Cloud SaaS / Media production · Cree8
29,682 people in the CRM. About 2,000 of them were real.
Cree8 runs a cloud platform for remote and virtual media production. Their Attio was genuinely well built: a real pipeline, a Chargebee billing model, eight dashboards, sixteen workflows. The audit found the setup was not the problem. The problem was noise, and the guardrails built to stop it had been switched off.
Free 48h audit
Engagement
29,682
People in workspace
79%
Never had an interaction
~2,000
People actually active
12,626
Companies sharing a name
6
Cleanup workflows paused
The problem.
Cree8 knew the tool. 228 deals with real values and stages, $2.0M won and $6.5M open, a Contracts and Allocations billing model wired to Chargebee, eight dashboards, sixteen workflows, and Claude already connected and used daily. That is further than most teams get on their own.
The problem was noise. 29,682 people and 18,466 companies, but 23,562 of the people (79%) had never had a single interaction, and 23,520 of those arrived in one month, from the HubSpot import. About 2,000 people were real. The rest was what everyone scrolled past to reach them.
Duplicates hid in the names, not the emails. Attio's uniqueness rules had already stopped every duplicate email and domain. But 12,626 companies and 10,718 people shared a name. "Apple" appeared 36 times. "NFL" and "National Football League (NFL)" were two separate companies.
The board reports were already built, and could not be trusted. New deals added in the last 7 days read 0. ARR closed, new ARR pipeline, and closed-won for the week all read $0. Closing in 30 days showed $7.4M against $790k at 60 days and $60k at 90, which is arithmetically impossible. That is why a weekly board report still cost an hour or two of chasing.
The most striking finding was that the fixes already existed and had been turned off. Of sixteen workflows, the six that keep data clean, the weekly health checks, the deal-value nudge, the stage-change task reminder and the stale-deal re-engagement, were all paused or in draft. The ones still running were cosmetic.
Objectives.
- Get the workspace down to the ~2,000 people who are real, without deleting a single record.
- Make the six broken board reports true, then stop the weekly number being hand-built.
- Merge the name-level duplicates the HubSpot migration left behind, and stop new ones forming.
- Connect Intercom, so Attio is genuinely the single source of truth it was meant to be.
- Add one Source field, so the business can finally say which channel brings deals.
What we found.
Findings ranked critical to low. The four that shaped the plan:
79% of records had never been touched
23,562 people and 16,077 companies with no interaction, ever. One month of HubSpot import plus email auto-capture dumped roughly 30,000 rows into the same object as the live contacts. The people who mattered were buried under them.
The board reports were built, and broken
Six of the eight dashboards reported $0 or an impossible number. Closing-in-30-days exceeded closing-in-90-days by an order of magnitude. The filters were wrong, not the data model.
Duplicates hid in names, not emails
Because email and domain were already unique, there were no classic duplicates at all. 12,626 companies and 10,718 people still shared a name, which is exactly the residue a HubSpot migration leaves behind.
The guardrails existed and were switched off
Six cleanup workflows sat paused or in draft. The cheapest win in the whole audit, because the team had already built them and then stopped trusting them.
The fix: two agents and a half-day of wiring.
No rebuild. The data model was sound, so the plan was cleanup plus two scheduled agents running on the team's own Claude subscription.
Reporting Agent
Once a week it reads the pipeline and writes the board numbers into Notion or Slack: pipeline by stage, new deals by channel, closed-won, revenue. It also flags any report reading $0 or plainly wrong. The Monday report is ready before anyone sits down to build it.
Deduper Agent
Finds duplicate companies and people, merges them keeping the best value per field, and links every new record to the right company instead of making a new one. It runs on a schedule, so the data stays clean without anyone policing it.
The manual half-day
Make a Cold list of records with no interaction and hide it from default views. Turn the six paused workflows back on. Add one Source field on People and Deals. Wire Intercom in with Make. Fix the six report filters.
Why we did not propose a rebuild.
It would have been easy to sell one. The pipeline, the Chargebee billing model and the dashboards were all sound design, and a rebuild would have thrown away work that was already right. The honest finding was that a good workspace had been buried by one month of import and six switched-off workflows. Clear the noise, turn the guardrails back on, and the reporting they had already built starts telling the truth.
Results.
- A named cause for the noise and the slowness: one month of HubSpot import, 23,520 records, sitting in the same object as roughly 2,000 live contacts.
- A Cold list definition that takes the workspace back to the people who matter, without deleting anything.
- Six broken dashboards identified by name, with the filter faults that make each one lie.
- Two Claude agents specified end to end, reporting and dedup, running on the team's own subscription with no extra AI bill.
- A half-day Intercom recipe, so Attio holds the support conversations too and QBR prep stops being a manual export.
- One Source field and a fill plan, so channel attribution stops being a one-off spreadsheet after each conference.
“George and the team are incredible, and they did a fabulous job of acting fast to move quickly to audit our system and provide actionable feedback to improve how we run our business! I was hugely impressed - and I would recommend anyone use Attio as a CRM.”
Vanessa Mullin
Chief Revenue Officer, Cree8
Ready when you are.
Two ways in. Pick the friction that fits.