The Relevance Group: 2 Quarters to the First Go-Live

How The Relevance Group, a buy-and-build group of 10 marketing organisations across DACH and BeNeLux with roughly 700 customers, is moving from separate systems to one shared HubSpot portal: kick-off in April, the first three labels live in September.

From kick-off to first go-live: 2 quarters · Data source: interview by Manuel Hartmann with Fred van Westerop on the Diary Of A CRO podcast (published as an article on September 8, 2026), H. Steckhan's review in the HubSpot Solutions Directory and SalesPlaybook's project documentation · Industry: data management, insights, marketing technology · Markets: DACH, BeNeLux

The Relevance Group is owned by Ufenau Capital Partners and brings together 10 marketing organisations, some of them in business for 30 years. Fred van Westerop has spent the last 25 years in marketing and sales and used to sell CRM systems as a vendor. Now he has to make one system run across ten companies, several of which were doing fine on their own. Two quarters after the kick-off, the first three labels are working live in one shared HubSpot portal, and the rest follow the same pattern.

“Sometimes there's three labels supporting one company. Sometimes we don't even know about that. Sometimes the customer doesn't even know about that.”

— Fred van Westerop, Group Business Development Director, The Relevance Group

Results

The Results

• Live with the first three labels in mid-September, two quarters after the kick-off in April
• One HubSpot portal for the whole group instead of separate CRM environments, Excel lists and project boards
• One company, one record: every customer exists once in the system, however many companies serve them
• Cross-selling as its own deal type, within one company and across the group
• One deal pipeline with the same stages, so forecasts and reporting are comparable across all companies
• Handover to finance and ERP straight from the deal, instead of rebuilding invoicing logic in the CRM
• Marketing on the same data: a shared lifecycle, one engagement score for the group, ICP fit per company
• 5 out of 5 stars in the group's review in the HubSpot Solutions Directory

The Starting Point: Ten Companies, Ten Views of the Market

Until spring 2026, every company worked with its own tool. The largest ran a heavily customized Salesforce, others kept their customers in Excel lists, on project boards or without any CRM at all. The group pipeline was pieced together by hand every month, and the same customer appeared several times across systems.

“Everybody has their own list. This is my target list, this is where I know people, this is where I go after. But that's an enormously complicated process. It's not transparent, it's not visible for others.”

— Fred van Westerop, The Relevance Group

When Fred joined, he built the group overview himself in Excel. Cross-selling ran through personal networks, not through the system. For a group that is meant to be sold one day, that is more than a growth leak.

“When the group is sold, the buyer inherits either one system with connected history or ten data sources and a promise.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

The Strategic Question: One Group or a Holding

Fred has seen the politics of programmes like this up close in earlier roles: managing directors who run their own business and do not want to move over because their system is linked to their backends. He understands the position. Some companies run separately and do well, which is good for the business and for the PE owner.

“It all boils down to the strategy of the private equity and the company itself. Do you want to merge all the labels into one group, or would you like to keep things separate?”

— Fred van Westerop, The Relevance Group

The Relevance Group answered the question early: one shared portal and one simple process for the whole group, instead of a separate customer journey per company. The companies stay separate where their business requires it.

“A system cannot decide your operating model. It can only make the model you chose cheaper to run.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

The Business Case: Licences Are the Floor

In a PE-owned group, the CFO asks for the licence savings first. Fred did not give a number, but he did describe what the savings are made of.

“You can imagine, if you have 10+ different systems running, it's not just license cost, it's also maintenance, it's keeping things up and everything. If you have one system, one way of working, there's maintenance efficiency and there's license efficiency.”

— Fred van Westerop, The Relevance Group

Add implementations and optimisations on top. The EBITDA argument exists, but it does not carry the business case on its own. The larger part is cross-company referrals that were never made and deals lost to a competitor already inside another label's account.

“In a portfolio company the floor buys you the meeting. What buys you the mandate is the second column: revenue you already own and cannot see.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

What SalesPlaybook Built: One Portal, Separated by Data

SalesPlaybook has worked with the group since the kick-off in April, through concept, build and rollout. It started with the current state of marketing, sales and after-sales in every company, captured with a questionnaire per company and an on-site workshop. Four design decisions came out of it.

1. One company, one record
Every customer exists once in the system, as one company for the whole group. The responsible company is a property on contact, company and deal, and legal entities come from the ERP. At first, only a few people can create new companies, so no new duplicates appear.

