Data on 10 different tools
Growth Tribe is at the forefront of innovation and modern teaching techniques, which propelled its growth to an alumni network of 35,000 professionals and 900 corporate partners. But given their rapid success, they’d fallen behind in applying innovation to their own data and processes.
“When people are so busy with their day-to-day operations, it’s hard to focus on implementations that will ease those processes and make things more efficient for everyone,” says Ahmed Hassan, IT Process Manager for Growth Tribe.
The sales and marketing teams, for example, spent hours pulling data from 10 different tools to compile the reports they needed for informed decision-making.
“Generating comprehensive reports that would give us valuable data was super hectic. We were manually compiling reports from all those different tools in different places,” says Ahmed.
A sales forecasting report, for example, took at least three days to compile. Consequently, the sales team only created those reports every quarter, or every month at the most.
Lack of team alignment and missed opportunities
With so many different tools, each team had limited visibility into what other teams were doing. They attempted to address this issue with shared Google Docs and Excel sheets, but this created inefficiencies.
Ahmed explains: “This was really terrible because you had to go in and manually update every single sheet or every single document. Imagine the time wasted between team members communicating something on Slack when it could go right into a record.”
This misalignment among teams led to missed opportunities. At times, customers would communicate their interest in purchasing additional courses to the customer support team, but that interest was never communicated to the sales team.
“That is a 100% missed opportunity that comes with a cost. Once you miss something important like that, you lose a potential customer that wants to come back and purchase another product from us,” says Ahmed.
Aligning sales, marketing, service, and operations on HubSpot
Growth Tribe realized that moving from disparate tools and processes toward standardization and automation was the only path toward efficiency. When Ahmed looked for a solution, he realized Growth Tribe already had one with HubSpot. Growth Tribe implemented HubSpot prior to Ahmed joining the company but never fully utilized it.
“Ops Hub and Service Hub was basically a Gmail inbox with labels and tags. No one was using Service Hub. Marketing Hub only had a few workflows. Sales Hub was all over the place,” says Ahmed.
At Ahmed’s urging, Growth Tribe decided to utilize HubSpot more fully and subscribe to the Enterprise tier for all Hubs, including CMS. Ahmed was convinced that moving all of these functions to one platform would bring new automation and efficiencies to the backend, freeing teams to refocus their efforts on more productive tasks.
Consolidating data and automating processes from first contact
Growth Tribe started by migrating from their old web hosting service to HubSpot, ensuring that when new leads fill out a contact form on the website, that data lives on the same platform as sales, marketing, and service, and that the next step in the process happens automatically.
Ahmed explains: “We have a form on our website where users can fill in all the details. We then generate an automated email after form submission and the whole process is laid down in HubSpot CMS.”
No more missed opportunities
With sales, marketing, and service on the same HubSpot platform, all teams are aligned and able to act on sales opportunities when they arise.
“It’s as simple as the service team tagging a customer ticket and assigning the task to sales to follow up with the customer that might be interested in a new course or product,” says Ahmed. “That’s very important and vital.”
Similarly, the walls between sales and marketing are removed with both teams on HubSpot. Ahmed describes what can happen: “As soon as a customer logs in and shows an interest in a certain product, it’s assigned to a salesperson—and they can contact the user without having to worry about miscommunication with the marketing team or other team members.”
Similarly, this alignment makes it easy for Growth Tribe to respond to customer feedback, even when it’s unspoken. For example, the marketing team can report on unsubscribes and scale back future marketing communications as needed.
“The sales team, the marketing team, and the support team work alongside our HubSpot administrators to understand the difficulties between different team members and align and improve those processes,” says Ahmed.
Getting new users up to speed quickly
Growth Tribe is also an avid user of HubSpot Academy, building it into their training and onboarding process to get new users up to speed quickly. Existing users can also refer back to it when needed.
“Each user has to go through to a certain certification level, just to make sure that they know how to navigate around HubSpot. That saved us from having to reimplement anything,” says Ahmed.
2x to 3x more website conversions
After moving to HubSpot Enterprise and fully implementing the HubSpot platform, Growth Tribe experienced a 2x to 3x increase in website conversions, contributing to more sales and increased revenue. Ahmed attributes this impressive increase to automation—and the ability to examine Growth Tribe’s processes across all teams and optimize them for conversions.
Growth Tribe also achieved significant efficiency gains. Some submission processes, for example, were shortened from about one week to one day. Previous time-consuming reporting, such as sales forecasting, has been shortened from about three days to mere seconds. Today, the sales team reports on forecasting every week.
“Sales forecasting that would have taken at least three days to compile is now just a simple click,” says Ahmed.
Improved customer experience
At the same time, consolidating on the HubSpot platform created an improved, and more personalized, experience for leads and customers.
“The centralized data, the forms filling within the website, the tools—it really helps provide a more personalized touch for the user,” Ahmed says. “It's all about the personalized feeling that the customer gets at the end of the day that will enhance the customer experience.”
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