The Customer Journey Maestro

If you can't beat them, join them. I have resigned from my own career as a freelance writer because AI is replacing people like me, and there's no point in waiting around for the inevitable. Now I'm focused on learning how business people can leverage AI. I don't yet have a service to offer around this, but I'm happy to discuss the practical applications of AI anytime.

B2B Strategy Advisor and Consultant

I specialize in building and executing content marketing strategies for companies seeking sustained revenue growth. My process is to create a customized messaging framework (aka, “brand story”), develop a content strategy and calendar, and execute the content strategy by building a content team and/or writing brand content.

Fractional Content Director

I love to write and create content of all kinds. My broad and deep experience across sales, marketing, and customer success gives me a unique perspective and the ability to write compelling content for just about any industry. My approach is to get the inside truth from the people behind each story, and I don’t believe in taking shortcuts. I write and publish for your customers, to engage them, educate them, and compel them to take action. The SEO stuff comes along for the ride. Let’s talk about your freelance writing/content needs.

Freelance Writer

I help B2B companies build and execute modern marketing strategies focused on customers.

B2B Marketing Advisor

Hire me on a full-time or part-time basis to up-level your go-to-market strategy. And it won’t cost you an arm and a leg.

Go-to-Market Strategy Advisor

Your customers have their own Journey that may not match your Funnel or Flywheel. If you want to understand their journey and be there when they need you, that takes work. Designing a customer experience that builds trust, now that's another level entirely. I'm here to help - on your journey.

Customer Journey Guide

On-demand expertise in marketing strategy, demand generation, content marketing, social media marketing, product and customer marketing, sales and marketing alignment, and customer success.

Fractional CMO/VP Marketing

CMO for Hire

Are you in transition? Starting from scratch or making a pivot to a new revenue growth strategy? My Virtual CMO services provide proven expertise to help you jumpstart sales, marketing, and customer experience prior to hiring executives and staffing departments. It's a low-cost, low-risk way to get the strategic advice you need.

Virtual CMO

Riptide Business Press

Ed Marsh and I have written a book, titled Common Sense Revenue Growth, that helps CEOs understand the digital and consumer disruption facing them today and develop plans to grow in spite of those challenges. Buy the book at www.commonsenserevenuegrowth.com.

Author, Podcaster and Consultant

Kuno Creative

Co-owned one of the first and most successful inbound marketing agencies, Kuno Creative. Grew the agency from a handful of talented marketers and designers to a 50+ person agency with clients ranging from national healthcare and technology companies to international consortiums and manufacturing giants. Specialized in marketing technology and sales enablement - helping companies fix leaky funnels and sales pipelines via strategy, marketing automation and optimized CRM utilization. Please visit Kuno's website, www.kunocreative.com for more information, or follow me on LinkedIn.

EVP and Co-Owner

Awakening Technology Company

Developed corporate websites from scratch using HTML/CSS, then created a proprietary CMS for creating client sites backed by a SQL database using ASP.net and later, Ruby on Rails.

Web Developer

Zydeco Energy

Independent oil and gas exploration company in Houston, TX. No longer in business.

Executive Vice President and CTO

INEXS

Exploration Geophysicist

Raytheon - GeoQuest

Product Marketing Specialist

Shell

Research professional working in electron microscopy for Shell Research and in geophysical interpretation research for Shell Exploration and Production.

Research Geoscientist

B2B Marketing Strategy Advisor With Company, Agency, and Freelance Chops

I retired in 2017 from a 40-year career, mostly in sales and marketing, for a variety of energy, manufacturing, and software companies. My penultimate position was co-owner of Kuno Creative, a digital marketing agency and one of HubSpot's first agency partners. My contributions continue as I seek to help other agency owners, professionals, and free-wheelers navigate their way through gnarly challenges in business and life.

John McTigue

I help your team get your Hubspot and RevOps projects over the finish line. We design your strategy and provide your team with the extra bandwidth so you can get projects off your to-do list.  Let's win together. My primary goal is to turn your team into RevOps Tech Stack experts.

HOW WE HELP:
🧐 Are you utilizing the software stack in your business effectively? 

💻 Is your data consistent and accurate so your teams can execute on a day-to-day basis? 

🤯 Are you struggling with software/tech adoption in your company? 

♻️ Do you have a repeatable process improvement culture? 

