How HubSpot gave MHM Automation more control over global sales program
MHM Automation, a New Zealand-headquartered designer and supplier of engineered automation solutions to primary industries and logistics worldwide, partnered with Concentrate to replace Salesforce with HubSpot Sales Hub Professional across its global group, standardising a patchwork of platforms into one sales funnel and one reliable source of truth for a private-equity-backed group operating at pace.
Global sales team migrated from Salesforce to HubSpot in tight timeframe.
Weekly operations reporting delivered in the same format across every business unit
Licence savings from consolidation reinvested into further enhancing the platform
Primarily a designer and manufacturer of automated solutions for primary industries and food processing sectors, MHM operate globally through a number of brands & locations. Their portfolio of solutions and services are recognised as leaders by customers processing cheese, dairy, vegetables, meat, poultry & fish. MHM is a wholly owned subsidiary of Fortifi Food Solutions, backed by KKR, a New York-based private equity firm on a mission to bring automation to a food processing industry still characterised by a costly dependence on low skilled labour and a high degree of food waste and safety risk.
The Challenge
One group, built from many different ways of working
With a decade long acquisition strategy, MHM Group is a combination of businesses with capabilities that span everything from stainless steel fabrication and post-harvest crop processing through to the chilling and freezing of meat and protein, cheese processing, and grain, fertiliser and materials handling. Whilst integrated in many areas, each business unit has largely continued with its own systems and ways of working within sales pipeline management. This needed to be addressed as MHM migrated generally into Fortifi’s heavily data-driven management style.
“You can't improve what you can't measure.”
Richard Jenman,
Chief Operating Officer, MHM Group
That created a twofold challenge: driving the organisation toward more data-driven decision making, while integrating separate sales teams onto standardised ways of working, a standardised sales funnel, and a standardised way of interpreting the data behind it. Individuals within certain teams were doing things their own way, Jenman says, and “pipeline accuracy is critical to our resource planning and financial forecasting, however there wasn’t common agreement on what the stages of the funnel were, or how we should recognise and acknowledge them."
Following the November 2023 acquisition of the Wyma Solutions business, MHM inherited two very different starting points under one roof. Roughly half of the group's teams were on Salesforce, each using it their own way, while the Wyma team had spent years refining a HubSpot setup so complete it tied together everything from lead and opportunity generation through to point of sale. For Jenman, that contrast pointed to an obvious conclusion: HubSpot, not Salesforce, was where MHM's real position of strength already sat, and the more advanced use Wyma had already achieved was the standard the rest of the group should eventually work toward, once everyone was on the same tool.
There was also a clock running. With MHM's Salesforce licence due for renewal, the time to get it sorted was imminent, both strategically and financially: another year on Salesforce meant another year of fragmentation for half the group, and another year paying for a system MHM no longer wanted to keep.
The Solution
Consensus first, platform second
Before any tool was chosen, Richard Jenman and the sales leadership worked through the fundamentals: what the common stages of the pipeline should be, what criteria & milestones attainment should move a deal from 30% to 50% for example, and what information should give the team confidence to progress a deal to forecast, or take it out of the pipe altogether. “If we weren’t settled on that, no tool was going to really work,” Jenman says.
With the sales process agreed, the platform decision followed. Jenman took his ambition directly to Concentrate by Ilaria: get every business unit onto a single tool at a common baseline first, then chart a second-phase strategy to bring the whole group up to the more advanced way of working.
“I approached Concentrate with this as my dream: One CRM tool group wide, One common funnel management process, One revenue forecasting model, and sales people united & motivated by the success that professional funnel management brings. With time pressure, this was a big ask. Concentrate counselled me on the need to stage this work for success...let's get everyone onto the one tool to start with, rally around the commonality of use, and then chart out a strategy to bring both user groups to even more powerful ways of using HubSpot.”
Richard Jenman, Chief Operating Officer, MHM Group
Key factors behind the decision, and the solution Concentrate delivered, included:
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Consolidating licences onto one platform reduced cost and gave MHM a system it can manage and adapt in-house as its needs change.
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A compressed delivery timeline, run at a pace Jenman pushed the team hard to hit, that beat the looming Salesforce renewal date.
Delivery started with requirements and design. Concentrate worked through MHM’s requirements then designed it within HubSpot's CRM and Sales Hub. MHM's data was checked, cleaned and migrated across from Salesforce. Implementation and configuration included mapping deal pipelines, sales automation, lead routing and custom properties to set up a solution for enhanced pipeline visibility and forecast reporting. Training was backed by documentation so the MHM team could run the platform itself.
Throughout, Concentrate acted as more than an implementation partner. “What I took comfort in, and continue to take comfort in, is that Concentrate can advise when we’re on the right path or not, what have others done with this tool, how did they do it,” Jenman says. “That gave us the confidence to proceed. You can’t go fast and hard without that confidence.”
Impact
One version of the truth, every Tuesday
The quality of MHM's information has been transformed. Every Tuesday, the leadership team now receives a weekly operations snapshot, built in the same format and drawn from the same data, across every business unit. “It’s using the same information,” Jenman says. “We can do like-for-like comparisons across business units, and we don’t have this need for subjective opinions about the state of the pipeline. It’s all a constancy of definition.”
That consistency has changed how the leadership team spends its time. “I spend a lot more time working with the data, rather than questioning the data,” Jenman says. “It’s enabled us to make better decisions, and to forecast a lot better, good and bad. When things are looking bad, we can take appropriate action; when things are looking good, we can be braver with the decision, because we know it’s a sustainable trend.”
That reliability has value beyond MHM's own walls, too. As part of a private-equity-backed group with a heavy forecasting cadence, having numbers the leadership team can trust has built confidence with MHM's parent company.
The CRM move and HubSpot has given us the trust of our parent, and the confidence to operate within a data-driven management environment. If we're in control of our own numbers, we get access to capital, and we get the permission to grow.”
Richard Jenman, Chief Operating Officer, MHM Group
Adoption across the group has also been strong, including among teams new to HubSpot. “HubSpot’s not as complex as Salesforce” Jenman says. “It’s pretty intuitive for the team, and what I like most is the graphical information, it’s digestible, and it’s easy to make an insight rather than just data for data’s sake.”
Jenman also credits the pace of delivery to Concentrate's team.
“The partnership's been invaluable. We had subject matter experts from different areas during a rapid deployment, on an aggressive timeframe, and I could look at four or five people in the eye and know they had my back. They delivered! It's given us the confidence to know we can go to Concentrate for the next step.”
Richard Jenman, Chief Operating Officer, MHM Group
Photo credit: MHM Automation
Looking to the future
With every business unit now on HubSpot and working the same way in funnel management , MHM's next step is bringing the whole group up to a shared, more advanced level of maturity, a project on hold until an ERP implementation currently underway wraps up in Q1 2027. “It’s really about maturing the use, gaining further pipeline insight, from opportunity to lead, and really understanding how they migrate through,” Jenman says. “That’s where I think AI will come in, to help us understand the chance of a lead with certain attributes progressing right through to sale. We operate in a pretty volatile project based sales environment, so having that insight at the front end of the pipeline is going to be really valuable.”
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