Author

Nick Nabai

Founder & Managing Director, BranchLead

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Ex-HubSpotHubSpot Inbound certifiedHundreds of implementations, career-wide

About Nick.

Nick Nabai is the founder and managing director of BranchLead, an Australian HubSpot delivery partner. He works with service businesses around the world.

Nick worked at HubSpot before he started BranchLead. Across his career he has delivered hundreds of HubSpot implementations: CRM setups, advanced automation and custom integrations. The clients are businesses that live or die on how well they follow up. 50-plus of those builds came through BranchLead. He is HubSpot Inbound certified and holds a wide range of HubSpot certifications.

He started BranchLead after watching too many businesses buy HubSpot and never get it running the way it was sold to them. The tool arrives, the setup never lands, and it quietly becomes shelfware. His writing is the opposite of a sales pitch. It is plain answers on what goes wrong with CRM and automation, what to do about it, and what you can safely skip.

Whatever BranchLead builds, you own it, with no lock-in.

Articles by Nick.

Portal ownership

Nobody Manages Your HubSpot: What That Costs

Everyone uses HubSpot a bit and nobody is responsible for it. Here is what quietly decays in an unowned portal, which safety nets expire while you wait, and what it takes to hand the whole thing over to someone.

Custom objects

HubSpot Custom Objects: When to Build One, What Breaks, and Why the Exit Is One-Way

HubSpot's docs explain how to build a custom object in detail, but say almost nothing about when not to, what breaks, and the one-way exit once you do.

Deal pipelines

HubSpot deal pipeline setup

Three to seven stages, each one named after something the buyer did, every transition triggered by a property.

Contact object

The HubSpot Contact Object: What It Is and How It Runs the System

Get the Contact model wrong and the whole portal compounds the mistake.

Lifecycle stages

HubSpot lifecycle stages best practices: setup that doesn't break your reports

Lifecycle stage is the most-misused property in HubSpot.

Workflow re-evaluation

HubSpot Workflow Re-evaluation: The Misunderstood 30-Minute Cadence

You have probably watched a HubSpot workflow do nothing right after you built it, and assumed it was broken.

Calculation properties

HubSpot Calculation Properties: When, Why, How, and Where They Hit Their Limits

You've got a number that lives in a spreadsheet instead of on the record, recalculated by hand every time someone needs it.

Company hierarchies

HubSpot Company Hierarchies: How Parent, Child and Subsidiary Records Work

You have got more than one company record for what is, in the real world, one business.

Marketing hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub onboarding: what proper setup involves

Marketing Hub is not plug and play.

Progressive profiling

HubSpot Progressive Profiling: Queue Model vs Dependency Model

Two forms, same contact, two different approaches.

Active lists

HubSpot Active Lists vs Static Lists: The Operational Difference

Active lists update themselves.

Contact deduplication

HubSpot Contact Deduplication: How the Match Logic Works

HubSpot's native deduplication tool compares email address first, phone number second, and name plus company name third.

Lead scoring

HubSpot Lead Scoring for Engagement: Build a Model Your Sales Team Uses

Lead scoring fails when it scores activity, not intent.

RevOps architecture

The HubSpot RevOps architecture

How HubSpot's objects, data flow, properties and reporting fit into one RevOps system that holds up.

Choosing a CRM

CRM for small business in Australia

What a CRM is, when you actually need one, the main tools compared, and what setup really costs.

Choosing a consultant

How to choose a HubSpot consultant

What a consultant actually does, whether you need one, and the seven things to check before you hire.

Speed to lead

Why the first reply usually wins

The research on lead response time, what the 100x stat really measures, and what slow follow-up costs you.

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