How HubSpot implementation helped a consulting company automate 30% of their business development team’s workflows and increase MQL-to-Deal conversion by 20%.
Industry:
Fintech
No matter how hard-working and talented your business development team is, their efforts won’t yield the desired results if the information about leads and clients is stored across multiple spreadsheets or worse, jotted down on paper.
As any business grows, it becomes harder to keep track of all the data. Lack of visibility across sales and marketing processes brings mayhem to the management of these activities and has a negative impact on a company’s performance.
That’s exactly what happened to our client, a US consulting firm from Chicago that provides professional accounting services and what made them look for a technological remedy.
It used to be difficult for the client to navigate through tons of disparate data within their marketing and sales department, let alone use it for the company’s benefit. To do so, they needed a well-honed, calibrated CRM that would make the sales process transparent and traceable.
Prior to engaging with *instinctools, the company had been utilizing Zoho CRM, which focused solely on lead generation, leaving other aspects of the sales funnel unaddressed.
Meanwhile, the marketing department used the standard MS Office 365 package.
All these circumstances hindered the development and growth of the client’s business.
Once the problem was identified, the client turned to *instinctools, a CRM consulting and implementation company, for a solution. As per our standard practice, we started with a deep dive into the client’s business processes to find a solution that can meet the customer’s requirements.
One of the client’s underlying requirements was to choose a CRM system that could grow with the company while not draining its budget.
The customization of the client’s existing CRM — Zoho — was not an on-the-table option. During the discussion of the system requirements, it became clear that fine-tuning Zoho couldn’t fully cover the client’s needs. That’s why, it was decided to implement a new, more powerful CRM.
For organizations of our client’s scale, Salesforce is usually a good fit. But despite the popularity of the platform, not every company can afford it. For our client, the price of implementing Salesforce didn’t make sense – the license fee was too high, considering that the client didn’t need all the platform’s features. With this in mind, we shifted to searching for more budget-friendly options.
Given the client’s company size, its business processes, and budget, HubSpot looked like an excellent choice. This platform provides all the necessary functionality while costing several times less than Salesforce.
The client strongly favored HubSpot CRM implementation after we presented its capabilities:
Next, we decided on the team’s composition, which included a project manager, business analyst, designer, and two developers. The project also required the involvement of our business consultant, who was engaged in optimizing the client’s business processes.
Adopting CRM for the marketing department is a standard initial step in such projects, so we also started with the HubSpot Marketing Hub implementation.
Our web developers integrated all the lead generation forms and campaigns from the client’s website into HubSpot. Next, they worked with a designer to customize and connect the forms to the new CRM.
Now all requests coming from the website go straight to the CRM, so their processing is faster.
Among the challenges encountered during the HubSpot Marketing Hub implementation, the data migration from numerous Excel spreadsheets is the most noteworthy. This step was also relevant for the next phase of the HubSpot implementation process, so we’ll come back to some of the issues we’ve faced in detail later.
Although the client had been using another CRM for years, a considerable portion of the client’s mundane and repetitive operations continued to be handled manually, draining the sales representatives’ time.
We analyzed the client’s processes and uncovered that at least 30% of them can be optimized through automation, streamlining the sales department’s work. To capitalize on this potential, we automated lead scoring and email distribution as well as set up automatic reminders for sales managers to follow up with leads through the appropriate channel.
When talking about how to implement HubSpot, we can’t but mention data migration. Its accuracy is paramount, as even minor errors can impede the creation of reliable analytics, compromising the system’s effectiveness in the long run. Given the importance of data migration, this stage demands meticulous planning and execution to ensure a smooth transition to the new CRM system.
During this HubSpot implementation project, we migrated over 700,000 contacts and 300,000 campaigns from the legacy systems to HubSpot. The process took six weeks to complete.
Before the data migration itself, we encountered the challenge of establishing a shared understanding of the data requirements, as marketing, sales, and lead generation teams lacked a unified source of truth, causing discrepancies in their respective data. As the key HubSpot implementation consultant, our business analyst took the lead in defining common criteria for migrating data from the spreadsheets and the old system to the new CRM.
We assembled a dedicated team of client employees who were most enthusiastic about implementing HubSpot. This team served as the system’s beta testers in the initial stages and later played a crucial role in promoting the solution within the business development team. This collaborative approach not only allowed us to gain valuable feedback on the system’s features and functionality but also helped mitigate any potential resistance to change within the company.
The HubSpot implementation took six months, along with data migration and organizational enablement. The CRM started working at its full capacity only after the data migration was completed.
HubSpot has become a unified tool that works at all sales funnel stages, from dealing with leads generated through website forms to cross-selling and upselling to the existing customers. Thanks to HubSpot implementation, our client got not only end-to-end analytics but also the ability to interact with contacts, deals, and companies in various ways throughout the funnel. MDRs, SDRs, and sales managers can now send emails, make calls, transfer prospects from one sales rep to another, schedule meetings, and register all these changes in one place.
HubSpot is mobile-friendly and available to client team members on any device. So even if sales managers, marketers, and lead generation team members are out of office, they still have full access to the CRM functionality on their phones.
HubSpot allows highly flexible configuration at the no-code level. For instance, the client doesn’t need to involve developers to configure access rights. The skills of a system administrator trained under our guidance are sufficient to cover these tasks.
Incorporating CRM software can prove highly advantageous for B2C and B2B companies across a diverse range of industries. In fact, in today’s business landscape, it has become a prerequisite for efficient customer management, rather than a whim.
Both B2C and B2B organizations need to gather, organize, and analyze mind-boggling volumes of data to enhance interactions with their clients and improve customer experience. With a proper CRM solution in place, you can streamline your workflows and capture lead-specific information at every available touchpoint across multiple channels to nurture more high-quality leads.
For growing mid-sized companies, HubSpot is one of the most profitable and advantageous options due to its functionality, scalability, and cost-effectiveness.
