As the BFCM season approaches, the pressure is constant. The only variable is the kind of business you are. During BFCM preparation for small businesses, the best thing to do is ‘use your resources better’ and keep a self-curated BFCM Sale checklist.
Note that! The success with Black Friday-Cyber Monday isn’t built on last-minute discounts or flashy banners. It’s built on your unique proposition and how ready your systems are to handle the surge when it arrives. In a nutshell, your story!
“Every Small Business” may vary in size, functions, and offerings. But we intend to narrow down the approach to BFCM readiness with this BFCM sale checklist, including only the “MUST-DOs”.
Thus, here’s your practical 10-step BFCM sale checklist that you carry along when building a BFCM strategy around “your customers”.
BFCM Readiness for Small Business
This Black Friday Cyber Monday checklist attends to one of those rare windows when small businesses can take on their biggest competitors. Customers are actively looking for deals, browsing more than usual, and ready to buy fast.
For businesses, BFCM pre-up isn’t just running offers; it’s more about operational readiness.
While customers arrive with clear intent, businesses need the same level of clarity about their systems, processes, and capacity. So, knowing your standing is a key element during BFCM preparation for small businesses.
Every small business operates differently. Yet, when you look closely, most successful BFCM readiness tends to follow a familiar pattern. The BFCM sale checklist, likely:
- Begins with organised customer data.
- Revolves around your tools strategy that works predictably under pressure.
- Includes a command center to administer, deploy, and make decisions quickly.
So, let’s begin with understanding your business and identifying your gaps. After this, we can find your to-dos for BFCM readiness.
If You’re a Startup or Solo Founder
Without a dedicated team, the BFCM festive season may feel overwhelming, yet oddly exciting.
When volume spikes, the cracks show up fast. While running your marketing campaigns and responding to prospects, you’re also fixing bugs, managing inventory and payments, and checking analytics. Often on your own.
In moments like this, you don’t need more hustle. You need simpler systems and fewer touchpoints that demand constant manual attention and effort.
If You Run a B2C or eCommerce Business
As eComms, BFCM feels like controlled chaos. You know the traffic will come, yet you feel under-prepared, owing to the variety of offerings and the versatility of messaging it involves.
On top of this, traffic surges, abandoned carts multiply, coupon codes circulate faster than products, and inventory feels like a moving target. Even small frictions like slow checkouts, mismatched prices, or broken discount coupons cost real revenue.
Therefore, more traffic is inevitable. So, one item is definitely off your Black Friday Cyber Monday checklist. As per the BFCM checklist for eCommerce, what you really need is better flow, tighter control, and clearer visibility across your systems.
If You’re in B2B
BFCM preparation for small businesses and B2B has a slightly different version, which isn’t about impulse purchases. It’s about momentum!
More demo requests, more pricing conversations, more internal approvals on your buyer’s side. The risk isn’t low intent or engagement. It’s delay, confusion, and missed follow-ups.
What B2B teams like yours actually need is structured follow-ups, clean lead handling, and smoother handoffs across teams. Additionally, AI Copilot and agentic automation are the prime arrangements you must opt for.
BFCM Sale Checklist for System Readiness
All the above examples showcase a similar narrative: a command center. This unified whole that not only combines your data, tools & operations, but also assists you every step of the way.
In the age of AI and fierce competition, that’s the core component you must have.
Here, HubSpot proves to be a solid contender. The HubSpot CRM brings you the right mix of CX (customer experience), agentic automation, marketing & sales, data management & analytics, and everything that we will talk about in this Black Friday Cyber Monday checklist.
While discussing the BFCM sale checklist, we will explore how HubSpot aligns with the must-dos of BFCM-readiness along the way.
1. Start With Clean, Reliable Data
Before you jump into campaigns, fix the basics. It starts with fool-proofing your data across your system. That’s your first step of Black Friday Cyber Monday checklist.
Good data = better targeting and higher conversions.
