123: Seven Teams, One System: Inside the Paragonix Medical Device HubSpot Build (Office Hours)

Danny Gavin (Host): 00:05
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Mentor. I’m your host, Danny Gavin, and together with industry leaders and marketing experts, we’ll explore the meeting point of mentorship and marketing. We’ll discover how these connections have affected careers, marketing strategies, and lives. Now get ready to get human. This episode is sponsored by Odeo Academy. Do you know a woman who’s ready for something more? Or maybe that’s you. Maybe you just finished seminary and aren’t sure what’s next. Maybe you’ve been home with the kids and want a few hours of work that are actually yours. Maybe you’re good at your job and just don’t want to be doing the same thing for the next 20 years. Odeo Academy is my 15-week digital marketing fundamentals course, built for beginners, no marketing background required. AI is woven into every skill from day one, so you’re learning how the field actually works right now, not a version that’s already behind. The next course starts Sunday, October 25th. Head to Odeoacademy.com forward slash podcast and use code MENTOR for $250 off. That’s ODEOacademy.com slash podcasts, code M-E-N-T-O-R for $250 off now.

Danny Gavin (Host): 01:12
It’s 2:38 in the morning and somewhere in America, a case just closed. Not a sales case, a transplant case. A human heart traveled across the country tonight in a temperature-controlled device from a donor to a recipient, and a small team of people you will never meet coordinated every minute of that journey. The hotline call, the courier, the flight, the operating room times on both ends, the device serial numbers, the data, the invoice. Until recently, the system holding all of that together was a Word document with hand-colored rows, yellow for pending, green for good to go, pink for drop-offs, built with enormous care by people doing heroic work on tools never designed to carry it. One of the executives at this company told me something early on that I’ve never forgotten. He said, we’re saving lives on a daily basis. We can’t miss a case. It’s a never event for us. And here’s what you need to understand they don’t miss everything about how this company operates. The around the clock hotline, the double checks, the sheer dedication of the people is built around that standard, a never event. That’s the bar this team holds itself to every single day. And that’s exactly why they wanted their systems to be as strong as their people. Hello, I’m Danny Gavin, founder of Opditch, marketing professor, and the host of the Digital Marketing Mentor. And today I want to tell you about the most complex implementation my agency has ever done, our work with Paragonics Technologies, a medical device company whose products carry donor organs, hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, to the patients waiting for them. Now, if you’ve been with the podcast for a while, you might remember episode 59, the Berlin Heart Case Study. That episode was about what HubSpot can become when you push it past being a CRM. Custom objects, device tracking, digital transformation. Even if you haven’t heard it, go listen. It’s a great companion to this one. But this episode is not that episode, because the paragonic story isn’t really a story about software. It’s a story about people. Specifically, it’s about what happens when you walk into a company with seven different teams: sales, sales operations, logistics, services, finance, IT, marketing, plus executives, plus outside vendors, and every one of those teams has its own tools, its own priorities, its own perspective. And no single team owns the cross-functional system you’re hired to deliver, because a system like that has never existed there before. That was the real challenge at Paragonics, not the custom objects, not the integrations, the coordination. And because the role of owner of the new system didn’t exist yet on anyone’s org chart, and it usually doesn’t, at companies doing this for the first time, I ended up playing a part that agency founders don’t often talk about on podcasts. I became functionally the product owner of the new system, the person who sets the build cadence, brokers of the design compromises, wins over the skeptics, and takes responsibility when things break. And I did it in close partnership with someone on the inside, which is a big part of the story. So this is a case study, yes, but it’s really a leadership story. And I’m going to give you the honest version, the wins, the architecture debates, the launch week surprises, and what it takes to bring seven teams onto one system, one launch at a time. Let’s

