Need for scalability from the get-go
With its inception in 2019, the founders of Spenmo were clear on one thing - they needed a robust CRM that could scale as their business grows. They had the foresight to anticipate their future needs and the challenges of scaling too quickly, involving messy data, disparate systems, and a lack of proper processes. They wanted a future-proof system that catered to their current and forthcoming business needs and helped them avoid a cobbled tech stack.
Aaron Goh, Head of Marketing at Spenmo, explains:
“From the beginning, we needed a CRM solution that could meet us at every point of Spenmo’s growth journey – from a nascent startup to a Unicorn. That’s when we discovered HubSpot, and there was no turning back.”
“HubSpot matched our expectations for several reasons. We loved its flexibility, ease of operations, and pace of scalability. It was intuitive to pick up and adopt, and had a very user-friendly interface that was easy to adapt.”
As Spenmo was ramping up fast, they appreciated that HubSpot is intuitive and straightforward enough such that new employees can easily pick up and see the value of HubSpot. This was especially important for a startup growing at an accelerated pace.
“Since we were a part of the HubSpot for Startups Program, we also received a 90% discount on such a robust platform that gave Spenmo oversized value,” recalls Aaron.
Spenmo started with Sales Hub Pro, Marketing Hub Starter, and Service Hub Pro. As they continued to scale over the last three years, they upgraded the Sales and Marketing Hub editions and added CMS Enterprise to their roster.
Switching from multiple products to a unified Marketing platform
Before deploying HubSpot CMS, Spenmo had several website domains managed by multiple agencies and platforms that proved time-consuming and of no value to the company. It was also challenging to comprehensively understand their website performance when the website data was disjointed. HubSpot CMS made it easy for Aaron and his team to consolidate multiple domains on a single platform and have a bird’s eye view of their website performance.
The team also relied on Netlify before shifting operations to HubSpot. Aaron reveals, “CMS Hub is a lot more flexible than Netlify. With Netlify, the marketing team needed to hire freelancers who could turn their requirements into code, push it onto Netlify, and then into production. With CMS, the no-code requirement allows the team to be much more agile and efficient.”
Within 8 months of implementing CMS Hub Enterprise, the marketing team saw a 1300% growth in new visitor sessions.
Enabling quality data-led nurturing
Implementing both Marketing and CMS Hub enabled the Spenmo team to connect the buyer journey effortlessly from acquisition to nurturing. HubSpot also helped track analytics for each web page to inform marketing campaigns and how they engage with their customers.
“CMS Hub Enterprise also offered seamless integration with other marketing software such as Braze, and a Sandbox environment to test websites before they can go live,” Aaron mentions.
Aligning the Sales-Marketing-CSM trifecta
In order to acquire quality leads, it was vital to align Spenmo’s marketing and sales teams. Clear SLAs between the marketing and sales team enabled the teams to hand over leads seamlessly.
According to Fanshen Chan, Country Lead at Spenmo , “HubSpot CRM gives sales reps full visibility of actions taken by the lead before becoming an opportunity, and that information can help speed up the sales process.”
While the lead handover process is currently automated and working efficiently, the team is excited to explore lead scoring next to enhance the qualification of leads further.
Supercharging ahead with Sales Hub
Spenmo implemented HubSpot Sales Hub pro for its sales team right from the beginning. The team started to rely on sales productivity tools like sequences and templates and boosted efficiency, especially for the SDR processes. With the Sales Hub pro, the team could store a bank of email templates that were best practices to equip and onboard new hires to ramp up. It also encouraged knowledge sharing among sales teams, contributing to the rapid growth of Spenmo’s dynamic sales reps. With efficient tracking and analytics, the leadership team had 360º visibility into every deal created and milestones achieved.
Eventually, the team saw an opportunity to adopt HubSpot’s automated workflows and pipeline for their customer success teams. At the same time, the commercial team was expanding rapidly, which resulted in the need to scale their use of Sales Hub and upgrade to the enterprise tier.
While the upgrade was born out of a need for scale, the team is enthusiastic about exploring playbooks, conversational intelligence, and predictive lead scoring.
Implementing HubSpot for Customer Success
Prior to using HubSpot, the customer handover process from sales to the customer success team was a manual task involving spreadsheets. Sales reps had to fill in details of the deal on a spreadsheet manually, and the CSM manager would manually route them to the relevant CSM. While it was quite an inefficient process of capturing data, its biggest drawback was relying heavily on human input and an inability to identify the human error.
Today, the team can automate that handover and routing process with HubSpot workflows and pipelines.
“The Customer Success team can now create customer pipelines per country, which has given much visibility into the process. We can now track CSM performance across the company, which has helped the marketing team create informed campaigns and nurture leads for the sales team.”
“The CSM team has also set up onboarding and customer engagement sequences to automate the process, which has increased productivity by up to 20%”, informs Calvin Ng, Customer Success Lead at Spenmo.
Power of Aligned Teams and Systems on Growth
Ever since partnering with HubSpot, Spenmo has witnessed swift expansion - servicing over 2000 businesses in a span of 3 years. There are several reasons why Spenmo was so successful with using HubSpot, but primarily because its leaders are also internal champions of HubSpot with a strong technical understanding of the platform.
Marketing, sales, and CSM leaders work closely to develop and arrive at a shared understanding of their lifecycle stages and the goals they want to achieve using HubSpot.
Precise team alignment and goals and understanding of HubSpot’s capabilities allowed Spenmo teams to design process requirements that could be easily translated into workflows on the platform.
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