What you need is clean and complete data that you’re confident enough to work with. The data management and readiness essentials include syncing, structuring, mapping, deduplication, lists & properties, and even proactive enrichment across all your tools and platforms.
These are all possible inside a customer data management tool such as HubSpot CRM. In its Fall Spotlight update, HubSpot recently introduced the Data Hub. It is a dedicated branch offering advanced data management capabilities like Data Studio and Data Agent. So, add that to your Black Friday Cyber Monday checklist.
2. Sync All Your Platforms Before the Rush
This step saves your BFCM strategy from falling apart. The idea is to achieve consistency across all your platforms and a unified destination for your refined data.
Make HubSpot your command center to oversee all the actions across marketing, sales, customer service, and all customer touchpoints.
One clean HubSpot: the source of truth for everything.
To achieve this, deploy a free iPaaS tool (such as MakeWebBetter Connect) to keep your store, CRM, marketing tools & assets, and automation in synergy. This way, your platform and tools communicate with each other, creating a seamless experience for your customers and promising a frictionless customer journey.
MakeWebBetter Connect also puts you at an advantage for HubSpot. The HubSpot iPaaS solution offers deep CRM logic, Artificial Intelligence, hundreds of cross-platform integrations (including AI tools), prebuilt integration apps, agentic workflow automation, and everything that hands you a systematic and centralized ecosystem of tools.
All About MakeWebBetter Connect
Explore how MakeWebBetter Connect aligns with your needs to eliminate data silos, unify your tech stack, and automate without coding.
3. Build Segments That Reflect Real Buying Behavior
Let’s not send the same offer to everyone.
Build your BFCM strategy separately for targeting your existing contacts, new prospects, high-spenders, loyal customers, and sleeping contacts. Group these contacts by creating properties and key lists in HubSpot, such as repeat buyers, discount hunters, high-intent browsers, and dormant customers.
For example, these segments should have a well-defined BFCM strategy for email campaigns, coupon logic, and retargeting automation workflows.
4. Synergize Your Marketing
Once you have integrated your marketing tools and your marketing channels (social media), the multifaceted holiday marketing campaigns come into synergy. In addition to this, you and your copilot can work with the integrated data to accomplish omnichannel marketing for your BFCM marketing campaigns.
Plan & plot everything in advance. From teasers, early access, reminders, & countdowns to peak-time campaigns, discounts, and sale items, and down to follow-ups & retargetting.
HubSpot, in itself, is a marketing platform with a newly launched ‘Marketing Studio’. You must make the most of it!
Utilize the campaign builder tool alongside scheduling + segmentation, combined with managing your marketing assets such as emails, sequences, ads, forms, chatflows, landing pages, and everything. This surely would ensure that your messaging hits the right people at the right time.
5. Prepare Your Website for High-Intent Traffic
Next in the Black Friday Cyber Monday checklist is optimizing your website! Maximize the efficiency of your product pages, landing pages, & checkout page, and make sure you highlight your BFCM deals clearly.
HubSpot CMS offers a pretty extensive suite of website-building components that can even get a B&M started in a jiffy.
It has a drag-and-drop editor to build and update pages without developer assistance. Additionally, it has powerful tools for developers, including serverless functions, local development, and flexible theme creation.
Plus, you can leverage HubSpot’s Global CDN for fast loading under peak traffic conditions. Reach out to us if you need any BFCM optimization tips for your website.
6. Don’t Leave the AI Out
Let the AI do its magic and go for a seamless experience where everything is well taken care of.
MakeWebBetter Connect empowers you to run intelligent data automation: from context-aware decisions to real-time syncing & updation, lead intent analysis, product recommendations, and agentic logic in your automation flows.
On the other hand, HubSpot Smart CRM has Breeze AI that can power your entire BFCM strategy. Breeze Assistant is your sidekick, a copilot that can draft emails, summarize calls/tickets, streamline workflows, and whatnot. Plus, you get about 20+ HubSpot Agents that help you in various departments.
