Tessera Studio

Tessera had been on HubSpot Sales Hub Professional for two years. Twelve seats at $90 a month came to $13,000 a year before contact-tier upgrades pushed the bill higher. The Professional tier was overkill for the agency's actual needs — they used contacts, deals, and tasks; the marketing automation, chatbot builder, and ad audience features sat idle.

The bigger problem was the data model. Several Tessera clients are holding companies with three to seven brands under one corporate roof. HubSpot's "one company, one record" assumption meant the team either lumped every brand into a single record (and lost pipeline visibility) or duplicated client records under different brand names (and missed cross-brand opportunities). Reporting on revenue-per-client was a quarterly Excel exercise rather than a dashboard.

Tessera now models holding-company clients as a parent account with up to five brand sub-records. Each brand has its own deal pipeline, its own contacts, its own billing record, and its own brand-asset folder, but the parent account rolls everything up for relationship reporting and account-management cadence.

Pipeline visibility went from "which client?" to "which brand within which client?". The strategy team now spots cross-brand opportunities (a packaging project for Brand A often suggests an identity refresh for Brand B) that were previously invisible. Account managers walk into quarterly review meetings with a single dashboard that shows every active project across every brand under the parent — and the client's CMO finds the conversation noticeably more useful.