Internal Comms & Meetings

How to run a monthly business review as Small RevOps Teams

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small RevOps Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your monthly business review shouldn't take two days to build, but it does. You're pulling HubSpot deal data into Sheets, pasting Apollo sequence stats into a slide deck you rebuilt from scratch last quarter, and reconciling why the CRO's pipeline number doesn't match what you pulled from Salesforce. The attribution story requires four tabs and an explanation nobody reads. You're two people supporting thirty reps, and half of November's MBR prep time is spent arguing with formulas instead of interpreting what the data actually says. By the time the deck is done, the pipeline snapshot in slide 6 is already stale.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Internal Comms & MeetingsFor Small RevOps Teams3 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A live pipeline and revenue view that pulls from HubSpot and Stripe so your MBR snapshot reflects the actual state of the business on the day you run it, not last Tuesday's export.

A presentation-ready MBR deck built from a natural-language description — covering open pipeline, won/lost breakdown, quota attainment, and ARR trajectory — without touching Google Slides until it's time to present.

A repeatable monthly workflow where the data connections are already wired and you're spending time on interpretation, not assembly.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

Sales Agent CRM Investor Reporting Runway Analysis

Data sources & config

Starch syncs your HubSpot data on a schedule — deals, contacts, owners, and pipeline stages — so every MBR query runs against current CRM state. Starch connects directly to Stripe for MRR and revenue metrics, and syncs your Plaid bank feed for expense and burn data. Apollo.io is connected via Starch's scheduled sync for sequence and outbound activity data. Salesforce and Pipedrive are reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries them live when your MBR app pulls pipeline.

Prompts to copy

Pull all HubSpot deals closed or updated in the last 30 days. Group by rep, show close rate, average deal size, and days-to-close. Flag any deal that slipped from last month's forecast.

Build me a monthly business review summary using our Stripe MRR data and HubSpot pipeline. Include: new ARR this month, pipeline coverage ratio, deals slipped vs. won, and a 3-sentence narrative on what drove the number.

Using our Stripe and Plaid data, show me current net burn, months of runway, and how this month's revenue compares to the prior 3-month average.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect HubSpot as a scheduled-sync provider. Starch syncs deals, contacts, companies, and owners on a recurring schedule so your MBR always reflects the current pipeline, not an export from last week.

2 Connect Stripe so Starch syncs your MRR, new ARR, churned ARR, and invoice data. This gives the revenue side of the MBR a live data source instead of a manually updated cell.

3 Connect Plaid so Starch syncs your bank transactions and categorized expenses. The Runway Analysis starter app uses this data to calculate net burn and months of runway — your CRO will ask about cash even in a pipeline review.

4 Connect Apollo.io via Starch's scheduled sync to pull sequence activity, open rates, and reply rates. This closes the attribution loop between outbound touches and the deals that showed up in HubSpot.

5 Open the Sales Agent CRM starter app and customize it for your MBR view. Describe the rep-level breakdown you want: 'Show me attainment vs. quota by rep, grouped by territory, with a flag if their pipeline coverage is below 3x.'

6 Type a natural-language prompt to generate your pipeline analysis: 'Pull all deals that were in stage 3 or later at the start of the month. Show me which ones closed, which slipped, and what the average slip reason was based on deal notes.' Starch queries HubSpot live and returns a structured result.

7 Use the Investor Reporting app to generate the revenue narrative section of your MBR. It pulls Stripe and Plaid data and writes a summary paragraph — you edit the tone and emphasis, not the data gathering.

8 Open Runway Analysis to pull burn and runway for the ops section of the MBR. This gives you a one-click answer when finance or the CRO asks how this month's spend tracked against plan.

9 Describe your full MBR deck to the Presentation Agent (currently in development — request beta access): 'A 12-slide monthly business review for March 2026. Slide 1: MRR and ARR summary. Slide 2: pipeline coverage by segment. Slide 3: rep attainment vs. quota. Slide 4: slipped deals and root causes. Slide 5: outbound activity from Apollo sequences. Slide 6: burn and runway.' Until Presentation Agent is live, export your Starch data surfaces to a doc and use them as the source of truth for your deck.

10 Save the pipeline analysis and revenue summary as a recurring Starch automation. Set it to run on the last business day of each month and Slack you a digest — so next month's MBR prep starts with a full data package waiting in your inbox instead of a blank Sheets tab.

11 Share the live Starch dashboard with your CRO as the authoritative pipeline view. When someone asks 'can you just pull me the Q1 attainment by rep,' the answer is a link, not a 30-minute task.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

March 2026 MBR — 30-rep org, two-person RevOps team

Sample numbers from a real run

New ARR (Stripe)	142,000
Churned ARR (Stripe)	18,500
Net New ARR	123,500
Open pipeline entering April (HubSpot)	890,000
Pipeline coverage ratio (vs. $400K Q2 target)	2.23
Deals slipped from March forecast	7
Apollo sequences sent (March)	3,200
Net burn (Plaid + Stripe)	194,000

In March, your Starch-connected HubSpot sync showed 34 deals closed — 27 won, 7 slipped. Starch flagged the 7 slipped deals automatically because they were in stage 4+ at month open and hadn't progressed; deal notes cited 'procurement delay' on 4 of them. Net new ARR came in at $123,500 against a $130,000 plan, a $6,500 miss you could explain by the time the 9am review started because the data was already assembled. Pipeline entering April sat at $890K against a $400K Q2 target — a 2.23x coverage ratio that looks healthy until Starch's attainment-by-rep view shows two of your enterprise reps carrying 60% of it. Apollo sequence data showed 3,200 touches in March with a 14% reply rate; the Starch attribution surface tied 9 of the 27 wins back to an outbound sequence, which is the number your CRO wanted and previously took you half a day to calculate. Net burn from Plaid came in at $194K — slightly above the $185K plan because of a mid-month AWS spike the AWS Cost Checker flagged separately. Total MBR prep time: 90 minutes, down from the 6 hours it took in February.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Net new ARR vs. plan (new ARR minus churned ARR, from Stripe)

Pipeline coverage ratio by segment (open pipeline / quarterly target, from HubSpot)

Rep attainment vs. quota, ranked (HubSpot deals closed by owner vs. assigned quota)

Outbound-sourced pipeline percentage (Apollo sequence attribution vs. total HubSpot pipeline)

Deals slipped from prior month forecast and stated slip reason

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

HubSpot native reporting + Google Slides

HubSpot's built-in reports cover pipeline and activity well, but you still manually copy numbers into Slides each month and rebuild the narrative from scratch — there's no layer that writes the story or combines CRM data with Stripe revenue and burn.

Salesforce + Tableau or Looker

Gives you deep pipeline analytics, but setup takes weeks, requires a BI person or consultant, and doesn't connect to Stripe, Plaid, or Apollo without custom data engineering — too heavy for a two-person RevOps team.

Sheets + manual exports from HubSpot and Stripe

Zero cost and full flexibility, but the 'two days to build the MBR' problem is exactly this — every month you're re-pulling exports, reconciling discrepancies, and rebuilding formulas when the CRO changes a quota field.

Clari or Gong Revenue Intelligence

Purpose-built for forecast accuracy and rep coaching, which is powerful if that's the core use case — but expensive for a small team and doesn't cover the burn/runway or attribution parts of the MBR that live outside the CRM.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — sales agent crm, investor reporting, runway analysis all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We use Salesforce, not HubSpot. Does this still work?

Yes. Salesforce is reachable from Starch's integration catalog of 3,000+ apps; the agent queries it live when your MBR app runs. HubSpot has a deeper scheduled-sync integration where Starch syncs data on a recurring schedule, but Salesforce pipeline data is fully usable for the same MBR workflows.

Will Starch write the narrative section of the MBR, or just pull the numbers?

Both. The Investor Reporting starter app pulls revenue data from Stripe and Plaid and generates a written summary with key trends and metrics. You can prompt Starch to write a specific section — 'write a 3-paragraph executive summary of March pipeline performance using this HubSpot data' — and it will draft it. You edit the emphasis and tone; Starch handles the data gathering and first draft.

We need historical pipeline data going back 18 months for trend analysis. Can Starch do that?

Starch is built for live data surfaces, not long-horizon data warehousing. HubSpot's scheduled sync gives you current and recent deal state; for deep historical snapshots going back 18 months, you'd want to keep those exports in your existing BI tool and use Starch for the monthly assembly and narrative layer on top of current data.

Are we talking about replacing HubSpot or Salesforce?

No. Starch syncs from your CRM — it doesn't replace it. Your reps keep logging activity in HubSpot or Salesforce exactly as they do today. Starch reads that data, combines it with Stripe, Apollo, and Plaid, and lets you build the views and automations that your CRM's native reporting can't produce on its own.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? We have a procurement question from our CRO.

Not yet — Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified today. If your organization requires SOC 2 compliance before connecting production CRM or financial data, that's worth knowing upfront. It's on the roadmap.

How long does it take to get the first MBR out of Starch?

If HubSpot and Stripe are your primary sources, you can have a working MBR data surface in the same session you connect them — the scheduled sync starts pulling immediately. Building the first custom view with your specific rep attainment breakdown and narrative prompt takes another 30 to 60 minutes. The second month takes about 10 minutes because the connections and prompts are already saved.