Today, it is easy to purchase software yet hard to implement. There are thousands of options and usually not enough time to complete the process effectively.  Our mission is to simplify the software buying and implementation to drive results for your team.  We are flipping the script of the traditional consulting experience and are hyper-focused on delivering results and building your team. We focus on coaching, teaching, and training your team to utilize the technology stack to drive revenue in your business. 

Our team of consultants is ready to work with your team, learn about your business, and complete the list of RevOps projects on your list. 

WHAT WE DO:
- RevOps alignment- Marketing, Sales, and customer success
- Repeatable playbooks and training so you can grow and scale efficiently
- Technology and Software education - Make everyone a power user!
- RevOps automation - simplify the follow-up, data entry, and task management for your team

Follow Me here on LinkedIn

HIGHLIGHTS:
📈Grew SaaS startup from 5 to 100 employees in a 3-year period

📗 Learned consulting framework and how to manage projects effectively in Big 4 Consulting. My most important takeaway - make it easy for your customers to work with you and get projects off their to do list by getting them done

🖥 Now it's time to take all those learnings to modernize the consulting business model.

MY MOTTOS ARE:
✌🏼 ”Be authentic"

✅ "Be intentional"

🏆 "Enable your team to win" 

🎉 “Celebrate those wins”

💪🏼 "Be comfortable with being uncomfortable, it's a normal feeling"

OUTSIDE OF WORK I:
🎶 Love going to concerts to see my favorite bands

⛳️ Always trying to get better at golf  

🏝 Travel around the world 

👩🏻‍🤝‍👨🏼 Stay connected with my family and friends

Adam Sharrow

The best CRM projects we’ve seen all have one thing in common.

They focus on fundamentals before features.

Clear lifecycle definitions.
Simple, enforceable processes.
Reporting that leadership actually uses.
Automation that supports people instead of confusing them.

It’s rarely about doing more.
It’s about doing fewer things better.

When the foundation is solid, everything else moves faster.

Including marketing 
Including sales.
Including onboarding.
Including decision-making.

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Certified Revenue Architect

Sales Hub Implementation

HubSpot Community Ambassador 

Inbound Sales Certification

Sales Enablement Certification

Sales Software Certification

Certified Public Accountant (CPA)

Sales Hub Enterprise Implementation Expert

Service Hub Software

Unleash the full potential of HubSpot in your business - Diamond Partner, Ops-minded problem solver, Dad

Strategic GTM + Hubspot Technical Consulting - Diamond Partner, Ops-minded problem solver, Dad

This should’ve existed years ago, but I’m still celebrating. HubSpot workflows now support business-day delays (weekends excluded).

Cleaner timing.
Fewer surprises.
Less manual cleanup.

Finally, workflows that behave like real-world operations.

Adam Sharrow 🤙🏼

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Hot take: letting people rename standard objects in HubSpot but not standard properties is unhinged behavior.

You rename Deals to Opportunities because “that’s what sales calls them.”

Cool. Fine. Love that for you.

Then you open a workflow and see:

• Deal entered stage
• Deal exited stage
• Deal close date
• Deal owner
• Deal probability

So now your “Opportunity” pipeline is powered by a bunch of properties that insist, loudly and repeatedly, that they are still DEALS.

It’s like renaming your dog to Max but everyone in your house keeps yelling “COME HERE, STEVE.”

Technically it works.
Practically it’s chaos.

This causes real problems:

Confused users who think they’re in the wrong object

New hires asking “what’s the difference between a Deal and an Opportunity?”

Reports and workflows that feel gaslight-y

RevOps teams explaining this for the 47th time on a Zoom call

Either:

Let us rename the standard properties to match the object
or

Don’t let us rename the object at all

Right now we’re living in the uncanny valley of CRM semantics.

Anyway.
If you’ve ever inherited a portal where “Opportunities” still say “Deal entered lifecycle stage” everywhere...

I see you.

Most companies don’t have a CRM problem.
They have a process clarity problem.

When teams say:

“HubSpot didn’t work for us”
What they usually mean is:
“No one could clearly explain how work actually flows here.”

Leads come in through five different places.
Deals get created sometimes.
Ownership changes depending on who last touched the account.
Projects live in another tool.
Revenue data lives somewhere else.

The CRM isn’t broken.
It’s just faithfully reflecting the mess underneath.

This is why process mapping matters so much early.

Not as documentation.
Not as flowcharts for the sake of flowcharts.

But as a forcing function:

Who owns what?

