When VP of Marketing Simon Wahl first joined Flinks in 2018, the company was a small startup of under 20 people, with ambitious plans for growth. From the beginning, the team needed to work with a CRM that could expand with the company as it grew.
They chose HubSpot Sales Starter and Marketing Starter because they knew that HubSpot had the features, automation capabilities, and flexibility to support them in their growth journey.
Today, Flinks is a large fintech business trusted by millions of consumers to connect their bank accounts. They’ve integrated their sales and marketing, built out their customer lifecycle management, and used workflows to create a smooth customer journey, upgrading their HubSpot plans to Marketing Hub and Sales Hub Professional as their needs increased. HubSpot has helped power that growth every step of the way.
As Flinks grew, the company needed to better integrate its marketing and sales together, to ensure that their revenue efforts were aligned and everyone was working towards the same goals. Using HubSpot as a foundation for their sales and marketing engine made it easier to get their teams aligned and the made integration possible, Simon tells us:
“We had a vision of sales and marketing being integrated teams, part of one commercial force. Without HubSpot, we can’t have that, because we’d be looking at different things.”
Today, HubSpot is the commercial heart of their business, Simon says. “HubSpot is the central place for the life of our marketing and sales teams. It’s where the magic happens,” he adds. “It’s where the contacts come in, the deals are created, the opportunities are tracked and moved through the funnel. It allows us to do pretty much everything.”
By creating this central focal point where sales and marketing align, HubSpot makes it possible to see, measure, and optimize every strategic decision that Flinks makes. “We know what we’re doing, and we can track it,” Simon explains. “You can only optimize what you can measure. Having this centralized visibility into business goals allows us to have real discussions around important decisions. Are we targeting the right clients? Are we bringing in enough volume or SQLs? Is the marketing team doing a good job bringing leads to the BDRs? Are BDRs converting leads? What are the sizes of the deals? We need a central place to look at everything together, and HubSpot gives us that.”
With HubSpot’s 360° insights, Flinks has been able to make important strategy decisions and focus pipeline measurement around deal life cycles. They’ve made sales-qualified leads (SQLs) the key metric to measure both sales and marketing performance and outcomes.
“Before we weren’t in sync, because we were all working for different incentives,” Simon says. “Having the SQL as this central point is so important. It’s changed everything for us. Before that, we were very misaligned, and now we’re all looking at the same thing. With HubSpot, we’ve been able to put very strong life cycle management in place.”
Features like the deal pipeline, custom objects, and automated workflows make it possible for Flinks to automate their sales and marketing efforts, accelerate their sales velocity and streamline their revenue operations.
“The pipeline feature in HubSpot is amazing,” Simon says. “It’s very simple and visual. It’s super easy to use. It makes life a lot easier than just managing things deal by deal.”
Over the course of Flinks’ growth, HubSpot’s automation and ease-of-use have won Simon’s heart:
“I love HubSpot. I love it more than any other CRM I’ve used, and I’ve used many,” Simon says. “It’s just so much easier to have everything in one place…At the core of it are the properties, the rich data that you collect on people. You can create deals and send emails. You can outreach and create more contacts. You can automate and clean up data. Having everything in one tool in a single place is so much easier than having different integrations.”
With HubSpot’s support, Flinks has seen rapid and sustained growth since its startup days. SQLs have increased 40% YoY, and sales velocity increased 28% YoY. Having integrated sales and marketing teams within HubSpot has been critical to Flinks’ success, according to Simon.
“HubSpot provides one central focal point where the sales and marketing team can align,” he says. “Without HubSpot, life would be chaos. We wouldn’t be able to track, we wouldn’t be able to flow, we wouldn’t have good data. It would be a mess.”