Danny Gavin (Host): 04:11
start at the beginning, which I love telling people about this, starts with ChatGPT. In August of 2025, Paragonics found Optage by asking ChatGPT for a HubSpot partner with medical device experience. True story. If you ever wonder whether AI visibility matters for your agency, there’s your answer. They asked, we came up, they called. And on that first call, I learned two things. First, this was a company doing extraordinary work, organ transport devices for heart, lung, liver, pancreas, kidney, supporting transplant cases around the clock. And second, they were growing so fast that they had simply outgrown their tools. Here’s what the day-to-day actually looked like. Their director of sales ops described it to me at kickoff. We’ve been doing a lot of manual processes that are just, we can’t keep up with this anymore. The sales data lived in NetSuite, their ERP. But how did a sale get into NetSuite? A rep would email the sales ops team, hey, this hospital used this device with this serial number on this date. Sales ops would type it in. That data flowed through a linking database into Power BI, which is what the sales team actually looked at. So one piece of information got touched by, and this is their account, not mine, five different people entering the same data. SalesOps ran on a shared inbox with no clear ownership of who answered what. Their director told me, there are tons of emails flying around. It’s very easy for something to get overlooked. Then there was logistics, the 24-7 Hotline team. When a transplant case sparked up at 2 a.m., the process was the hotline lead typed the details into a notepad template on his phone, then he transferred it into the hand-colored Word document to pass off between shifts. Then when someone had time, it got entered into a homegrown caselog

Danny Gavin (Host): 05:45
portal, and case notifications went up by group text, where he manually copied 16 people per case. I remember saying to him on that call, the crazy thing is you’re not managing the actual stages and processes in the caselog system. You’re managing that in a Word doc. And he just said, correct. And I said, which is insane, but not in a bad way. That’s why we’re doing this. His line, which I think about constantly, copying 16 people in a text message every time manually is not a sustainable growth model. And the data underneath all this had the problems that every fast growing company’s data has. The same surgeon living in the system under multiple spellings, with his case history split across identities, duplicate hospital records, fields that meant slightly different things to different teams, nothing unusual, and nothing anyone did wrong. It’s just what happens when great people move fast with disconnected tools. And beyond that, like every company with multiple business lines, different teams had built their own tools over the years. Their own spreadsheets, their own trackers, systems that worked well for the team that built them, but that the rest of the company couldn’t see into. That’s the pattern I want you to notice, because it’s not a paragonics thing. It’s an every company thing. Each team has built exactly the tools it needed to do its job well. The cost was invisible until you stepped back. No single place where the whole picture lived. At the executive presentation, I summed it like this. We basically have many islands of paragonics, spreadsheets, Word documents, software systems, text message threads. Paragonics does a great job with what they do, but if we want to grow, we have to streamline. I compared it to a busy kitchen where orders are shouted out and tracked on sticky notes, great chefs, world-class food, and a kitchen they’d outgrown. Now here’s the part that makes this engagement different from every implementation playbook you’ll read. Usually when you do a big CRM build, the client already has a systems owner on staff. A RevOps director, a CRM administrator, somebody whose full-time job is to own the platform. The architecture, the build decisions, the roadmap. Paragonics, like most companies building their first cross-functional system, didn’t have that role yet. And I want to be really clear, that is not a gap anyone left open. The seat literally could not exist before the system did. You don’t hire a RevOps director for a platform you haven’t built. And Paragonics did something a lot of clients don’t do. They put a strong project manager on this from day one. Their head of project management drove this thing from the inside the entire way: scheduling, escalations, accountability, momentum. More on him in a minute because he’s one of the heroes of this story. Think about who touched HubSpot before we arrived. Marketing technically owned the portal. They used it for emails. Sales barely touched it. And like most sales teams anywhere, they were skeptical of anything CRM shaped. That’s not a paragonic squirk, by the way. In every sales organization I’ve ever worked with, reps worry that a CRM means more admin work and less selling, and you have to earn them over. So, marketing owned the tool, but not the problem. Sales ops owned the problem, but not the tool. IT gated security, but didn’t drive projects. Logistics had the deepest process knowledge and no mandate. Project management could drive the process, but somebody

