We've just won HubSpot's H1 2026 Impact Award for Platform Excellence in EMEA, our 9th Impact Award overall and our second specifically in this category, for the work we did with RMS. Here's what the award recognises, and the project behind the win.
What an Impact Award actually recognises
HubSpot's Impact Awards are handed out twice a year across different categories. Platform Excellence specifically recognises how well an agency uses HubSpot as a complete platform to solve a genuinely complex customer problem, not just whether the numbers went up.
RMS Cloud: rebuilding brand, website, and HubSpot as one system
RMS Cloud is a property management system for hotels, resorts, and holiday parks, with over 40 years in the industry. Following its 2024 acquisition by private equity firm Advent Partners, new CMO Sandrine Zechbauer needed a repeatable, measurable demand engine, but the infrastructure to support it didn't exist. Two HubSpot portals had drifted apart over years, the website wasn't built to capture leads, and the brand hadn't kept pace with RMS's international ambitions.
We treated it as one programme, not three. HubSpot consolidation came first, unifying both portals before any brand or design work began. Brand and messaging followed, giving RMS a visual identity and its first documented tone of voice. The website came last, rebuilt on HubSpot Content Hub around buyer journeys rather than products. With clean, unified data, RMS could then properly deploy Breeze AI, including an assistant for CRM queries, an AI agent answering customer questions on the site, and automated record enrichment.
In her own words, here's how Sandrine Zechbauer, CMO at RMS, describes what the transformation has meant for the business.
The results:
- 38% pipeline growth in the first year post-launch
- Marketing-attributed pipeline that simply didn't exist before
- 10% lift in conversion rate despite an industry-wide traffic decline
- RMS Pay surpassing €1 billion in processed transactions since launch
"Now I'm 100% confident that I know what's going on. It's about having that pulse on the business - how are we tracking, do we have enough pipeline for this month, next month, next quarter? That was just impossible before. This has been transformational for us."
Sandrine Zechbauer, CMO at RMS
The takeaway
This is Blend's 9th HubSpot Impact Award, and our second win specifically for Platform Excellence, a category that doesn't hand out points for a good-looking website or a single strong metric. It rewards proof that brand, website, and CRM can be built as one connected system on a single platform, and that the system actually moves the needle commercially.
RMS is a clean example of why that matters. The consolidation work was the least visible part of the project and arguably the most important, because none of the brand work, the website performance, or the Breeze AI capability would have held together without it.
For us, it's also a marker of consistency. Nine Impact Awards across different categories and different clients isn't a one-off result, it's a track record of applying the same principles that achieve success.
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