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Creating a new caliber of business
New Charter Technologies helps businesses implement technology to reach new heights of efficiency and growth. With a team of over 850 specialists, they deliver comprehensive IT strategy, data storage, network security, Microsoft solutions, and help desk support to small- and medium-sized companies across North America.
When New Charter Technologies started growing through acquisitions, leadership recognized they needed to connect each brands’ sales and marketing efforts with a cohesive strategy. This was a foundational piece of the organization’s business model.
Director of Marketing Process Nora Erspamer was in charge of engineering the new, uniform approach.
Nora says, “When your sales and marketing teams aren't aligned, your business can’t reach its full potential. We knew that HubSpot would help our teams collaborate better and make our marketing & sales strategies stand out from our competitors.”
Maturing the marketing strategy
One of the challenges that Nora and her team faced was getting the various sales teams on-board with a more sophisticated marketing strategy.
Nora says, “Before HubSpot, each of our brands had their own way of organizing the sales process, and different interpretations of what marketing should look like. Our industry doesn’t have a very evolved marketing framework, so the sales teams didn’t understand the need for their efforts to align.”
One of the key requirements for the new system would be to make the benefits of a marketing partnership visible to the larger organization and demonstrate how a thoughtfully crafted system can enhance sales activities and performance.
Aligning sales approaches
The issue of disconnected sales approaches was compounded by the company’s acquisition-based growth model.
When they first tried to connect their three earliest brands, it was like taming the wild west.
Nora says, “Each company was doing their own thing. They created their own sales processes and used different fields to map data.”
She adds, “The system was highly unorganized, data was poor, workflows were used incorrectly, and there weren’t any permission parameters to control what was being created. Cleaning up existing content and building the new standardized architecture was top priority, especially as the acquisition pipeline was growing.”
Without consistent architecture, it would be impossible to draw meaningful data insights or implement cohesive practices as the organization continued to grow. In addition, marketing and sales outreach effectiveness would be limited by poor visibility on data, processes, and the connectedness of workflows.
Nora says, “My job was to take a step back, get an overview of the whole system, and build standardization and strategic process. I needed to lay a foundation that would take us into the future.”
Elevating performance with HubSpot
In order to align the sales teams from multiple acquired brands, connect their efforts to company-wide marketing, and easily accommodate rapid growth, New Charter Technologies implemented a coordinated solution with Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and CMS Hub.
Rapid implementation with a user-friendly UI
Designing a system for multiple brands and anticipating continuous additions might be a daunting task. But Nora was surprised how easy it felt with HubSpot.
She says, “At first it was hard to wrap my head around the volume of workflows, data fields, processes, technical steps we were working with, and all the reports we’d need to set up. But I was able to learn the system quickly and build everything we needed. Within just a few months, I was laying our foundation, and I felt confident the system would have the legs to grow with us.”
Unifying over 20 brands
Within just a few years, New Charter Technologies went from 3 acquired brands to over 20, due to a strategic and relationship-oriented partnership approach.
Thanks to HubSpot’s growth-friendly features, they were able to keep their sales and marketing processes cohesive through every acquisition. Nora says that the repeatable and standardized process they built has made it easy to onboard new companies. Setup and implementation are now quick and painless.
To keep access organized throughout the network, Nora and her team used Team permissions to segment brands within the system and assign appropriate data for each team to edit or view.
Nora says, “With 20+ companies in the system, we had to keep the database organized. Being able to control permissions was critical, especially from an asset management and data security standpoint.”
Another tool they leverage extensively is business units, which allow marketers to separate everything from contacts to marketing assets among multiple brands. They make it easy for anyone to find the right templates for their brand and produce strategic assets quickly.
Finally, the cornerstone of their sales and marketing standardization is HubSpot’s virtually endless array of workflows.
Nora says, “We’ve leveraged workflow automation to keep our deal management consistent from one brand to another. We’ve also standardized our pipelines and sales process workflows, which we customize for each company to ensure we have consistent data as we work through the lead management process. We also use workflow automation for data hygiene, lead nurturing, internal communications, and more.”
Unlocking consolidated data insights
Nora says, “With our new data consistency, we can now create custom reports. We can look at New Charter as a whole, or drill down into each company.”
That real-time visibility is accelerating the evolution of the sales and marketing strategy.
Nora says, “We’ve recently been focused on attribution reporting. We can see in detail which efforts our deals are coming from, and that helps us identify where we can spend our time and resources most efficiently. That data is driving decisions about individual brands as well as our company-wide approach.”
Driving marketing-sales synergy
Nora says, “Now that we have full visibility around lead management and marketing performance, it’s changing the way sales follows up. That’s never happened before.”
Using HubSpot’s sequences, the sales and marketing teams now collaborate to optimize outreach communications. For example, when sales comes back from a trade event with a new list of leads, the marketing team helps them set up relevant nurturing emails.
Nora adds, “When the marketing team runs an email campaign, the sales team can track its performance. They’re actually getting excited about the engagement and the sales potential that our marketing activities could yield for their book of business.”
Most impressive of all, New Charter Technologies is empowering their multiple brands to collaborate and support each other.
Nora says, “With team segmentation, we don’t only separate what data or assets each team can see. We also connect relevant companies and let them share email templates, landing pages, files, and more. It’s helping teams execute more campaigns than they were before.”
More successful campaigns
With their increased marketing activity and more sophisticated strategy, New Charter Technologies is driving thousands of new leads.
Nora says, “We’re seeing growth from our marketing campaigns. We’re running webinars and live events, developing funnels to drive attendance and brand awareness, and nurturing those leads once they’re in the system. That’s where we’re seeing the pipeline grow.”
20+ brands driving collective growth
In spite of experiencing enormous growth with almost two dozen recent acquisitions, the sales and marketing teams at New Charter Technologies are collaborating more effectively than ever, thanks to their consolidated activities on HubSpot.
Nora says, “HubSpot allows our different teams to work in a consistent way, to evaluate their efforts, and to learn from what other teams are doing. It’s spearheading a lot of conversations and helping us truly understand the opportunities out there.”
By organizing and sharing sales and marketing templates, the brands under New Charter Technologies are executing more marketing activities with less effort. The time savings adds up to a whopping 13,866 hours per year.
Nora says, “Compared to manually creating one-off emails and assets, our collaboration on HubSpot is saving our marketing professionals as much as a third of their time.”
Perhaps most exciting of all, the standardized tracking is yielding rich data that’s helping optimize sales and marketing initiatives within teams and across the organization.
Nora says, “We’re looking more tactically at our campaign strategies, now. We’ve identified a lot of untapped opportunities, and we’re watching how our efforts perform with detailed attribution, so we know exactly what kind of deals they’re generating.”
Without HubSpot, New Charter Technologies feels their smooth scaling wouldn’t have been possible.
Peter Melby, Chief Revenue Officer at New Charter Technology, says, “New Charter is unique, both in our operating structure, and our market-leading growth. HubSpot supports the growth strategy across each of our markets and brands. Most importantly, it supports and drives momentum rather than impeding it.”
Nora says, “If we didn’t have HubSpot, we wouldn’t have a single source of truth to hold us accountable across all our brands, and wouldn’t have the data to run effective campaigns. HubSpot empowered us to execute sophisticated marketing strategies and build a sales process that aligns with our growth model. It removed a lot of manual tasks and made our huge consolidation surprisingly simple. We can now say we have a sales and marketing engine and culture.”
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