Danny Gavin (Host): 08:43
still had to own the product, the architecture, the design decisions, what gets built and in what order. And the executives wanted the outcome, but weren’t going to run a weekly build meeting. That’s the brand new chair. Every first-time transformation has one. And one of the two things happened. Either it stays empty and the project strifts, decisions stall, momentum bleeds out, or someone sits in it until the client is ready to fill it themselves. I decided basically at kickoff that I would sit in that chair. And I want to be precise about what that meant, because this is the core lesson of the whole episode. It meant I set the meeting cadence, and it was heavy, weekly discovery blocks in October, then during the build, two to three working sessions per week. It meant I wrote the steering deck for the executives. I compiled their user and seat list. I drafted the document defining which team owns which module after launch. I defined their email subject line standards for purchase orders. At various points, I was chasing their own IT department to open DNS tickets and emailing their Netsuite administrator about sync scripts. Their problems became my problems, even the ones that had nothing to do with HubSpot. Now, none of that works alone, and this matters more than anything else in this section. This was a two-person leadership team from day one, me in the product owner seat and their head of project management in the driver’s seat on the inside. On the kickoff call, he introduced himself by saying, I’m excited to help chase down and herd any cats that you need on our side, Danny. And he was underselling himself. He got the right people in the right rooms, kept the timeline honest, understood the internal landscape far better than I ever could, and you’ll hear later, gave me the single best piece of strategic advice of the entire engagement. Here’s the principle an outside consultant can hold the product owner’s seat for a while, but only paired with a real leader on the inside. I owned the build, he owned the momentum. Neither works without the other. And one more thing about that kickoff. At the

Danny Gavin (Host): 10:26
end of it, with the whole mess mapped out in front of us, I told the team, we are currently in a dark tunnel. We don’t see the light yet, but we know it’s going to be there. When you’re leading a project of this size, part of the job is just saying that out loud. By mid-November, we had done eight hours of formal discovery, a four and a half hour on-site in Boston, and deep dives with every team. We had an architecture. Now we had to win the executives. And this is where my partner on the inside, their head of project management, gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve gotten in my career. I had built this beautiful, thorough slide deck, layers of analysis, and he looked at me and told me essentially, if you present this, you’re gonna come across like a McKinsey report. Abstract, expensive, forgettable. These are operators. Don’t tell them, show them. Then he challenged me to build a live working MVP of the system in HubSpot in about 48 hours. I joked at the exec meeting that he was like my Mr. Beast. What can you do in an hour? So we built it. A form that creates a case, a case that moves through a pipeline, a pipeline connected to a central donor ID record, and the finale, HubSpot creating a real sales order inside NetSuite, live in front of the executives. I’ll be honest with you about how that felt. There’s a moment on the recording where I say mid-demo. I did a lot of praying this morning that we wouldn’t have problems. Live demos are terrifying. Do them anyway. Because it worked. The sales order popped up in NetSuite on screen and the room changed. The executive sponsor said, I’m excited, you captured everything. And then at the end, excellent work, Danny. How long did it take us to figure this out? You got it in a couple of weeks. Now, why did the demo work when a deck would have failed? Because with this many stakeholders, every person in that room was silently asking a different question. The sponsor wanted invoicing speed. He wanted to close the books fast. The sales executive was protecting her reps and her Power BI reports. The services director was wondering if this thing would steamroll his team. IT was thinking about data security. A deck makes them wait for their answer. A live system lets each of them poke at their own corner of it. And poke they did. The sales executive asked, point blank, what this meant for Power BI. My answer, and I chose these words carefully. My goal for this system is not necessarily to destroy Power BI. It might, but that’s not my goal. Everybody laughed. The sponsor jumped in to confirm Power BI stays. HubSpot feeds NetSuite, feeds Power BI. And a turf war, I could have killed the project, just dissolved. The services director pushed back too. He said rolling this out as his team’s first line entry tool might be a little ambitious at this point. And instead of arguing, I agreed with him. I told the room, I’m going to be shooting for the stars, but it’s about getting people to use it. We could construct the most beautiful system possible, but if no one’s going to use it, that’s not the point. Remember that exchange. It’s going to matter a lot later in the story. Quick question: Is there a woman in your life looking for a flexible career? One that’s well paying and actually hers? Or maybe you’re the one asking. Whether you’re just starting out, getting back to work after time at home, or ready for a change from a job you’ve outgrown, Odeo Academy was built for exactly that. Nearly 300 women have gone through the program and landed in-house marketing roles, agency jobs, and freelance clients of their own. It’s 15 weeks beginner-friendly, taught directly by me, and I personally grade every project myself. AI is part of the curriculum too. So you learn the current version of the job, not one that’s already out of date. Classes are filling fast, with the next cohort starting Sunday, October 25th. So don’t wait. Visit ODOACademy.com forward slash podcast and use code MENTOR for $250 off. And if that’s not the right fit, you’re covered by our 14-day guarantee, no questions asked. Again, that’s ODEOacademy.com forward slash podcasts, code M-E-N-T-O-R to save $250 off now.

