Dennis K. Burke, Inc. has delivered premium gasoline, diesel fuel, and lubricants across the Northeast since 1961. As a family-owned B2B distributor, the company relies on consistent customer relationships and responsive sales execution.
Problem
Burke Oil adopted HubSpot in 2015 to centralize customer data and support their sales team. By 2024, the platform had become part of daily operations, but a decade of use without governance had created reliability problems leadership could no longer ignore.
Sales leadership couldn't trust the data they were seeing: After 10 years in HubSpot, the database contained duplicate contacts and companies, inconsistent formatting, test records mixed with real customers, and missing critical information. Sales management had no confidence in the numbers they were reviewing. Reports showed activity, but the underlying data was suspect. Without clean data, follow-up decisions were guesswork. The sales team couldn't rely on contact records, company hierarchies were unclear, and no one knew which leads were worth pursuing.
The system had become unmanageable and cluttered: Burke Oil had accumulated 1,380 marketing emails, 200 forms, and over 30 dashboards, most of which were no longer in use. Teams were working around HubSpot rather than with it. There was no clear way to decide what to keep, what to delete, or how to organize what remained. The company wanted a fresh start for 2025, but there was no roadmap for how to get there.
No way to identify or prioritize high-value leads: Despite years of website traffic and form submissions, Burke Oil had no lead scoring system. Sales reps received every inquiry with equal priority. There was no automated follow-up, no threshold to separate warm interest from hot opportunities, and no systematic way to route leads to the right people. High-intent prospects were getting the same treatment as casual browsers or, worse, falling through the cracks entirely.
Solution
This wasn't a quick cleanup. Burke Oil's HubSpot environment required structural work, decisions about what data to preserve, how to organize it, and what systems would prevent the same problems from recurring.
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Part 1: Data Integrity & Foundation Reset
Created full backups of contacts, companies, and deals before any modifications
Standardized formatting across seven data hygiene criteria: capitalized names, lowercase emails, consistent phone formats, removed test records, split combined name fields, stripped invalid characters, and flagged bad email addresses
Identified duplicates using email, phone, and name matching across contacts and companies
Established parent-child company relationships where Burke Oil served multiple locations of the same customer
Documented which records required manual review before merging to avoid destroying legitimate multi-location data
Part 2: Lead Intelligence & Sales Automation
Configured a two-tier lead scoring model: 50-100 points triggered an automated help email from the Burke Oil team; 100+ points created an immediate task for the contact owner to make personal outreach
Built automated workflows to ensure no scored lead went unnoticed, with fallback assignment to leadership if no owner was assigned
Created custom sales dashboards optimized for how Burke Oil's management actually reviewed performance, grid and count visuals instead of graphs, tracking email/call outcomes, new deals logged, close percentages, and pipeline stage weight
Designed reports to match the team's existing Excel-based mental models while surfacing HubSpot's real-time capabilities
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Part 3: System Governance & Long-Term Maintainability
Defined clear rules for archiving unused marketing emails (low open rates, low click rates, age) and forms (zero page appearances, zero submissions, low traffic)
Consolidated 30+ dashboards into a streamlined set focused on the metrics leadership actually monitored
Reorganized active dashboards to improve readability and reduce cognitive load
Delivered best practices documentation so internal teams could maintain the new structure without re-consulting
Results
Before: A decade of unmanaged HubSpot use had created data leadership couldn't trust, a cluttered system teams worked around, and no way to prioritize sales follow-up.
After: Clean, reliable data; automated lead qualification; real-time sales visibility; and a governance framework to maintain it.
Financial Impact
Reduced lead leakage: Automated scoring and task creation ensured high-intent prospects received timely follow-up instead of disappearing into the database. Every lead above 100 points now generates a personal outreach task.
Faster speed-to-lead: The scoring threshold at 50 points triggers immediate engagement emails, closing the gap between website activity and first contact.
Operational Impact
Improved trust in HubSpot data: Standardization and deduplication across contacts, companies, and deals gave the sales team confidence in the records they were using to make daily decisions.
Clearer sales next steps: Lead scoring replaced ambiguity with priority. Sales reps now know which contacts warrant immediate attention and which require nurturing.
Improved sales activity visibility: Custom dashboards surfaced the metrics leadership cared about, email outcomes, call logs, deal counts, close rates, and pipeline distribution, in formats that matched how they already thought about the business.
Strategic Impact
Single source of truth: By eliminating duplicates and establishing parent-child company relationships, Burke Oil regained a unified view of their customer base.
Growth-ready systems: Clear deletion criteria, organized dashboards, and automated workflows created a maintainable foundation the company could scale without recreating the original chaos.
Real-time business visibility: Sales management moved from reviewing stale spreadsheets to monitoring live activity and pipeline health inside HubSpot.
Family-owned distribution companies like Burke Oil often face the same pattern: years of HubSpot use without strategic oversight create data problems that erode trust in the platform. When leadership can't rely on what they're seeing, the system stops supporting growth and starts slowing it down.
If your sales team is working around HubSpot instead of with it, we can help you reset the foundation.
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