Case Study: Building a stronger referral system with HubSpot — A specialty veterinary center’s transformation

The challenge

When a national specialty veterinary referral center launched in 2022, its mission was clear: provide 24/7 emergency and advanced specialty care for pets while building trusted partnerships with referring veterinarians. But behind the scenes, their growth was being slowed by outdated processes.

The team relied on spreadsheets and emails to manage outreach to local clinics, track referrals, and coordinate visits. This manual system left room for duplicate touchpoints, limited visibility into outreach effectiveness, and no reliable way to forecast referrals.

They knew they needed more than a patchwork fix. They needed a system that could scale with their growth, support complex data requirements, and give them the insights to strengthen community partnerships.

• A disorganized sales process: Outreach was tracked through scattered spreadsheets and email threads. Without a centralized system, visits to referring clinics could be duplicated or overlooked, leaving the team without a clear, reliable workflow.
• Complex data needs: Their work involved more than just contacts and appointments. They needed to track referral sources by specialty, frequency of clinic visits, and even distribution of brochures. Patient visit data from their management software, Instinct, had to be imported in a way that protected client privacy.
• Limited reporting and forecasting: Leadership wanted visibility into which clinics drove the most referrals, how referral volume shifted by specialty, and which practices hadn’t been visited recently. Their manual system couldn’t provide that level of transparency.

The solution

Working with media junction®, the center adopted HubSpot as its new system of record and reporting. The onboarding approach emphasized building a usable system from day one, while also teaching the team how to manage and extend it themselves.

• Custom CRM setup: Partners were categorized with custom company types (e.g., general practice, groomer, member hospital). HubSpot’s tasks and meetings objects were repurposed to track recurring visits, ensuring that no partner clinic was left unattended.
• Automation and training: New workflows automatically created follow-up tasks after clinic visits and notified team members of scheduled outreach. A custom property was developed to track brochure distribution, making previously manual tracking efforts seamless.
• Data governance and reporting: To protect privacy, patient IDs replaced names during imports from Instinct. The team also learned to build custom reports and dashboards in HubSpot, giving them new visibility into referral patterns.

The results

• A fully functional CRM tailored to their outreach model.
• A centralized, automated process for managing clinic visits.
• Clearer, more reliable referral data that improved transparency.
• A trained team empowered to manage HubSpot and scale operations independently.

The shift from spreadsheets to HubSpot not only streamlined operations but also positioned the organization for long-term growth.

Why it worked

The project’s success came from a hands-on, project-based onboarding model. Instead of delivering a generic system, the engagement focused on building practical workflows that solved the team’s daily challenges. Training was prioritized alongside setup, ensuring the client could take ownership of their system from the start.

Key metrics (where available)

Looking ahead

This referral center’s journey highlights how purpose-built HubSpot onboarding can transform even the most complex, data-heavy processes into scalable systems. By blending technical expertise with practical training, media junction® helped them replace disorganization with clarity, efficiency, and confidence.

Call to action

If your organization struggles with disconnected systems and manual processes, media junction® can help you build a foundation that scales.