Rika partnered with Caterham to overcome a fragmented, decentralised lead management process through a heavily-bespoke HubSpot Enterprise CRM rollout, built on custom API integrations, purpose-built custom objects, and automated lead routing across 30 independently run retailers.
The Challenge
Caterham is an iconic British automotive brand, best known for its lightweight sports cars, motorsport heritage, and passionate global driving community. The business sells through a network of 30 independent retailers across the UK, Europe, the US, and international markets, ranging from family-run dealerships to large multi-franchise dealer groups.
This distributed model created genuine technical complexity. Before HubSpot, enquiries arrived through a legacy dealer portal plagued by duplicated records, spam and delivery failures. Customer communications lived in a black box of emails, WhatsApp messages, and spreadsheets. There was no single view of the customer and no reliable way to track a prospect from enquiry through to order.
Buying a Seven is a considered, discretionary purchase, the average customer journey spans approximately nine months from first interaction to placing an order. Across that period, website and campaign enquiries were handled inconsistently, often going untracked. Manual lead distribution to retailers created delays and lost opportunities at the very top of the funnel. As a result, HQ had no visibility into dealer activity, no insight into appointments, test drives, or sales outcomes, and no direct access to the end customer. Sales were driven entirely through the retailer network, leaving Caterham unable to communicate directly with prospects or understand customer buying behaviours firsthand.
Our challenge was to design a HubSpot environment that could track every opportunity, deliver a single view of the customer to HQ, and enforce centralised governance and reliable reporting, while remaining flexible enough for independent retailers with their own systems, habits, and commercial priorities to actually adopt and use.
The Solution
Rika consolidated Caterham's fragmented and disparate digital stack, designing and implementing a fully customised HubSpot Enterprise platform, Caterham's first CRM system, combining Marketing Hub Enterprise and Sales Hub Enterprise into a single connected operational system. This standardised lead management and provided real-time intelligence across the sales funnel for the first time, sunsetting Mailchimp and the legacy dealer portal in the process, reducing technical debt and licensing costs.
Fig1: Our approach connects fragmented customer data, builds usable segments, and activates them across marketing, sales and reporting workflows.
Integration and data architecture
Caterham's customer enquiries arrive from multiple distinct touchpoints: website contact forms, vehicle configurator submissions, events and campaign activity. Rika built custom API integrations between the Caterham CMS and HubSpot, routing every enquiry into the platform with enriched data fields. Every enquiry was automatically captured, routed to the right retailer, and tracked from the moment it entered the system, without the need for manual intervention.
Rika also built custom objects for the range and for retailers, allowing Caterham to associate specific models and configurations with individual customer records, and gave each retailer a distinct entity with its own properties and routing logic. Combined with the custom API integrations from the Caterham's CMS, this gave the platform the data structure it needed to route, track, and report accurately across a global network, and gave Caterham a 360° view of the customer for the first time.
Governance, monitoring, and adoption
Getting independent retailers with their own processes and no incentive to change them onto a single platform required accountability to be built into the system itself. SLA-driven workflows introduced a 72-hour response framework. Any lead not contacted within that window triggered automated escalation sequences and notification alerts to Caterham HQ. Open lead monitoring dashboards gave Caterham a real-time view of retailer engagement across the entire network, making inactivity visible and actionable. Alongside the platform build, Rika delivered tailored onboarding and best practice sessions with each regional retailer to ensure processes were understood and followed and so no enquiry would go untracked or unlogged.
Data consolidation
Rika removed more than 8,500 spam contacts, merged approximately 5,500 duplicate records, and resolved formatting inconsistencies across more than 3,000 additional records, creating a clean, structured customer database capable of supporting accurate reporting, segmentation, and automation.
AI Implementation
Rika deployed a Breeze AI agent on Caterham's finance offers page to qualify inbound enquiries before they reach the retailer network. The agent confirms finance intent, captures contact details, and collects model interest and location, creating a fully enriched contact record in HubSpot and triggering the retailer routing workflow automatically. Every finance enquiry entering the system arrives with purchase intent confirmed and the data needed to route and action it without delay.
