Meet MethodData, the Baltimore company building sales dashboards for HubSpot users

HubSpot’s customer relationship management software offers plenty of tools for overseeing the sales and marketing interactions it has with folks who its users want to do business with. When it came to reporting out the data on those interactions for sales pros, however, Sebastian Walker saw room for a product that could help improve the platform’s capabilities.

In talking to users about HubSpot, Walker found that the data reporting for marketing functions was excellent, but for sales reporting, people tended to make their own solutions, like spreadsheets or pivot tables.

With that insight, Walker founded Baltimore-based MethodData, a company that creates reports and dashboards for specific types of sales data for HubSpot users. These reports include contents relative to key performance, as well as tracking deals.

“It’s reached a stage now where if the data exists within HubSpot, there’s not a report that we can’t build for people. Any type of report or dashboard, we can now build,” said Sebastian Walker, the company’s CEO who is a former IT program manager with IBM, Thomson Reuters and Legg Mason.

This includes “out-of-the-box” dashboards and reports, which MethodData built and makes available. For those seeking more specific uses, the five-member team also works directly with companies to build bespoke dashboards tailored to their needs. It’s appealing to companies that have between 10 and 100 employees, and don’t have the tech teams to build such tools themselves, Walker said.

As the team set out to create these dashboards, Walker said talking to the folks using HubSpot was key. They spoke with more than 50 companies on the platform to find out what they wanted in a report. It’s a process that continues. Even as a company that has previously operated by word of mouth and is now ready to launch more marketing, Walker is seeking out folks to test the product, on one condition: They have to provide honest feedback.

“If you think a report doesn’t work the way it should or there’s more we can add, tell us, because we are constantly iterating. We want to build real-world reports for sales people that really work,” he said.

Another important factor along the way has been support from HubSpot itself. MethodData is a certified partner of the CRM company, and has its tools available on the app marketplace. It’s an example of how entrepreneurship can take place within the community of an existing tool. Ultimately, MethodData’s tools add value as HubSpot looks to retain customers.

As it grows, Baltimore figures into the company’s plans.

“As a city the people have been extremely kind to us and we feel this is absolutely home,” said Walker, who moved here five years ago. Until the pandemic, the company had offices in Port Covington’s City Garage, and plans to take space there again once it has reopened. With hopes to grow a tech team, Walker said the company is also looking to hire software developers locally.

“Where at all possible I want to recruit locally,” he said.