A custom plastic sheet manufacturer based in Missouri had previously attempted to use two different customer relationship management (CRM) tools to streamline sales and business processes. But without company-wide user buy-in and adoption, efforts fell flat.
The manufacturer hoped to achieve the following:
- Find a CRM that is easy to use and uncomplicated
- Achieve company-wide buy-in and adoption
- Streamline and optimize the sales process
- Bring all relevant data and processes under one umbrella (HubSpot)
The manufacturer partnered with Unlimited Tech Solutions to migrate to HubSpot and implement a sales process that worked for new and existing sales reps and gathered the information they needed all in one place.
“We did not have a formal sales process until our Unlimited Tech Solutions HubSpot implementation. For a business of our size and revenue, their expertise was necessary for us to move into the next phase of growth. Unlimited's customization of our HubSpot portal is exactly what we needed.”
Case Study Highlights
- 152% growth in deals created between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024
- 84% growth in sales activities between March 2024 and February 2024
- 67% of onboarding tasks completed by sales users YTD 2024
The Pre-HubSpot Challenges
When the client signed on with Unlimited Tech Solutions we noticed three challenges:
- No clear sales process
- Disparate systems that worked on their own but not with each other
- Lack of sales team buy-in
Let’s dig into each instance.
No Clear Sales Process
When entering this engagement, the client did not have a well-defined sales process. This raised the risk of building a half-baked solution, created ad hoc solely to change platforms.
The client struggled to manage two primary issues with their employees: utilization and compliance. Data was often entered after the fact (sometimes incorrectly) or not according to instructions.
A lack of utilization and compliance had the following effect:
- Obstructed the visibility into both sales activities and sales performance
- Diminished management’s capability to implement improvement strategies in their team
Disparate Systems
The client had several systems and processes that were created with good intentions but conflicted with one another. This posed a risk to the integrity of their HubSpot configuration in the form of a system that generated recurring and unanticipated side effects like repeated, missing, or erroneous data, and more.
Lack of Buy-In
The client anticipated some resistance from their sales reps when migrating to HubSpot. This posed a risk of diminishing, rather than enhancing, the sales team’s performance by transitioning to HubSpot.
Finding the Solution With HubSpot Tools
After our initial discovery process, Unlimited Tech Solutions came up with a process that achieved user buy-in, user compliance, and line of sight into the entire sales process.
Sales Process Solution
To mitigate this risk of creating a half-baked solution, we helped the client articulate a formal sales process so that our implemented solution would be built on a process that suited their business's needs and their teams' working styles.
Tools used:
- Teams-based permission sets: With teams-based permission sets, we prevented rogue individual action from corrupting data when it wasn’t appropriate to change or an accurate reflection of the task at hand.
- Reporting: With reporting, management was able to see both the level of adoption of each employee and the real health of their sales pipeline.
- HubSpot Playbooks: The client’s playbook process was developed to support the sales process, reduce redundancy in reporting/sharing of information across different systems, drive accountability, and improve visibility to all areas/stakeholders within the company. The playbooks are helping to better validate the quality of deals in the pipeline, drive a sense of urgency to close, and allow the team to focus more on real selling activities.
The client has been able to build out numerous reports and dashboards that are aligned to Individual, Industry, and Company. The level of detail available in the HubSpot reports is something the client lacked in their other CRMs.
Disparate Systems Solution
To ensure that the HubSpot configuration we built did not have conflicting parts, we needed to manage their transition into a system that required an integrated and holistic system of processes that supported rather than conflicted with one another. This was primarily achieved by using a workflow mapping tool to understand the entire deals process.
The workflow map acted as a collaboration tool for the client to better articulate their sales process (which needed to be innovated and modified as inefficiencies became clear) and as a visual aid in training sessions with their leadership and sales teams.
With this information, Unlimited used playbooks and workflows to build an automation system for their sales reps. When certain values are entered at different stages, workflows would trigger to perform certain actions, such as:
- Move the deal to the next stage (or fallback)
- Close the deal
- Escalate an issue to a sales manager
- Put the deal through a scientific review process to determine feasibility
This combination of playbooks and workflows provided not only an automated system that required sales reps to focus on the task at hand, but also liberated them from the task of managing all of the information about a deal throughout the deal’s lifecycle.
Buy-In Solution
To overcome this risk, Unlimited was diligent about building a system that was simple to understand and use and we took the time in training to answer any questions that users had when they were confused.
Some training participants entered the training with criticisms, but by demonstrating the answer in HubSpot (rather than merely telling), we were able to achieve user understanding and increased willingness to adopt the system.
We also:
- Developed a 30-page HubSpot Admin Guide for their HubSpot admins to use for future reference regarding our custom build for them.
- Trained three groups of users each taking place over several batches of individuals so there would be small enough groups to enable Q&A throughout. These groups include management, power users, and viewers. Each of these teams shared a different level of access to HubSpot and therefore required a different curriculum to maximize HubSpot for their particular roles.
And now, the client’s use of HubSpot is a condition of employment and 100% higher in user adoption compared to when a different CRM was in place.
Custom HubSpot Solutions
- Created team and permission set architecture based on their internal organizational structure documents. This became key to segmenting automation routing and managing visibility at scale.
- Developed a business discovery document and created corresponding deal stages in HubSpot.
- Built forms to sync with Azure backend to enhance lead capture based on 45 different sample types a lead could select, which would route them to a particular sales rep based on industry.
- Created 2 additional forms (Contact, and Contact a Specialist) for general purpose use.
Results and ROI
HubSpot Playbooks were an enormous win for this client. They were created to support the sales process and reduce redundancy in reporting and the sharing of information, but they also drove accountability and improved visibility into all areas of the business. This process better validates the quality of deals in the client’s pipeline, drives a sense of urgency to close among the sales team, and allows the team to focus more on real selling activities rather than manual data entry.
They experienced:
- 152% growth in deals created between Q4 2023 and Q1 2024
- 84% growth in sales activities between February 2024 and March 2024
- 67% of onboarding tasks completed by sales users YTD 2024
“We architected a sales process and implemented a system that enabled our client to grow their revenue and improve sales team efficiency. HubSpot was the perfect tool to give them the process automation and performance visibility that they had survived without for too long. We are proud of our work product, but even more proud of the results we see in our client's system and business after implementing their HubSpot solution.”
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