Marketing-Sales Collaboration with HubSpot Drives Powerful Results
Summary
Patti Engineering, a control system integrator, was dissatisfied with their customer relationship management tool (CRM). By implementing a system that could track both marketing and sales activities, Patti Engineering gained full visibility into the customer lifecycle, including insight into ROI on marketing activities.
Problem
Patti Engineering had been using Microsoft Dynamics as their CRM for years. While the software had almost infinite customization capabilities, it was clunky to use and unintuitive resulting in frustration and lack of adoption. In fact, most data was input by one or two people in the company, and the sales team passed the information through that person. Therefore, the data was not updated in real time, and was not being used to make decisions or plan sales activities.
In addition, marketing had no visibility into the sales pipeline through the CRM and all data had to be exchanged manually through phone calls or emails.
Solution
Rivergate Marketing worked very closely with Patti Engineering’s sales and operations teams to customize the HubSpot Marketing Pro and Sales Pro to meet their needs. The legacy data from MS Dynamics was cleaned up and imported to HubSpot. Because Rivergate Marketing understands Patti Engineering’s business from the inside out, we were able to tailor the team’s HubSpot training and recommend new features to address their particular pain points. We created dashboards and views to match and enhance the reporting that they used to do manually. Follow up tasks are now automatically assigned, so new contacts do not fall through the cracks.
Because the data from sales and marketing are now updated continuously, all teams, including engineers working on projects, can see more accurate information, eliminating previously siloed activities for better decision making. For example, the sales team can look at a contact record before a meeting and see what marketing information that contact has viewed or downloaded. The marketing team can use sales information such as target accounts or previous sales to segment lists and send out targeted emails. With HubSpot’s centralized system, the engineering team now has easy access to contact information and can see what conversations have taken place so they have context for their conversations with clients.
A key feature, HubSpot offers detailed data about the success of particular marketing activities. We can now draw a line from content downloaded or emails opened to project closed. We can tell which activities have generated the most new contacts, website sessions, downloads, and more, which informs our decisions on creating future content. For example, content involving the client’s partnerships has been so successful that we have expanded the initiative to capitalize on its popularity by creating additional related worksheets, articles, videos, and more.
Results
ROI
As with all marketing efforts, it can be difficult to impossible to calculate an exact ROI because customers make decisions based on many interactions with your content and company. However, we are now able to glean data, such as:
- ‘Content Piece A’ influenced 62% of revenue over the next 12 months
- 27% of new contacts came from downloading ‘Content Piece B’
Customer Lifecycle Visibility
Access to MS Dynamics was limited by licenses and difficult user experience. Only 2-3 people had access at all. Now, 32 members of the team have accounts with 14 logging in at least weekly. Sales, marketing, and engineering all have visibility into the customer lifecycle.
Time Saved
Automatic reminders, automatic reports, integration into Outlook, and on-demand data save the time and effort of searching for information manually. Timely information has improved decision making throughout the sales cycle.
