Client Case Study: Payority

Situation Overview

Payority is a payroll service bureau writing payroll in 49 states — from straightforward single-employee setups to complex multi-state clients with quarterly filing obligations across dozens of jurisdictions. They had been using HubSpot for some time before engaging The Gist, but their experience with it had been frustrating, inconsistent, and ultimately unfinished.

The core problem wasn't that HubSpot was broken. It was that it was significantly underbuilt — and the blame sat squarely on a previous solutions partner who had abandoned Payority mid-engagement without completing the work they were contracted to do. What was left behind was a patchwork of incomplete workflows, outdated integrations, a ticketing pipeline that had been repurposed in ways that didn't make sense, and almost no usable reporting. The team had largely abandoned the CRM for service and sales functions and had resorted to manual processes to keep things running.

When Payority reached out to The Gist, the priorities were clear: fix what was broken, build what was missing, and create a HubSpot environment that could actually support a growing payroll operation. That meant addressing marketing orchestration, rebuilding the sales pipeline from the ground up, wiring in an implementation process that handled the real-world complexity of onboarding payroll clients, and standing up a ticketing and support infrastructure that worked the way a payroll company actually needs it to — quietly in the background, not as a wall between their team and their clients.

Process

Starting with a Real Audit

Before any build work began, The Gist conducted a comprehensive HubSpot audit of Payority's entire portal. This wasn't a surface-level review. The team went deep — examining every integration, workflow, form, contact record, property, lifecycle stage, pipeline, and dashboard. What they found was consistent with what Payority had described: a system that had been partially configured, never finished, and left with no documentation, no training, and no clear ownership of what did and didn't work.

The audit surfaced a number of important findings. There were only seven custom company properties in the entire portal — nowhere near enough to capture the data a payroll operation relies on. There were two dashboards with almost nothing useful on them. Many workflows were redundant, triggering the wrong notifications or producing no results at all. Several integrations that had been installed by the previous partner — including tools for e-signatures, payment processing, and internal communication — were either no longer in use or had never been properly activated. The audit also revealed that the company had no lead capture system tied to their website, no standard process for how leads were created or assigned, and no functioning connection between their sales activity and their onboarding workflow.

The Gist presented all of this in a structured format — a multi-tab audit workbook, a plain-English summary, a prioritized action plan, and a phased proposal — giving Payority everything they needed to make a fully informed decision about how to move forward.

Phase One: Building the Foundation

Phase one focused on core CRM organization, marketing basics, and the full sales system. The first order of business was creating the custom properties, configuring lifecycle stages, and building out the company and contact record views so that anyone on the team — whether a sales rep, an implementation specialist, or a customer service rep — could log into HubSpot and immediately see everything they needed to see. This seems simple, but it was foundational. A CRM that doesn't surface the right information at the right time doesn't get used. One that does becomes the system of truth the whole team trusts.

Lifecycle stages were reconfigured and renamed to match how Payority actually thinks about their contacts — leads, opportunities, clients, former clients, referral partners, and a clean archive category for contacts that had gone dormant. Automated workflows were built to move contacts between stages based on real triggers: a form submission, a deal created, a deal closed won, a deal marked as closed lost. This meant the CRM would begin self-regulating, keeping lists clean and segmentation accurate without requiring anyone to manually update records.

On the marketing side, the work focused on building the infrastructure that would allow Payority to eventually do more — email templates, landing page assets, and critically, a real lead capture system connected to the website. For the first time, when a prospect submitted a request for a quote or booked a discovery call, HubSpot would automatically create a contact, create a deal, assign it based on sales rotation rules, and send a confirmation email. No more leads falling through the cracks because a form went to the wrong place or nobody was watching the inbox.

Redesigning the Sales Pipeline

The deal pipeline rebuild was one of the most detailed and collaborative parts of the engagement. The Gist and Payority worked through every stage together — mapping out exactly what data needed to be captured, when it needed to be captured, and what should happen automatically when a deal moved from one stage to the next.

The result was a pipeline designed for how payroll sales actually work. After a discovery call, reps are now required to enter critical qualification data: number of employees, pay frequency, current provider, whether the company has ever processed payroll before, input methods, pain points, and entity type. These are not nice-to-haves. For a payroll company, this is the information that determines complexity, determines pricing, and determines what the implementation team is walking into. By making it required at the deal level and syncing it automatically to the company record, Payority now captures this data consistently — and can use it for reporting, forecasting, referral partner tracking, and long-term re-engagement of closed-lost prospects.

One particularly important design decision was the handoff from sales to implementation. Rather than relying on a Slack message or a manual email, the new pipeline was built so that when a proposal is accepted, HubSpot automatically creates a ticket in the implementation pipeline, populates it with all the relevant deal data, and sends an internal notification to the onboarding team. The sales rep's job is done. The implementation rep's job begins — with everything they need already in front of them.

Phase Two: Implementation and Customer Service

The implementation pipeline was built to reflect the real complexity of onboarding a payroll client — a process that looks very different depending on whether the client is brand new to payroll or converting from an existing provider, whether they're in Texas with straightforward filing requirements or in a state with multiple local tax jurisdictions.