Danny Gavin (Host): 14:13
So what did we actually build? Let me give you the architecture in about 90 seconds, because the technical shape of it was itself a multi-stakeholder compromise. The anchor is the UNOS ID, the national identifier that follows an organ donor. Every transplant case, every device, every invoice of paragonics ultimately traces back to one of those. So we made the UNOS ID a custom object at the center of the system, and everything else, case logs, inventory, deals, service records, all hang off of it. Around it, a case log custom object that replaced the notepad, the Word doc, and the Homegrown Portal, an inventory source object that unified field inventory and consignment locations. About 50 separate hospital forms collapsed into unified conditional forms. Three new deal pipelines, commercial, field inventory, consignment, that automatically create the billing paperwork in NetSuite when a case completes. A priceless object synced from their NetSuite contracts, real-time par-level inventory tracking at courier sites, eventually live profit margin calculation per case. But here’s what I want to hear in all of that. Almost every design decision was really a negotiation between teams. Example one. The logistics lead, who came from the organ procurement world, wanted everything nested under the donor. One record per donor, everything inside it. He pushed hard. Why do we have to have seven different records versus one record? And from a pure database design standpoint, he was wrong. And I told him so. The trick here is we have to understand which things need to be their own entity. But he wasn’t asking a database question. He was asking a reporting question. Market share per donor, missed organs. And he was right about that. So the compromise, separate case records, all anchored to one central Unis ID entity. His reporting, my relational database integrity, that argument made the system better. Example two, the sales team. The guidance from sales leadership was clear. Keep the burden on the reps as light as possible. So we did. The entire sales-facing footprint of this massive system came down to some emails become forms, one approval task in their inbox, and a mobile app. That’s it. No activity logging mandated. For a field team whose job is being in hospitals, not in software, restraint was the design. Example three. The case log screens are laid out to mirror the old Word doc. On purpose. Familiarity is a feature. Adoption beats elegance every time. And underneath all of it was the least glamorous work of the whole engagement: data. Merging duplicate records, standardizing names, building did you mean duplicate checkers, and date validators so bad entries can’t happen in the first place. Nobody puts data cleanup in the sales brochure, but it’s half the value. By the way, the pace of this phase was wild. We ran build reviews on December 26th and December 31st. Two calls a day sometimes, one track for logistics and one for sales ops. When you’re sitting in the product owner chair, momentum is your responsibility, and momentum

