Zero Downtime, Doubled Capacity How Balance Claims Rebuilt Its Operation on HubSpot Enterprise

Key Results

• • Over 2x claims capacity per supplement worker: from 80-100 files before HubSpot to 180-200 today, up to 250 at peak

  • Zero downtime migrating 30 users and tens of thousands of records: no operational disruption on go-live day

  • 31% revenue growth since the migration: driven by closed-loop reporting that ties every marketing dollar to real client acquisition cost

  • The entire business now runs on HubSpot: marketing, sales, service, and the team managing live claims all work in one platform

The Challenge

Balance Claims is the largest third-party administrator of insurance claims for restoration contractors in the United States, and the platform running their core operation had become its biggest constraint. ClaimsForce, the industry-specific claims CRM they relied on, could no longer keep up. The work was relentlessly manual: emails were copied into the system by hand, every figure was keyed in, and every billable was calculated by hand. The platform was slow enough that each entry carried a three-to-five-second delay, hundreds of times a day, and data didn't always save, forcing teams to redo completed work. Reporting was so thin that each department kept its own rogue spreadsheets just to see its own numbers.

With sales and marketing already on HubSpot and the ClaimsForce contract ending, the path was clear: move the entire business onto one platform. The catch was that Balance Claims could not pause operations to do it. Thirty users and tens of thousands of records had to migrate while the business ran at full speed.

The Strategy

This was not a standard CRM build. Beyond marketing, sales, and service, HubSpot had to run Balance Claims' production team, the people managing live insurance claims every day. Running a production operation inside HubSpot sits well outside its typical use case, so the architecture had to mirror how a supplementing business actually works, not how a sales pipeline flows.

Savage Media began with discovery sessions to document how files move through the business and which fields and workflows were essential. From there the plan called for cleaning the existing data, designing a custom pipeline and property architecture, mapping every field to its HubSpot equivalent, and defining the stages and automation the new system would run on. That clean, structured foundation also made the new environment AI-ready from day one.

Because the cutover could not fail, Savage Media worked on-site with the Balance Claims team to hand-pick and train a pilot group that ran real claims in the new system first. What the pilot surfaced shaped role-specific record layouts and documentation for each team, and those first users became the internal experts who carried everyone else through go-live.

"I was expecting a few fires on our first day in the new system....And then there was nothing...I was shocked. Everything went smoothly."

-Steven Tutterow // Balance Claims

The Solution

Rather than bolt on a custom object, Savage Media ran the entire claims operation on HubSpot's standard Deals object with a purpose-built Claims pipeline. The choice was deliberate: it kept the data model simple and unlocked HubSpot's native revenue reporting, so every claim's value could be tied back to the marketing and sales effort that produced it. Production now lives in HubSpot alongside marketing, sales, and service, with each file moving through a custom set of stages built around how a claim actually progresses, from intake through estimating, supplementing, and final billing.

The detail lives in the properties and automation. Claims-specific fields capture the carrier's initial estimate, the contractor's estimate, and a billable rate stored on each client's company record, and a set of calculation properties rolls billables across multiple supplement rounds into one running total. When a new claim lands, a workflow branches on claim type, creates the estimate task for the assigned estimator, and advances the file to Estimating, removing the manual triage the old system required.

Billing works the same way, auto-calculating amounts and generating billing tasks as a claim is approved, so nothing is keyed by hand. Unified dashboards then give leadership real-time visibility across the whole business for the first time, including which marketing spend actually produces profitable clients, the closed-loop reporting that drove the 31% revenue gain.

AI in Daily Operations

With clean, structured data in place, Balance Claims put HubSpot's AI to work immediately. Breeze enriches records and populates industry-specific smart properties, and Breeze Assistant drafts one-page communication summaries before client calls.

The clearest example came when the team had to send a client to collections. Workers manage hundreds of communication touch-points per file, and assembling a collections case once meant combing through months of history by hand. Using Breeze Assistant, the team pulled a summary of the full communication history and within minutes had an accurate record of every time the client acknowledged the work was done and agreed to pay.

A task that took a couple hours was done in 15 minutes, an 87% reduction.

The Results

Since the migration, capacity per worker has climbed from 80-100 claims to 180-200, the business handles more volume with significantly lower payroll costs, without team burnout, all on HubSpot Enterprise with zero downtime at go-live. Profitability has climbed alongside revenue, even as the company invests more in software and services than ever before. The productivity gains don't just justify the investment; they fund the growth, creating efficiencies Tutterow describes as "ten times better" than the old system.

Balance Claims came to Savage Media stuck with a system that couldn't keep up. Today, the business runs entirely on a unified HubSpot Enterprise platform built for the growth it has always been capable of.

"Our profitability and revenue has increased even though we're paying more money on systems than we had in the past, because of the efficiencies that the system has allowed us to have...we're doing more work with less people."

-Steven Tutterow // Balance Claims