The support ticketing infrastructure was designed specifically around one of Payority's strongly held values: they do not want their clients to feel like they are opening a ticket. Their competitive advantage is that they answer the phone. They respond directly. The ticketing system was built entirely as an internal tool — a way for the team to track what's being worked on, categorize issues, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks — without ever surfacing that infrastructure to the client. Emails to the support inbox create tickets automatically. Reps work them and close them. The client just gets a fast, personal response — the same way they always have.

Referral partner tracking was also built out during this phase, with a leaderboard that tracks total leads referred, total clients closed, and close rate on referred leads. An automation was added to flag lapsed referral partners — those who had previously sent business but hadn't referred anyone in six months — prompting the owner to reconnect before the relationship goes cold.

Weekly training sessions ran in parallel with implementation, bringing the broader team up to speed on how to use the tools that had been built — from managing the helpdesk inbox to bulk-closing tickets to navigating the new deal pipeline.

Wins and Breakthroughs

Getting Honest About What Wasn't Working

One of the earliest and most important conversations in this engagement was a direct acknowledgment from the client about just how far behind things had gotten — not just technically, but strategically. During the audit kickoff, reflecting on the state of their HubSpot portal and the experience with the previous partner, a member of the Payority team put it plainly:

"What got us to where we are now is not gonna take us to the next level. We were at the point a year ago for sure, and it's not gotten better. So this is all stuff that we gotta get fixed."

That kind of honest self-assessment created the conditions for a genuinely productive engagement. It was clear from the start that this wasn't a client looking for someone to rubber-stamp what they already had. They wanted it done right.

Recognizing the Data Gap for What It Was

One of the most valuable moments in the audit presentation was the reframe The Gist offered around the state of Payority's CRM. The instinct in many engagements like this is to assume that a messy CRM needs cleanup. What the audit revealed was something different — and more encouraging.

"Your CRM is not broken. It's under-built."

This distinction mattered. It meant the foundation was sound. It meant the path forward was construction, not demolition. And it set realistic expectations for how fast the work could move. When members of the Payority team heard this framing, the response was immediate recognition — they had suspected as much but hadn't had a clear enough picture of their own portal to be certain.

The Referral Partner Story

During one of the strategy sessions, the conversation turned to referral partner tracking and what it could unlock. The client shared a story that illustrated exactly why having this data in a system matters.

A prospect had chosen a competitor over Payority. A week later, the competitor sent out a price increase announcement. Because the client had been added to that competitor's account for testing purposes, they received the notification — and were able to call the prospect back almost immediately, armed with real information about exactly what had changed.

This is precisely the kind of closed-loop intelligence that a properly built CRM makes possible at scale — not just when you get lucky with a notification, but systematically, for every lost deal that ever had a win-back possibility attached to it.

The Team's Response

By the time the training sessions were underway and the core systems were in place, the feedback from the team using the tools day-to-day was telling. The helpdesk was being used. Tickets were being worked and closed. The team members attending weekly sessions were navigating the system with increasing confidence — asking sharper questions, testing new workflows, and starting to push for more.

One member of the team summed it up in a moment of candor during a training session: "I haven't been on top of my tickets this week. It's been so busy. I need to get on there and do that."

That sentence might sound small. But for a payroll team that had previously abandoned their ticketing system entirely because it had never been properly built — the fact that staying on top of tickets was now a natural part of how they thought about their workload was a meaningful shift.

Outcomes and Looking Ahead

Payority came into this engagement with a HubSpot portal that was functionally unused for most of its intended purposes. They left with a platform that now serves as the operational center of their business — with a functioning sales pipeline, a real lead capture system, an implementation workflow that connects directly to deal outcomes, a customer service infrastructure that supports their team without creating friction for their clients, and the data architecture to support reporting, forecasting, and strategic decision-making.

The lifecycle stage and segmentation framework now allows Payority to see their full contact universe clearly — leads, active clients, former clients, referral partners — and to manage email subscriptions, marketing contact status, and client communication in a deliberate and organized way. For a company that processes payroll in nearly every state in the country, that clarity has real operational value.

The referral partner tracking system gives the leadership team a running view of which COI relationships are producing, which ones need attention, and where to focus relationship-building efforts. In an industry where so much new business comes through trusted referrals — CPAs, bankers, benefits brokers, attorneys — this is a significant competitive tool.

The sales pipeline now captures the data that actually drives the business: current provider, pay frequency, employee count, entity type, pain points, and more. Over time, this will power close ratio analysis by provider, by pain point, by employee size segment — the kind of intelligence that allows a sales team to sharpen its approach rather than selling the same way to every prospect regardless of fit.

Looking ahead, Payority is positioned to tackle several exciting next chapters on their HubSpot journey — from deeper operational reporting and more sophisticated client segmentation, to exploring integration options that could bring payroll processing data directly into HubSpot and create an even tighter feedback loop between operations and client communication. These are not outstanding items. They are the natural next layer of growth for a company that now has the foundation to support them — and the team knowledge and confidence to pursue them at their own pace.