Danny Gavin (Host): 17:02
compounds. April 1st, 2026, Go Live number one. Logistics, sales operations, and the entire field sales team trained in three territory sessions on launch morning, and launch week taught me things. Real things. Within days, we discovered a renamed case type had broken the Power BI and mapping, and a chunk of service cases vanished from executive reports right before a big Monday meeting. Two cases got created at the same instant and grabbed the same case number. The first days of field usage had the normal learning curve bumps you’d expect when busy people meet a new tool. And on a call, we discovered live that an entire sales order pipeline we’d all sworn we built didn’t exist. I said on that call, how did we miss that? Once you’re live, it’s a whole new ball game. I was officially on vacation that week. I was not functionally on vacation. But that’s the chair. But here’s the thing. Logistics adoption was a runaway success, basically from day one. And when I later found myself explaining why, it crystallized into what I now think is the single most important idea in this episode. Here’s what I said. The reason logistics was so successful is because there was a champion. Somebody who literally took the bull by the horns. You need a champion. The Logistics Lead didn’t just attend our sessions, he committed to two 90-minute working sessions a week for a month, on top of running a 24-7 hotline. And at some point in December, I made a decision that I’d now call the highest leverage move of the entire engagement. Instead of him telling me what to change on his screens, I gave him editing access to his own record templates and forms and taught him to redesign them himself. Think about what that changes. He stops being a stakeholder giving feedback and becomes an owner, shaping his own tool. His team stops hearing the consultant built this and starts hearing our lead built this. Requests stop cueing behind me, and the client is genuinely more capable after the engagement than before it, which, if you’re an agency owner listening, is the actual product, not the software, the capability. So if you take one tactical thing from this episode, on every team you serve, find the person with the deepest process knowledge and the most pain and make them powerful. Champions aren’t found. They’re made by giving away

Danny Gavin (Host): 19:10
control. Now let me tell you something that nobody puts in case studies, but every implementation leader knows. Adoption never moves at the same speed across teams, ever, in any company. Your first launch team has usually been in the room since discovery. They’ve shaped the system, they’ve argued about field names, they feel ownership. But in a phased rollout, the later teams haven’t lived that journey. They’re busy doing their actual jobs, in this case, life critical work that runs around the clock. And from their seat, a new system isn’t a solution yet. It’s homework. Their current tools work fine for them. And here’s the truth about any voluntary rollout. A team that isn’t ready can slow a system down just by staying busy. That’s not villainy, that’s gravity. So when our second wave came up in the spring and testing moved slower than the calendar wanted, I had to make some decisions. I’ll give them to you as three moves because I’d make all three again. Move one, respect the leverage and reset the timeline. I told my client contacts the uncomfortable truth. We can’t go live on the planned date if it hasn’t been tested. Launching something unready hurts us more than waiting hurts anyone. So we did the thing consultants hate doing. We slipped the launch a month, and we used that month to build the features the incoming team actually wanted for themselves, the pricing logic and the staffing reports their real operational decisions run on. Never launch to a team that has nothing to gain on day one. Rebalance the deal first. Move two, get real executive sponsorship. A cross-team rollout cannot be driven sideways. Peer teams asking peer teams to please change how they work. That’s not anyone’s job, and it slowly burns goodwill. Priorities get set from above. So we made sure the executives who owned the outcome were engaged, informed with specifics rather than vibes, and visibly behind the timeline. The single biggest predicator of phase two success in my experience is whether leadership treats it as phase one’s equal. Move three, keep the door warm. Through the whole stretch, I treated the incoming team as exactly what they were, future power users. Every conversation stayed warm and personal, even the hard ones about timelines, because the relationship you build during the slow phase is the one you’ll be living in after launch. You can hold a deadline and extend a hand at the same time. In fact, you have to, because in every rollout story ever told, today’s slowest adopter is next quarter’s biggest advocate, and they will remember how you treated them on the way in. I said on one of those calls, half laughing, this is literally a case study in organizational behavior management. It was. The software was done for weeks. The humans were the project, and that’s not a complaint about this client. Hear me clearly. It’s the nature of the work. If you’re leading an implementation and the people part feels harder than the software part, you’re not doing it wrong. You’ve just reached the

