As Whitley Penn approached its fourth decade in business, they faced a challenge familiar to many growing professional services firms: how to preserve long-standing firm relationships as they continued to scale.
With nearly 40 years of relationship data spread across individual systems, inboxes, and spreadsheets, and a wave of partner retirements on the horizon, Whitley Penn recognized that critical relationship intelligence was at risk of walking out the door. They needed visibility into who knew whom, how those relationships came into the firm and matured, and how they could be sustained in the future, as people transitioned in and out of the firm.
“At that point, everything was a bit challenging,” recalled Kendall Jones Neukomm, Senior Manager, Marketing & Growth Strategy. “Everyone managed contacts in their own way. That works when you’re small, but it doesn’t work when you’re growing, adding offices, and adding people.”
Establishing visibility before CRM
Rather than starting with a traditional CRM rollout, Whitley Penn took a different approach. In 2020, the firm implemented Introhive as its first step toward centralized relationship data, before adopting a CRM at all.
Leadership needed a way to maintain and understand long-standing client relationships as partners and key employees began to consider retirement, while also creating a foundation for future generations of leaders. Introhive provided firmwide visibility into existing connections without disrupting how partners ran their individual books of business.
“That cultural shift mattered,” Kendall emphasized. “We had to show that this was about the longevity of the firm, not about taking any autonomy away.”
With Introhive passively capturing and organizing relationship data in the background, Whitley Penn began building a unified source of truth that would later support a broader CRM strategy.
Making CRM work through automation
In 2022, Whitley Penn implemented HubSpot as its CRM, with Introhive already embedded into the firm’s workflows. Today, Kendall describes Introhive as “the automation that makes HubSpot work.”
Contacts and companies are created and updated automatically. Relationship insights sync overnight, reducing the need for manual data entry or changing how they work day-to-day.
“You could connect email directly to a CRM, but that would include all the email detail,” Kendall explained. “For a firm like ours, we can’t turn that on for everyone and need to be sensitive to what types of data get stored for the long-term.” Introhive allows Whitley Penn to capture valuable relationship information without the underlying email detail.
The result is a seamless experience across the firm. Introhive handles the background work, while professionals use HubSpot to add context and move deals and opportunities forward.
Shifting Whitley Penn’s culture toward collaboration
Having shared visibility into relationships and activity also changed how the firm works together to manage their relationships.
With shared visibility into relationships and activity, collaboration across departments has increased. Operations teams, marketing, and client-facing professionals are becoming further aligned around the same data and goals, supporting growth at scale.
Unlocking what’s next with connected data
Looking ahead, Whitley Penn is focused on expanding what’s possible by connecting Introhive data with additional systems, including time and billing.
The firm has already begun building dashboards that combine relationship interactions with financial metrics such as billing, utilization, realization, and work in progress, giving their partners a more complete view of client relationships and engagement.
“For the first time, we can see interaction data alongside billing data in the same place,” Kendall shared. “That kind of insight isn’t possible without Introhive.”
As Whitley Penn continues to connect systems and explore new visualizations, the firm sees Introhive as the foundation for how their teams will continue to collaborate, prepare, and engage with clients moving forward.
“It’s hard to point to one specific win,” Kendall added. “Because there have been so many moments where someone says, ‘I wouldn’t have known that without Introhive.’ At this point, it’s just how it all works.”
Explore more Introhive case studies and client spotlights here.
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