Where do handoffs actually happen?

What should happen vs what does happen?

Where are we losing momentum, leads, or context?

Until you can see the full path end to end, every tool decision is guesswork.

And no amount of automation fixes guesswork.

Clarify the process, then optimize it in your systems.

What we fix first when a team says "we’re only using 10% of HubSpot."
When a team tells me they’re “only using 10% of HubSpot,”
my first reaction isn’t to show them more features.

It’s to slow things down.

Here’s what we actually fix first 👇

• Lead ownership
If no one owns the lead, nothing else matters.

• A single intake path
Not five inboxes, forms, spreadsheets, and side conversations. One front door.

• Clear rules for when a deal gets created
No vibes. No “it depends who’s working it.” Actual criteria.

• Simple deal stages that reflect reality
Not 14 stages. Just the steps that actually move revenue forward.

• Visibility for leadership
If leaders aren’t looking at the system, the team won’t use it either.

Only after those are solid do we touch:
automation, scoring, workflows, integrations, dashboards, or AI.

Because “using more of HubSpot” isn’t the goal.

Running a cleaner, more predictable revenue process is.

Map View puts your contacts and companies directly on an interactive map inside HubSpot (Beta). What an awesome native view in your CRM

No exports.
No third-party tools.
No spreadsheet gymnastics.

Just instant location context you can actually use:
- See who’s near an event
- Spot territory gaps fast
- Understand regional concentration at a glance

This is what good CRM UX looks like:
- less friction
- faster decisions
- zero duct tape

If you’re on Enterprise and have access, this one’s worth clicking around today.

If you are looking at the view saying, "I need to enrich my data," we can help with that

First full week back was so much fun, I forgot to even look at LinkedIn. 

Next week, we'll resume the RevOps and CRM fun

HubSpot isn’t just a CRM. It’s the operating system.

We’re seeing this more and more as teams build their entire operating motion inside HubSpot.

Not just:
• contacts
• deals
• activities

But:
• how work flows between teams
• how data moves (or breaks) across systems
• how decisions actually get made

When HubSpot is treated like “just a CRM,” teams optimize fields and pipelines.

When it’s treated like an operating system, teams design:
• ownership
• handoffs
• guardrails
• automation tied to real business outcomes

That shift changes everything.

How are you seeing this play out? 

Are you still managing a CRM...or running your business on it?

I built an AI-assisted performance review process, and it's been a game-changer.

For years, year-end reviews have been a huge documentation burden—often inconsistent and taking too much time away from actual coaching. I decided to reverse-engineer my most successful chat sessions with Gemini to create a "Standard Performance Review Prompt."

The goal? To be a neutral facilitator that guides managers through a fair, structured, and consistent evaluation, starting with all the necessary context:
- Prior Expectations
- Period Goals
- Mid-Cycle Feedback
- Employee Self-Review

The biggest win is efficiency: The manager uses simple voice-to-text to provide all their feedback. The AI synthesizes these verbal responses into a cohesive, finished review. No more staring at a blank screen or spending hours on write-ups.

This process is making our reviews:
1. Consistent
2. Fair (eliminates hindsight bias)
3. Fast (drastically cuts documentation time)

If you're tired of the traditional review grind and see the potential for AI to streamline your ops processes, let me know.

The fastest way to kill a CRM project is trying to boil the ocean and solve everything at once.

I see this mistake all the time.

A team finally commits to “fixing the CRM” and immediately wants:

Advanced automation

Complex scoring models

Perfect dashboards

Every integration turned on

Forecasting that works on day one

That approach can work.

But only if the foundation is already there.

If lead intake is clear.
If ownership is defined.
If deal stages reflect reality.

Without that, all you’re doing is adding complexity on top of uncertainty.

When CRM projects stall, it’s rarely because the software is limited.
It’s because the sequence is wrong.

What actually works for most teams looks a lot more boring:

• Stop missing leads
• Define ownership at each stage
• Track a simple, honest pipeline

Once that’s solid, advanced workflows actually stick.
Automation helps instead of hurting.
Dashboards start to mean something.

The goal isn’t to move slow.
It’s to move in the right order.

Some teams are ready to sprint.
Most need to walk first.

This week brought the flu to our house.
Which means the kids haven’t been in daycare all week.

You still pay for daycare all week, obviously.
And now a snow and ice storm is bearing down on us for good measure.

