Taking a Leap of Faith With HubSpot CRM
Noah Berk, Co-Founder of OBO, took a leap of faith when he signed on as a HubSpot Solutions Partner.
At the time, HubSpot was known primarily as an easy-to-use marketing platform for smaller companies. But Noah liked how HubSpot was taking its user-friendly software and making it enterprise-grade, and he saw an opportunity to grow with it.
Still, putting his faith in HubSpot was a risk at the time. OBO’s business is built around solving complex backend technology stacks. Would the HubSpot CRM Platform and support team be capable of solving the complex use cases of OBO’s customers?
Noah’s belief in HubSpot’s enterprise-level software and support paid off handsomely—as demonstrated by a project OBO undertook for the Stan Johnson Company.
Stan Johnson Company–OBO Partnership
Stan Johnson Company is a leading commercial real estate brokerage and advisory firm that focuses on investment sales transactions for retail, office, industrial, healthcare, and specialty properties. The firm provides services for institutions, developers, investment funds, corporate occupiers, and private investors across the United States.
Stan Johnson Company wanted to find a solution that would allow it to better leverage its proprietary data, so it began researching different marketing automation tools and speaking to different providers, including Marketo, Pardot, and HubSpot.
Based on its research, HubSpot was its best option. So Stan Johnson Company reached out to HubSpot for assistance—and HubSpot introduced the company to OBO, a HubSpot Elite Solutions Partner.
Complex Salesforce CRM configuration
Stan Johnson Company had a Salesforce CRM with 300,000 contacts as well as lots of custom objects. It was a complex configuration that couldn’t integrate with any solution straight out of the box.
“Our CRM is very complex and highly customized. It’s uniquely set up for our firm and the way we do things,” says Jessica Rodriguez, Property Marketing Manager at Stan Johnson Company.
Problems syncing with Marketo
At the same time, Stan Johnson Company was using Marketo for its marketing—and struggled to sync it with Salesforce.
“We had a lot of engagement metrics in Marketo, and a lot of deal-specific, client specific metrics in our CRM,” agrees Cameron Still, Corporate Marketing Manager at Stan Johnson Company. “We tried to pair those together but ran into issue after issue.”
At the same time, the team struggled to configure Marketo to get what they needed from it.
“Our use case is very unique, so we had to create workaround after workaround in Marketo,” says Cameron.
Integrating the HubSpot CRM Platform with Salesforce
Stan Johnson Company decided to work with OBO to replace Marketo with the HubSpot CRM Platform and Marketing Hub.
“We got to work migrating contact and company data as well as implementing the Salesforce-HubSpot integration,” says Jen Gruber, Senior Growth Manager at OBO. “We also created email and landing page templates for the Stan Johnson marketing team so they could migrate all the landing pages, emails, and lists.”
With the support of OBO, the Stan Johnson Company marketing team was able to move the project along quickly.
Native Salesforce CRM-HubSpot integration
Joe Hall, Lead Consultant at OBO, wasn’t surprised at the smooth integration between HubSpot and Salesforce CRM.
“I like to joke that HubSpot integrates with Salesforce better than some of Salesforce’s own marketing systems do,” says Joe.
Jen agrees: “The HubSpot-Salesforce integration is very well built out.”
Improving user experience with downloads
As part of the project, OBO helped Stan Johnson Company solve multiple issues related to “offering memorandum” downloads.
Stan Johnson Company has over 300 landing pages for real estate listings. Website visitors can download an offering memorandum (OM) from each landing page to get specs for the properties.
Leads must fill out a form to download PDFs—and the Stan Johnson Company captures this information to inform sales conversations and lead nurturing.
OBO overhauled these forms and set up workflows to improve user experience and conversion rates by changing how forms are displayed on landing pages and how users submit them.
At the same time, Stan Johnson Company continues to capture the user and download information its sales and marketing teams need when talking to prospects and nurturing leads.
Formstack integration for NDAs
There was an added wrinkle with the offering memorandum downloads: some of them require NDAs.
OBO used HubSpot’s integration with Formstack to put a process in place to obtain signed NDA agreements before allowing downloads.
Jen from OBO explains:
“We embedded a Formstack form with eSignature capabilities. So when someone signs a NDA, it automatically sends a copy to the signer as well as Stan Johnson Company.”
Integration of a Complex Sales-Marketing Tech Stack
Thanks to the partnership between OBO, Stan Johnson Company, and the HubSpot team, Stan Johnson Company successfully moved all 300 of its landing pages and 109,000 marketing contacts onto the HubSpot CRM Platform and integrated it seamlessly with Salesforce CRM.
This successful migration gave Stan Johnson Company the marketing platform it needed to easily customize its landing pages, improve user experience, and provide better conversion tracking.
Thriving as a HubSpot Solutions Partner
Both Jessica and Cameron at Stan Johnson Company have great things to say about their experience with OBO.
“OBO has the deep understanding and experience needed to manage these complex cases,” says Cameron. “Plus, their level of service is amazing. They really go above and beyond.”
Meanwhile, Noah at OBO couldn’t be happier with his decision to become a HubSpot Solutions Partner.
“The HubSpot CRM Platform is night and day from where it was four or five years ago,” says Noah. “Nowadays, the vast majority of enterprise companies could use HubSpot. And I expect HubSpot to continue to grow its market share in the coming years.”
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