How Pineo Provided Fractional HubSpot Expertise for One of the UK’s Largest Food Producers

How Pineo Helped apetito with Enterprise HubSpot Support in the UK

apetito is one of the UK’s leading food producers, supplying meals to hospitals, care homes, schools, nurseries, and local authorities across the country. With over 2,000 UK employees and multiple business divisions, including Healthcare, Education, and their direct-to-consumer brand Wiltshire Farm Foods, their HubSpot CRM is central to how their teams manage customer relationships, marketing campaigns, and sales operations.

Pineo was brought in as a fractional HubSpot manager on an 11-month retainer, providing hands-on CRM expertise across the business while apetito searched for a permanent, full-time hire.

Why apetito Needed a Senior HubSpot Consultant

With 160 users across multiple divisions, the HubSpot CRM had grown increasingly complex over time. Managing a platform of that size across Healthcare, Education, and Wiltshire Farm Foods required dedicated expertise that wasn't available in-house.

Workflows contained errors, data quality had declined, marketing email health was slipping, and DNS issues were affecting subdomains. apetito needed a senior HubSpot consultant who could step in quickly, take ownership, and improve an enterprise HubSpot environment without a long onboarding process.

Embedded directly into apetito's teams as a fractional HubSpot consultant

Rather than working at arm’s length like a typical agency, we operated as part of the business, handling everything from strategic recommendations through to hands-on implementation.

Day-to-Day CRM Management & Support

Pineo became the single point of contact for all HubSpot-related queries across the organisation, operating through a dedicated support email address with regular team calls and ongoing conversations across departments. Whether it was troubleshooting technical issues, advising on best practices, or responding to urgent support requests from Healthcare, Education, or Marketing, every team had a consistent, senior resource they could rely on.

Beyond reactive support, we also managed user permissions across the 160-user account. I maintained the connections with third-party applications integrated into HubSpot, ensuring everything stayed connected and properly configured as the business evolved.

Workflow Automation & Operations Hub Development

Over the course of the engagement, we built, fixed, and improved approximately 50 workflows across the business. This included custom-coded workflows using Operations Hub Enterprise to solve problems that couldn’t be addressed with standard HubSpot automation.

One of the most significant builds was a fully automated lead allocation system using Operations Hub. The workflow distributed incoming leads and business enquiries to a national sales team of around 20 representatives, automatically routing them by UK postcode. Every postcode in the country was mapped and assigned, replacing a previously manual process.

Marketing Hub Optimisation

Working closely with the marketing team, we provided a series of recommendations to improve their email marketing health and deliverability. The work covered several areas across Marketing Hub Enterprise, including cleansing bounced contacts from active lists, implementing best-practice sending strategies focused on engaged contacts, and setting up transactional email workflows for business-critical communications such as food product recalls.

We also supported the marketing team with campaign tracking, helping them structure UTM parameters correctly across email, LinkedIn advertising, and other channels to ensure accurate attribution in HubSpot reporting.

Bringing Pineo in gave us senior HubSpot expertise without needing to hire for it in-house. They sorted out our reporting and data structure, and made sure the team using HubSpot day-to-day felt confident with it. Easy to work with, quick to get answers, and pitched at the right level for a business our size. By the time we brought the work in-house, we had a HubSpot setup we could build on.

_{Dan Southall
Head of Proposition and Marketing, apetito}

CRM Training & Onboarding

A key part of the engagement involved upskilling apetito’s teams. We delivered three on-site training sessions for wider business units and teams, covering the Healthcare division, the Marketing team, and a group of internal HubSpot champions who would go on to support their own departments.

Alongside these, we ran a monthly onboarding webinar for new HubSpot users and team members joining the platform. With 160 users on the account and new starters joining regularly, this structured approach ensured consistent adoption and gave every user a proper introduction to the tools and processes they needed.

Sales Reporting & Dashboards

We built custom reports and dashboards for sales teams across different divisions, giving them visibility into key metrics and KPIs. These dashboards were designed to support day-to-day sales management and provide leadership with the data they needed to track performance across the business.

Sales Pipeline Development

We also built out new sales pipelines for apetito’s business development division, structuring the deal stages to reflect how their team actually worked and ensuring the pipeline gave clear visibility into new business opportunities from initial enquiry through to close.

HubSpot Calling Setup & Management

We set up and managed HubSpot’s calling functionality for sales teams, including configuring shared and individual phone lines, managing call routing, and ensuring all inbound and outbound calls were properly tracked and recorded within the CRM.

Custom Properties & Deal Calculations

For the Education division, we built custom calculation properties to work out deal values and projected revenue for school contracts. These calculations factored in variables specific to the education sector, including differences in term-time schedules between state and independent schools and the point in the academic year when a deal was closed, giving the sales team accurate revenue projections rather than flat estimates.

Global HubSpot Audit

We also worked alongside apetito’s Canadian and US teams to run an audit on consolidating three separate global HubSpot accounts into a single, unified account. This involved reviewing the structure, data, and workflows across all three portals and providing recommendations on how a consolidation could work in practice.

DNS & Subdomain Management

We identified and resolved DNS errors affecting HubSpot-hosted subdomains, ensuring landing pages, email sending domains, and tracking were all functioning correctly.

Data Quality & CRM Hygiene

Keeping the CRM clean was a continuous effort. I regularly imported data into HubSpot, ensuring it was cleansed and properly formatted before each import. Alongside this, we built automated processes to merge duplicate contacts and companies and systematically reviewed and resolved existing workflow errors that had accumulated over time.

Custom Integrations & Development

Pineo also explored custom integration work, including building an Ofsted data integration for the Education division in a development environment. This was designed to enrich nursery and school records within HubSpot using publicly available Ofsted data, giving the sales team better insight when prospecting. While the integration was scoped and built in a dev environment, it was not deployed to production during the engagement.