Case Study: Building a Custom GTM Engine for Cielo Aviation

Designing a scalable revenue operating system for a €9M private charter broker

Putting the GTM system in place for an aircraft charter business in 2026, long-term results to follow.

Overview

Cielo Aviation is a private charter broker operating across Europe, North America and the Middle East, with average bookings between €9–12k per charter and annual revenue of €8–9M.

The business was founder-led, inbound and referral-driven, with strong UHNW relationships but limited operational infrastructure.

What they didn’t need was “more leads.”

They needed:

Faster quoting
Scalable booking infrastructure
Corporate lifecycle acquisition
Revenue visibility
Forecasting discipline
Reduced founder dependency

We designed and deployed a fully integrated GTM engine to support the next phase of scale.

This was not a CRM implementation.

It was a vertical revenue architecture build.

The Challenge

Cielo had traction, reputation, and revenue
— but the infrastructure behind it was fragile.

Key issues:

Manual quoting solutions via Dropbox, PandaDoc, Qwilr and HubSpot templates
Custom-built CRM that lacked reporting and forecasting capability
Shared spreadsheets for revenue tracking
No lifecycle marketing for corporate retention
Thin SEO blog content with no programmatic structure
Founder handling overnight quotes due to mobile friction
Limited pipeline visibility across a five-person sales/service team

The business works. It just didn’t scale cleanly.

FireShot Capture 454 - Cielo Quote 302550353131 - [app-eu1.hubspot.com]

The Strategic Objective

Move from:

Founder-led, reactive, referral-driven growth

To:

A structured, measurable, scalable GTM engine with automation, visibility, and international expansion capability.

The Build: A Full GTM Engine

1. Custom Booking Infrastructure Inside HubSpot

We built a private booking application directly inside HubSpot using custom objects.

The system captures:

Travel requirements
Personal and VIP requests
Aircraft specifications
Staff and onboard needs
Distance calculations using lat/long airport data
Aircraft size logic and pricing rules

Pricing is calculated using:

Aircraft class
KM between airports
Custom routing logic

Quotes are issued via the industry-standard reservation platform and automatically CC’d into HubSpot, attaching PDFs to the deal record and maintaining full pipeline tracking.

The result:

Faster quote turnaround
Centralised deal intelligence
Structured deal stages
Clear visibility across the revenue pipeline

2. Service Hub + Deal Flow Automation

Booking forms now:

Auto-create deals
Assign team ownership
Trigger workflows
Move through pipeline stages as aircraft, ground transport and VIP requests are confirmed

This replaced:

Shared spreadsheets
Manual tracking
Founder-led knowledge

Administrative tracking and reporting effort is projected to reduce by ~40%.

Financial forecasting is now structured and measurable.

Insights will now inform marketing decisions.

3. HubSpot CMS Migration + Dual Language Build

We migrated the legacy custom CMS to HubSpot CMS.

Delivered:

Fully integrated booking form to deal flow
Dual-language website (English / Italian, expanding)
Structured corporate messaging
Mobile-optimised experience

This eliminated the friction that previously required laptop-based quoting and allowed mobile responsiveness across global travel clients.

4. Programmatic SEO Engine (HUBDB)

We deployed a fully customised programmatic SEO system using HUBDB.

Launched:

100+ global destination landing pages
Structured aircraft-type pages (small, medium, large jets, helicopters)
Route-based pages
Dynamic content generation via structured data input

Markets covered:

Mainland Europe
North America
Middle East / Dubai
Island and luxury holiday destinations

Admins can input new destinations and generate pages automatically.

This transformed static blog SEO into scalable high-intent infrastructure.

5. AI Integration

AI agents were introduced to:

Support content creation
Assist sales qualification
Augment customer success workflows

This enabled expansion without headcount growth.

The founder remains involved in UHNW accounts but is no longer required to manage process infrastructure manually.

Operational Impact

While full revenue impact will be measured across 2026, the immediate transformation includes:

Structured forecasting capability
Faster deal-to-quote cycle
Clear pipeline visibility
Reduced founder bottleneck
Improved mobile responsiveness
Corporate acquisition readiness
AI-enabled scalability

The system now supports:

€8–9M annual revenue or more
With infrastructure designed for aggressive corporate expansion.

What Makes This Different

This was not:

A HubSpot setup
A website redesign
A RevOps optimisation

This was:

A vertically designed GTM engine for a private aviation broker.

Custom applications.
3rd-party reservation integration.
Programmatic SEO.
Deal automation.
Lifecycle structure.
AI enablement.

All architected as one revenue system.

Strategic Outcome

Cielo now operates with:

A scalable booking infrastructure
Structured revenue reporting
Forecasting discipline
Mobile-first quoting
Corporate lifecycle capability
International SEO expansion

Founder-led growth is now supported by engineered revenue architecture.