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More than just a customer relationship management and marketing automation tool, the HubSpot platform helps boost collaboration between sales and marketing teams. In our latest webinar, we spoke with 3 HubSpot user companies to find out how the platform helps them on a daily basis and how its use has become essential to achieving their marketing and sales goals.
What are the best practices of the HubSpot platform? How do you know if HubSpot is right for you? Ian Marck, Head of Growth and Marketing at EasyMovie, Max Trudel Vice President Sales and Operations at Evolia & Alexandre Gauthier, Co-Founder & CEO at The Croo have gathered to answer our questions.
HubSpot is now coveted by many companies who point to the ease of deploying Inbound Marketing strategies and the gain in efficiency. The result? An ideal alignment of sales and marketing and new customer acquisitions. Before going further, we want to tell you a little more about the 3 companies we interviewed.
Croo Talk is a cloud-based telecommunications platform that helps tens of thousands of users optimize their customer communications in 10 countries. Alexandre's mantra: Create the first telecom company truly loved by its customers!
Ian Marck is a Full Stack Marketer with over 10 years of international experience and success in start-ups, ecommerce, agencies, SaaS and high-tech. He is currently working at EasyMovie.
Max Trudel is in charge of operations and customer relations at Evolia a company offering time and attendance software since 2016.
What was the trigger that made you want to implement a CRM (and marketing) platform like HubSpot in your organization?
Max : Launch and develop the business! As soon as we started making sales, we implemented CRM to get off on the right foot. HubSpot for Startups helped us a lot because we received a 90% discount for startups.
Alexandre: We had just lost our only salesperson and I had to take over this role. We were using a competitor's CRM and were looking for efficiencies and with Google integrations and automation, it became more interesting with HubSpot.
Ian: I combined HubSpot with another CRM. Our RevOps (Revenue Operations) department was responsible for the technical stack. The experience was not optimal before we turned to HubSpot. HubSpot allows us to integrate all the tools in one place with one process.
How does the HubSpot CRM platform allow you to gain efficiency in sales and marketing?
Alexandre: Both the platform and its ecosystem, and the principles of Inbound Marketing. We made new hires to facilitate the adoption of this platform and use the tool to its full potential to save time.
Ian: Aligning prospects and sales reps. We synchronize everyone's calendars with the CRM and the website. Having resources in Europe and the US, automation was more than required.
Max: Having a variety of tools and integrations was really beneficial for us: the online appointment scheduling feature, integration with Chrome and Gmail, Outlook and others.
How does marketing automation contribute to the profitability of your marketing and sales teams?
Ian: It's very important to define the automation we need, everything is possible but not necessarily necessary. Mapping out the integration of tools like Zoom or LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a good way to make sure you are in sync. The same goes for prospecting tools. Ensuring that data quality is maintained is crucial.
Alexandre: At Croo Talk, we organize tradeshows. Having the list of participants, creating marketing lists and integrating them into lead nurturing sequences makes it possible to send thousands of emails in just one week. Our clientele is mostly insurance companies. We are able to stop all email solicitations when an appointment is created and cover all our agendas with this dynamic.
Max: We have to make sure that every prospect is taken care of. Thanks to automation, we avoid losing opportunities or being slow to follow up on incoming requests.
How does HubSpot help you ensure better alignment and adoption rates among sales and marketing teams?
Max: Vendors don't need to document everything manually. Opportunities can evolve on their own, from mobile, desktop and the app. The reports available allow us to access everything very quickly.
Ian: HubSpot's mobile app is a second wind for us. We get an instant overview. A salesperson can send and receive emails, take a call or video conference. The time it takes to take over has been reduced and everyone appreciates the tool because it simplifies the work and limits forgetfulness.
If you had the power to add features to existing modules, what would they be?
Max: The lead source tracking could be improved. The support module doesn't have a tagging function which is not ideal for us.
Ian: I would say the data visualization. If we want to add more complexity to the analysis, we need to extract the data from HubSpot. A potential integration with Data Studio (now known as Looker Studio) or Microsoft Power BI would allow for optimal visualization.
How does better segmentation of your contacts allow you to be more efficient?
Ian: Recently we developed an Account Based Marketing (ABM) strategy. We've been able to integrate psychographics, demographics, lead scoring and personalized properties without having to ask people for information such as country, since the tool taps into the IP address to get the answer.
Max: We segment by source and industry, then assign the lead to the right person directly to make sure we follow up within minutes.
Is it possible to integrate an ERP?
Ian: HubSpot is very smart at the CRM level. To integrate ERP software, it's important to define what data needs to be synchronized. It is possible to go step by step and gradually, we manage to accomplish everything. The use of APIs allows us to connect everything, several connectors exist (Zapier, Skyvia) and we can also develop our own with the help of developers.
How can HubSpot help determine that a prospect is ready to be assigned to a sales rep?
Max: We can better plan departmental budgets, give investors a picture of our performance, do better follow-ups and offer adequate support. Track usage volume, end of trial periods and much more.
Ian: Our case is quite atypical, as we have a bilingual and international website. I'm taming the marketing opportunity to segment what needs to be in lead nurturing and what needs to go to sales or support. Requests go through HubSpot and a variety of triggers are put in place to ensure that contacts are connected to the right teams.
How can HubSpot benefit the entire company, not just the marketing and sales teams? And how does HubSpot simplify measuring your ROI?
Alexandre: The speed of adoption. From the very first actions, we see the gains in efficiency. Since we work in B2B, automating task reminders and sequences allows the team to perform well.
Max: Centralizing all the tools on a single platform allows for significant savings.
How do you manage to improve your sales forecasts with the tool?
Ian: When you understand your digital journey, you can easily map out initiatives to get the big picture. Before we adopted HubSpot, we were losing a lot of opportunities, leads that went from hot to cold. That's not the case at all now.
Max: The big advantage is that we have both a global view and a granular view of our sales performance.
Alexandre: When the sales pipeline is well structured, it is possible to anticipate the slow periods and the periods of increased sales activity.
What are the weaknesses of the HubSpot platform?
Max: The rules of the chat module are still a bit limited. That being said, the other alternatives are much more expensive. The test environments are a bit limited for data import in the Pro version unlike the Enterprise version.
Alexandre: Some features are exclusive to the Enterprise version. Customizing certain integrations can be costly and difficult for smaller companies. What is offered as standard is still excellent.
If you had to go through the implementation process again, what would you do differently?
Ian: Synchronization between what we want to import and what we don't want to import; in terms of fields, lists, contacts and databases in particular. Alexandre: Better planning our HubSpot integration and learning about possible discounts for startups.
Why do you think HubSpot is a must?
Ian: The power of automation and the freedom to orchestrate operations and manage teams with great flexibility.
Max: Simplicity. Turnkey. HubSpot support. Parkour3 support. Continuous improvement and customization of the tool and processes to gain efficiency and autonomy.
Alexandre: Because of its simplicity of adoption, the support of the partner and the savings in manpower.
What is the size of your current pipelines?
Max: 30 to 40 opportunities per week, all sizes, ranging from 15 to 1500 licenses per opportunity!
Alexandre: 800 opportunities per month, which translates into 40-50 new projects per month.
Ian: We have up to 5000 transactions per month.
There are many other reasons to use the HubSpot CRM platform and its 5 hubs. In fact, you can check out our article that mentions the 40 reasons to adopt this CRM platform.