Case Study

Replacing a spreadsheet with a payment-first booking process

A darkness retreat business was running 20 leads a day through two people and a spreadsheet. We flipped the sale to payment-first and built a HubSpot system that handles booking, health screening and counselor matching as steps rather than as things someone has to remember.

Client

Swiss-registered darkness retreat business, operating in Poland

Industry

Wellness & Retreats

Hub

Marketing Hub Professional, Sales Hub Enterprise, Data Hub Professional

Engagement

12 weeks

20 a day

Inbound leads a two-person team was handling in Excel

5 guest paths

Each with its own flow, from returning guests to last-minute bookings

2 pipelines

Raw inquiries separated from paid, screened opportunities

The problem

This business sells multi-day darkness retreats from five cabins to an international clientele, with five more cabins planned. The marketing was working: around 20 leads a day from Google Ads, Meta and LinkedIn. The sales process was two people and a spreadsheet.

The process was manual from end to end.
Two people tracked every inquiry by hand, so response times slipped and leads went cold before anyone reached them.
A spreadsheet could not hold the real requirements.
Medical screening before a retreat, matching each guest to the right counselor, grouping guests by language, multi-currency pricing, and last-minute discounting to fill empty cabins.
There was no reporting.
Lead sources and pipeline had to be assembled by hand in a marketing spreadsheet every time anyone wanted to see them.

What we built

We started with the order of the sale itself, not with the CRM. Changing when payment happens turned out to matter more than any workflow we could have built around the old sequence.

A payment-first process.
The guest pays to hold a spot, then completes the health questionnaire, then books the counselor call. Refunds are straightforward if someone is later disqualified on health grounds. This was our recommendation rather than the sequence the team had assumed, and it is what the rest of the system is built around.
Two pipelines, split at payment.
Lead Management runs from New through Attempting, Engaged, Sales Call Booked and Qualified, with a mandatory reason on Closed Lost so lost leads can be segmented later. Deal Management runs from Awaiting Booking through Booking Paid and Questionnaire Replied to Pass to Counselor.
Five guest paths, each handled properly.
New guests take the standard flow. Returning guests skip the sales call and get a questionnaire pre-filled from their history. Guests experienced elsewhere but new here still take the full safety flow. Last-minute bookings run a high-priority path with tiered waiting-list discounts. VIP and barter guests sit on their own path so non-paying guests still appear correctly in reporting.
The booking tool wired in around its limits.
The booking platform’s native HubSpot integration is one-way and carries only basic fields, so the process is driven by the inbound payment event, and any email needing a dynamic booking link is sent from the booking tool rather than HubSpot. Counselors who have no HubSpot seat submit a qualified or disqualified decision through a static form, which moves the deal on and triggers the next step.

What changed

The spreadsheet is gone. Every inquiry lands in HubSpot with its source attached, a rep calls within 24 hours, and payment, health screening and counselor matching happen as steps in a system rather than as things somebody has to remember.

Safety sits inside the process rather than beside it. A guest cannot reach a retreat without clearing the health questionnaire, and the reporting layer replaced the marketing spreadsheet the team had been rebuilding by hand.

Have a similar challenge?

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