Some weeks are about momentum.
Some weeks are just about survival.

This one feels like I’m surviving this week... and probably the start of next week too.

Anybody else in this mode today? Onward and upward!

Happy NFL Sunday. Go Pats. It feels like the Patriots might finally have their quarterback situation figured out.

And that matters, because we all know how this ends when you don’t.

Which brings me to what I see play out in business:

If three people own the account, no one owns the account.

“Everyone kind of owns it” is the fastest way to kill momentum.

It’s the same two-quarterback problem.
Everyone’s capable.
No one’s actually responsible.

This shows up immediately when you map the process, because one question keeps coming up:

Who owns this right now?

When there’s no clear answer:

Sales assumes support has it

Support assumes the account manager does

The account manager assumes it was handled

The CRM didn’t create the problem.
It just exposed it.

Clear ownership isn’t about control.
It’s about momentum.

HubSpot isn’t a CRM.
It’s the operating system for revenue.

And for RevOps leaders, that means it’s increasingly the control plane between systems.

We’re seeing teams use HubSpot to govern things like:
• when a deal is allowed to sync to accounting
• what revenue data is considered “final” vs provisional
• how invoicing is triggered (and blocked)
• when ARR, MRR, and bookings become reportable
• which systems are downstream consumers vs sources of truth

In practice, that looks like:
• required properties before a deal can close-won
• pipeline stages mapped directly to invoicing states
• workflows enforcing data completeness before NetSuite, QuickBooks, or Stripe sync
• custom objects modeling subscriptions, line items, or usage
• integrations acting as gates, not just pipes

This isn’t CRM configuration.
It’s revenue systems engineering.

When HubSpot is treated as the operating system:
• automation becomes policy enforcement
• integrations encode financial controls
• lifecycle stages align Sales, Finance, and CS
• reporting discrepancies expose broken process, not “bad data”

The teams that struggle treat HubSpot like a better Salesforce.

The teams that scale treat it like infrastructure sitting between GTM and Finance.

If you’re leading RevOps, the real question isn’t:
“How do we configure HubSpot?”

It’s:
“Where does revenue truth live, who depends on it, and how do we enforce it across systems?”

Curious which integration or handoff causes the most pain in your stack right now.

Passion for Growing Businesses | Hubspot Optimization + Custom Solutions

Always appreciate when clients take the time to share thoughtful feedback.

One of our clients recently submitted a review about a recent project where the goal was to update a legacy HubSpot setup. Hearing that the work helped create cleaner data, stronger alignment, and more trusted reporting is a great reflection of the approach we strive to bring to every project.

Shout out to Jessica MacAndrews 🦋 and Elizabeth Entrekin for their work on this engagement and for delivering such a strong outcome for our customer.

Onboarding sets up software.
Implementation sets up the business.

Most CRM onboarding looks like this:

- Pipelines created
- Users added
- Emails connected
- A few dashboards turned on
- Training sessions scheduled

All necessary. None of it is transformational.

Because onboarding assumes the process already exists and just needs to be configured.

Implementation is different.

It’s about defining how work flows end-to-end.
Where handoffs happen.
Who owns what?
And how decisions actually get made day to day.

That’s why implementation isn’t documentation.
It’s system design.

When teams skip this step, they end up “re-implementing” the same tool every 18 months.

When they do it well, the CRM stops being a project and starts becoming infrastructure.

Not because the software changed.
Because the business finally got clear.

There’s always something new emerging in the AI landscape. The key right now is to stay AI Curious and approach challenges with an AI First mindset.

If you are embracing this approach, you are "keeping up."

The reality is that everyone is engaged in learning, so continue that journey, and you will achieve long-term success.

In our daily practice and conversations, we all find ourselves in this space as operators today. Embrace the excitement, have fun, and let go of the stress associated with it. 

^ sorry if it’s your board creating this undue pressure just remember the part above while your getting pressured

Some very common January conversations we have:

“We’re forecasting off spreadsheets because we don’t trust HubSpot.”
“Sales and marketing numbers don’t match.”
“Our CRM grew organically and now it’s chaos.”
“We want to layer in AI, but our data is a mess.”
“We need better reporting before hiring more reps.”

None of these are edge cases.
They’re signs of growth.

The problem is waiting too long and letting frustration pile up.
The solution is slowing down just enough to fix the foundation.

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John McTigue

Adam Sharrow

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Adam Sharrow's LinkedIn Performance

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