2. One pipeline for all companies
All companies work in the same deal pipeline with the same stages, so forecasts and reporting stay comparable. Every deal carries its type: new business, renewal, upsell, cross-sell within one company or across the group. Qualification stays a short check of budget, complexity and urgency.

3. Sales ends with the signature
Part of the inherited estate carried invoicing logic inside the CRM. The boundary is now clear: HubSpot owns company, contact, deal, activity and consent, the ERP owns legal entity, contract and invoice. The handover to finance and operations is triggered from the deal, as a ticket or directly as a contract or project in the connected system, depending on the company. SalesPlaybook defined the process and the handover fields; a company within the group built the interfaces.

“A lot of people claim we're different, and with us we need to completely change the process. But all in all, if you really put the models on top of each other, they're quite similar.”

— Fred van Westerop, The Relevance Group

4. Marketing on the same data
Customer journey, lifecycle and lead logic apply to the whole group. The engagement score is shared, while each company defines its own ICP fit. The group has its own subscription, each company has its own, and unsubscribing from the group newsletter keeps a contact subscribed to their company. Website forms run through HubSpot.

“Relevance is not a brand exercise, it is a must in todays world, and an integrated Revenue Operating System is the foundation to make it possible.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

Start Simple, Then Learn

This is Fred's own learning point and the most transferable part of the conversation. Some companies had no CRM at all, others were far along with an integrated system. Once the MVP was in front of people in June, the real requirements arrived.

“You're implementing it for 10 different companies. Everybody has a different view, everybody has a different approach.”

“We don't try to boil the ocean. Not like some CRM people say, we need to capture everything, we have like 500 fields that we need to fill in. No, it needs to be simple. Focus on simplicity.”

— Fred van Westerop, The Relevance Group

The MVP ran through iteration rounds with the companies. The tests mostly raised training and usage questions, with only a few real bugs. Every field got an explanation, because people will ask. The schedule absorbed this second round of truth: base set in June, testing through the summer, live in September.

“Two quarters, not two years. I have watched groups this size stretch the same programme over two years and lose momentum, revenue leadership support and talent on the way.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

Adoption: Access First, Then Mindset

Fred gets as many people into the system as possible, specifically everyone who touches the customer: the person delivering the work, the person receiving the complaint, marketing. All sales users can edit the whole group's records, because cross-selling and upselling need collaboration. The rollout ran through power users in every company, with trainings and short guides for sales and marketing.

“We need to make a swift switch in our approach, from I need to put this in CRM, to I want to put this in CRM.”

— Fred van Westerop, The Relevance Group

The switch is paid for by what comes back, especially when AI suggests the next best action. Fred trains for it and already asks candidates what their philosophy on using CRM systems is.

“For a PE audience I would add: adoption is the only part of this programme that shows up in the exit story.”

— Manuel Hartmann, SalesPlaybook

The Group's Own Review

On September 19, 2026, H. Steckhan left a public review for The Relevance Group in the HubSpot Solutions Directory, with 5 out of 5 stars and the title “Successful Implementation of a Unified Group Wide CRM”.

“Our group operates as an umbrella structure with several independent operating companies, each running its own sales process, product catalog and customer base, previously spread across several heavily customized and fragmented CRM environments. Consolidating them into a single HubSpot instance was not a standard implementation. SalesPlaybook approached the project by first mapping the marketing, sales and after-sales status-quo of each operating company, then designing a CRM architecture that preserved that operational separation while establishing one unified source of truth across contacts, accounts and opportunities at group level. The technical complexity was substantial: migrating years of historical data from customized legacy systems, integrating multiple ERPs, reconciling hundreds of records across operating companies, and building automated handover processes between marketing, sales, finance, fulfilment and support so that information is retained accurately as CRM records move through the post-sales lifecycle. We want to thank SalesPlaybook for the speed, quality and handling throughout the project.”

— H. Steckhan, The Relevance Group, review in the HubSpot Solutions Directory

The Outlook

The remaining companies follow in waves, on the same pattern. Change requests are meant to run through one central process rather than one-off arrangements. And Fred is already asking the next question: when agents start using the system, is that also a seat?

“The system is in, okay, we can register, we can see the pipeline, all the contacts are in. But that's the basis, that's the foundation. Then the fun starts.”

— Fred van Westerop, The Relevance Group

The full conversation is available as a Diary Of A CRO episode, and the seven rules from it in Manuel Hartmann's article. How we set up group-wide CRM rollouts is described on the Group-Wide CRM page.