Danny Gavin (Host): 21:48
real part. June 1st, 2026, midnight. Go live number two, the services team. We purged the test data, paused the cutover for the night shift, because transplants don’t wait for software launches, and ran daily. Check-ins all week. Day three, the log reads No issues reported by the day shift. On day five, I opened our weekly stand-up and said, the services lead told me yesterday, thank you so much. It actually went really well. It’s a huge win for everyone. But my favorite moment in this whole story came about four weeks later. During the parallel run period, the services lead had sensibly kept his old spreadsheet going as a backup. Exactly what a careful operator should do. And on a call at the end of June, the two sources didn’t quite agree on one surgeon’s case count, so we audited the discrepancy together, live, line by line. We traced every single difference, and everyone came out the same way. The live system was right. Manual entry always lags. That’s not a knock on anyone. It’s just what manual means. And this is the same thoughtful skeptic who months earlier had called the rollout a little ambitious. And there’s this moment on the recording where he goes, So look at that. Almost like there’s a reason we should have live data. The system got certified as the source of truth on one of the reports his team makes real operational decisions from by its most careful critic. You cannot win an argument like that with slides, only with their own data on their own screen. Later that same call, he asked if we could add a mandatory confirmation pop-up to a workflow. Can we 100% do that? And I said, Do it right now, and then you can test it. And built it while he watched. He said, I love that. From careful skeptic to power user in one month. So where does it all stand today? Since March, every new case of paragonics enters through HubSpot, period. Finance came aboard in June. Four people trained on pay calculations and inventory reconciliation. The product team got access in July. There’s an automated staffing report that lands every Monday and Thursday at 7 a.m. Case level margin visibility. A transfer pipeline that replaced yet another email-based process. The billing coordinator on the services team, unprompted on a recent call, everything’s been running really smoothly. I love it. And the moment I’m proudest of happened just this month. I spent a session teaching the service leads to modify the system themselves, add their own properties, redesign their own card layouts. I told them the system is created in a way where you should have the flexibility to do that and not be afraid to do it. The team that was the newest to the system is now customizing their own build. That’s the arc. And even better, the client now brings us brand new business questions first. New things they want to track and measure, because the system earned the right

Danny Gavin (Host): 24:26
to grow. Let me land this episode with five lessons for anyone, agency or in-house, leading a project across many teams onto a system none of them has owned before. One, fill the brand new chair as a pair. A first-time transformation needs a product owner for the build and a leader on the inside driving momentum. And at the start, those are almost never the same person. I sat in the product seat, their head of project management drove from the inside. Without that partnership, none of this happens. Two, demo don’t deck. In a room full of stakeholders with different agendas, a working system answers every agenda at once. A slide deck answers none of them. Build the MVP, say a prayer, and demo live. Three, design and diplomacy. The best architecture on paper loses to the good architecture people will use. Mirror the old Word document. Leave the sales team alone. Let the database argument be won by whoever’s actually right about the underlying need. Four, make champions by giving away control. Editing Access did more for adoption than every training video we made. The goal isn’t dependence on your agency. It’s a client who can run without you. And paradoxically, that’s exactly what makes them keep you around. Five, adoption problems are leadership problems wearing a software costume. When adoption moves slower than the calendar, check the leverage, engage real sponsors with real specifics, delay before you force, and keep the relationship warm. Because today’s slowest adopter is next quarter’s power user reading you their case numbers in NATO phonetic alphabet at 238 in the morning. One year ago, a transplant case at Paragonics lived in a phone notepad, a hand colored Word document, a group text with 16 people, and a handful of separate spreadsheets. Today it lives in one system, entered once, visible to every team that touches it, from the hotline to the invoice. The software mattered, but what actually got built was alignment. Seven teams, one source of truth, one company seeing the same picture. The software mattered, but what actually got built was alignment. Seven teams, one source of truth, one company seeing the same picture. Thank you for listening to this very special office hours episode of the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast. If this resonated, go back and listen to episode 59, the Berlin Heart Story. They’re two halves of one thesis. HubSpot can become almost anything if you lead the people, not just the build. If you have questions about HubSpot, digital transformation, or leading a multi-team implementation, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you. Until next time. Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Mentor Podcast. Be sure to check us out online at theddmmentor.com and at the DM Mentor on Instagram. And don’t forget to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts for more Marketing Mentor magic. See you next time.