Back to customersAt a glance
- Live from day one: no implementation project, contacts pre-loaded by the Dreamhub team
- 3 ICPs, each with its own qualification criteria auto-populated from live sales calls
- Near-instant rep onboarding — new hires focus on pipeline, not CRM overhead
- 0 specialist CRM-admin skills required — dashboards and reports ready out of the box
- ~30 minutes per week: the team's entire ongoing CRM touchpoint
“The real moment is realizing that no one ever wants to go back to a traditional CRM.”
Joshua Oliver, CEO, DutyDeclared
About DutyDeclared
DutyDeclared is an AI-powered customs declaration platform built to make cross-border trade faster, simpler, and error-free. Founded in 2025 and based in London, the platform turns invoices, packing lists, and transport documents into structured declarations — handling HS classification, duty and VAT calculation, and direct submission to HMRC's CDS — for freight forwarders, customs brokers, importers, exporters, and enterprise trade teams. The company has already earned HMRC recognition and a Tolley's Taxation Award for the most innovative use of technology, and officially launched at Multimodal 2026.
The challenge
DutyDeclared came out of build mode with a product and a pull to start selling in earnest — and no revenue infrastructure to sell with. Sales and revenue operations ran entirely on manual spreadsheets: prospect details, functional gaps customers raised, dependencies to track, all typed in by hand, none of it connected to what was actually said in customer conversations.
The team needed somewhere to hold target prospects across three distinct ICPs, apply the qualification criteria from their sales methodology, progress deals through stages, and roll everything up into a weighted forecast. The spreadsheets could not do any of that — and as CEO Joshua Oliver put it, “as our pipeline grows, that admin overhead becomes a poor use of time.”
Why Dreamhub
As a tech company selling into the enterprise, DutyDeclared never questioned whether it needed a CRM. What felt wrong was the mismatch: a company built on eliminating manual work through AI, deploying a traditional vendor that still leans on manual data entry and hand-built reports. “That's exactly the kind of overhead you'd expect to have been solved by now,” Joshua said. Dreamhub lined up with the motion and the DNA DutyDeclared is building its sales organization around.
The main alternative the team evaluated was HubSpot. Two things pushed them away: the price point was very high for a company at their stage, and even at that price they would still be doing heavy pre-configuration — building dashboards, setting up reports, and manually capturing what happened on each call. Dreamhub was the opposite. It captures the actual conversations across DutyDeclared's sales channels and feeds them straight into the system, and it came configured around the MEDDIC and Challenger methodology unique to how DutyDeclared sells — with dashboards ready out of the box. Price and that AI-first, out-of-the-box model were the deciding factors.
The rollout
Because DutyDeclared was moving off spreadsheets rather than another CRM, there was no parallel migration to manage — the team was effectively up and running from day one. Joshua and his Commercial Director started as the first two users and had access almost instantly. The Dreamhub team even loaded DutyDeclared's contacts into the People tab, so the list came pre-populated with the core data they wanted.
The ongoing relationship has stayed just as light: a weekly 30-minute check-in with their customer success manager, plus a direct line to Dreamhub's executive team. Feedback gets genuinely listened to — product enhancements DutyDeclared requested were actioned and shipped remarkably quickly.
How DutyDeclared uses Dreamhub
The most transformative piece has been qualification. DutyDeclared defined the qualification criteria specific to each of its three ICPs and its selling motion, and Dreamhub actively listens for those questions on every call, auto-populating the answers. Reps walk into qualification calls with a clear, consistent set of things to uncover, and leadership gets an honest, uniform view of what was actually said with every customer — nothing slips through the net.
The intelligence follows the team into their workflow. After each call, everyone gets a summary and prompts through Slack with specific follow-up tasks already assigned, so follow-up is direct and deals keep moving. Dashboards and reports are segmented by tier and leadership viewing rights out of the box — views that on other systems would each need to be configured by hand by someone with specialist CRM-admin skills DutyDeclared never had to hire for.
Onboarding new reps is close to instant. Reps who have used other systems have found Dreamhub extremely intuitive, so ramp time is minimal and new hires focus straight away on generating pipeline and closing deals rather than CRM overhead.
The results
The biggest shifts have been in pipeline visibility and forecast accuracy: DutyDeclared now has a weighted pipeline it can actually trust, built on data captured directly from customer conversations rather than typed in after the fact.
The single largest change is the sheer reduction in time spent on CRM admin. Keying in call notes — monotonous and hugely time-consuming — is now fully automated, and nothing a customer says gets missed. Everything is tied to the sales criteria in DutyDeclared's playbook, giving the team a single source of truth for every customer engagement. As the team scales, that translates into real added capacity per rep.
For Joshua, the proof is behavioral: “You go about your day — calls, customer conversations — with little to no need to manually record notes or information. It all flows automatically into Dreamhub, and nothing gets missed.”
In their words
“This is the new way to think about CRM if you're serious about being an AI-first, efficient organization.”
Joshua Oliver, CEO, DutyDeclared
Start where DutyDeclared did
Like DutyDeclared, AI-first B2B software teams are running their sales motion on Dreamhub — live in days, with no admin tax. Book a demo to see what your sales motion looks like on a CRM built for it.