What Will My Data Look Like?

One of the most common questions we get during onboarding is:

“What will my messy CRM data actually look like inside HockeyStack?”

It’s a fair concern. You might have:

• Dozens of custom fields

• Inconsistent naming conventions

• Partial or fragmented data across tools

• Account/Lead Duplication issues

This documentation walks you through how HockeyStack ingests, organizes, and transforms all your sales and marketing touchpoints—from your CRM, ads, website, and more— into an action-based model, ready for granular analysis.

What’s an Action Based Model?

Traditional systems like Salesforce and Hubspot organize data around "objects" (like a "Lead" object or a "Deal" object).

This model was put in place at a time when the customer journey was less complex, and companies had less types of interactions with customers.

Today’s prospective customers, however, engage with companies across thousands of digital touchpoints.

Each interaction leaves behind a data trail, but trying to capture all of it in an object-based model quickly breaks down. Every touchpoint becomes its own object or an unwieldy combination of fields, making the object-based model bloated, rigid, and ultimately unmanageable.

To make sense of this, HockeyStack records every interaction as timestamped actions instead of objects.

This makes it very flexible to capture all sorts of customer touchpoints, and allows you to analyze every part of your funnel throughout the customer journey.

The Foundation: Actions and Touchpoints

To recap, at the core of HockeyStack is a model built around Actions and Touchpoints.

What Are Touchpoints?

Touchpoints are every interaction a user or company has with your brand across any channel. These could be:

• A website visit

• Clicking an ad

• Filling out a form

• Attending a webinar

• Offline event

How Touchpoints Are Captured

Actions come with Properties that describe the interaction—like:

• Channel

• Campaign

• Asset Type

• Page URL

• UTM parameters

These properties are key for analyzing performance and building attribution logic across your funnel.

HockeyStack allows you to define what constitutes a meaningful touchpoint and channel for your company. Watch the video at the end of this blog post to see how you can configure these definitions with properties and goals.

Measuring Business Impact: Goals & Funnel Stages

Once you’ve captured actions, it’s time to define outcomes with Goals.

What are Goals?

Goals define the outcomes you care about.

They could be:

• A form fill

• A lead becoming MQL

• A deal reaching Closed Won

You set up a goal by defining the conditions that mark that outcome as “complete.” HockeyStack then keeps track of how many times it’s been achieved, and by whom. This helps you measure progress, analyze your funnel stages, and ultimately understand if you’re meeting your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Funnel Stages = Goals with Business Context

Funnel Stages are sequential goals that mark progress through your pipeline. For example, common funnel stages we see are:

• MQL: form submission or lead scoring criteria met

• SQL: sales acceptance or opportunity creation

• Pipeline: deal created (with an associated value)

• Closed Won / Lost: deal outcome

Each stage should be distinct from one another to ensure accurate reporting.

Analyzing your Data with Breakdowns

If Goals are what you measure, Breakdowns are how you understand where those goals came from or what contributed to them. For example, you can look at your data segmented by Deal Type, Region, or Product. When you apply a breakdown, you're segmenting your goals (like MQLs, page views, or revenue) by a given property.

For example:

• Breaking down Page views by Page URL

• Breaking down MQLs by Channel

Reporting with HockeyStack

Your data doesn’t just sit in HockeyStack to be presented back to you. It becomes live, logic-powered data. To build powerful reports: Use Breakdowns (properties) to segment data about Touchpoints (actions) and measure their impact on Funnel Stages (goals).

• Actions capture every touchpoint

• Goals define the outcomes you care about

• Breakdowns let you analyze performance across any dimension

We ingest all your sales and marketing data (from your CRM, ads, website, events, and more) and merge it into a clean, timestamped model. That lets you connect the dots from a LinkedIn ad to a website visit to a deal in HubSpot, all in one place.

HockeyStack’s model gives you:

• Flexibility: Analyze any customer journey, regardless of tool or format

• Structure: Organize fragmented data into unified views

• Clarity: Measure what truly drives pipeline and revenue

You're not just cleaning up and displaying the same messy CRM data. You’re understanding what works, what doesn’t, and where to double down.

Learn what your data will look like in HockeyStack here: