Moving on from Frustrating Point Solutions
After several years working in marketing and business development for Salesforce, Tim Knight co-founded CloudApps to help companies get more out of their Salesforce investment. It became a successful business, with several blue-chip companies as clients, but its online marketing was starting to lag behind the growing demands of the business.
“By 2016, we were using a variety of different tools. We had a solution for mass email marketing; we used Salesforce and its workflow capabilities to automate lead follow-ups, we used Google AdWords and had several WordPress plugins to aid with search engine optimisation. It was a mishmash of separate solutions. The problem was that we were spending a lot of time, effort and energy overcoming the technical challenges, as opposed to focusing on generating demand,” explains Tim.
An all-in-one solution was a clear way forward. The HubSpot software was already on CloudApps’ radar – its marketing manager, Clara Grant, had attended a HubSpot event and been impressed by its capabilities – but she also investigated Marketo and Pardot.
“We liked how keen the HubSpot team was to work with us, and the discussion we had around the onboarding process made it plain that we would get much support. The technology also looked very easy to use and had all the features we needed. For example, one of the main areas we wanted to focus on was lead nurturing, and the Workflows App seemed perfect for that.”
In the end, it was a straightforward decision, and CloudApps signed up with HubSpot in December 2016.
Hitting the Ground Running with Help from HubSpot
As predicted, CloudApps appreciated all the onboarding support that HubSpot offered.
“Our HubSpot implementation specialist gave us advice and projects to work through. It was a great exercise, and it’s an approach that we’ve adopted with our customers. The onboarding gave us the structure we needed to get up and running with HubSpot quickly. We thought it would take three months to set everything up, but with the support and guidance on offer, it took just three weeks,” says Tim.
CloudApps transferred its landing pages onto the HubSpot CMS and set up a resource library for its content, which includes whitepapers, ebooks, videos and case studies.
“We also set up nurturing Workflows that are tailored to our two main personas, which are sales leaders and sales operations leaders in enterprise-level organisations. They are then automatically driven through the funnel with email campaigns that are relevant to them.
CloudApps’ new contacts and their interactions with the company are transferred directly into the HubSpot, so it gets more profound insights into its leads. HubSpot also integrates seamlessly with Salesforce, giving CloudApps an advantage when it comes to closing deals.
“It was so easy to do the initial sync, and we’ve created our own system that controls what data gets into Salesforce. The level of granularity you can achieve is amazing.”
The company is continuing to leverage HubSpot support, making particular use of the HubSpot Academy.
“It’s a great resource, and we can dip in and out whenever it suits us. We’re also big users of the HubSpot Community forum.”
A Swift Path to Results
CloudApps began to see the results of its efforts almost immediately; in its first month, it achieved a 40% increase in website traffic.
“That’s been growing by 20% month-on-month. We’ve seen a similar increase in lead generation, which has risen by 35%,” says Tim.
As CloudApps targets enterprise-level customers, its sales cycle is quite long – typically six to nine months.
“This quarter, we ran our best-ever campaign from a revenue standpoint, and our revenue has increased by 2X overall. The HubSpot software has been a massive time-saver for us. We’re no longer chasing unqualified leads, which means that our precious resources are spent closing more deals.”
The HubSpot software has also freed up the marketing team’s time, leaving it to concentrate on more high-value tasks.
“We’ve been focussing on content creation, and the HubSpot Content Strategy tool is helping us discover which topics matter to our customers. Thanks to that and our SEO work, we now rank on the first page of Google for over 20 of our key phrases.”
Tim says that the HubSpot software is going to play a significant role in CloudApps’ long-term development, and he recommends it to any other company that wants to go all-in with inbound marketing.
“It’s all about growth for us, and HubSpot is and will increasingly be the engine that powers that growth.”
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