HubSpot + AI Implementation
Consult with our team of seasoned HubSpot experts for a full-scale HubSpot implementation with AI.
7. Automate Your Coupons
This is a must-have in your BFCM checklist for eCommerce. Manually generating coupons during BFCM could be overwhelming and a chaos in many ways. Plus, you can’t leave out personalization when couponing.
This is why you must look for a mechanism that lets you combine all that, automate, and manage them from your command center, ‘HubSpot’. While HubSpot has a built-in couponing tool, there are certain limitations, and it does not support complex discount logic.
Therefore, you need a dynamic coupon code generator. This indicates Automated Coupons by MakeWebBetter, which lets you generate coupons based on advanced coupon rules. Based on these rules, the unique codes are auto-created and can be distributed through HubSpot automated workflows. Neat, right?
8. Make Signups & Payments Effortless
Complete the full circle! Once you make sure your core is strong through and through, then it’s time for the last step, ‘the payment’. Cashing your fully nurtured lead can sometimes be shockingly disappointing. You need to be fully prepared. That’s one of the key BFCM optimization tips.
This may happen because of the loopholes in your lead closure process (in eCommerce, your checkout page). Therefore, there are a few essentials for the checkout page that you must have for your BFCM readiness.
- Guest Checkout: Allow purchases without mandatory account creation to reduce friction.
- Mobile Optimization: Ensure perfect usability on smartphones, where most traffic originates.
- Flexible Payments: Offer multiple options to meet customer preferences.
- Full Transparency: Display all tax and charges upfront; no hidden fees.
- Trust Seals: Clearly show security badges (SSL, payment processor logos) to build confidence.
- Form Simplicity: Minimize required fields and utilize address auto-fill features.
MakeWebBetter’s FormPay has all that! Plus, it gives you advanced payment settings like discount coupons, tax calculation, offline payments, partial payments, subscription management, and more. Apart from HubSpot payment integration, it also offers multiple methods & gateway integration with Stripe, RazorPay, PayU, PayPal, Adyen, Amazon Pay, Authorize.net, Klarna, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and any gateway of your choice.
So, it’s great for collecting one-off payments, selling subscriptions, and even accepting charity in your BFCM campaign, with a one-time fee (one-week free trial). Trust it when working with your BFCM checklist for eCommerce.
9. Test and Monitor Everything in Real Time
Don’t get stuck on the same strategy if it isn’t working. Track, monitor, analyze, and iterate. You may need some BFCM optimization tips. You build them on your own.
Use HubSpot dashboards to track your campaign performance, set KPIs, gather AI insights, and modify your campaigns (use AI-powered HubSpot Marketing Studio for campaign building).
Below is an example of a Lead Generation reporting dashboard. You can set multiple dashboards in your HubSpot analytics, sales workspace, marketing dashboard, and even create custom dashboards for your teams.
On top of this, test your entire flow end-to-end and run through the customer journey yourself.
- Are forms working?
- Are payments smooth?
- Are marketing campaigns firing?
- Are your coupons working?
- Does everything reflect correctly in HubSpot CRM?
These small issues if caught early, can save you big conversion drops. Fix these loopholes and ensure your BFCM readiness with a foolproof BFCM strategy.
Let’s Redefine Your BFCM Sale?
Deploy this BFCM checklist as per your business logic, and feel free to reach out if you need any help.
Implementing BFCM Sale Checklist
A BFCM sale checklist is incomplete without layering your business logic. Build your own BFCM sale checklist by applying these list items as a frame of reference.
If you want a ready-to-run BFCM setup inside HubSpot or other BFCM optimization tips. Reach out to us, tell us your business type, and we’ll customize this checklist into an actionable plan.
For now, what we can derive from this BFCM Sale checklist is that the strong and intelligent systems are your real growth lever during this Black Friday and Cyber Monday season. Happy selling!