Being proactive in uncertain times
With economic uncertainty hitting service-based companies hard in 2023, marketing consultancy IMPACT had to make some fundamental changes to their sales processes in order to ensure revenue goals were met.
As IMPACT’s Director of HubSpot Training, Jessica Palmeri, explains:
“It was important for us to be proactive. We didn’t want to just sit back and let these economic changes happen to us,” she says.
The company took stock and made some broad structural changes to their team and processes. The biggest change? Pivoting to a consultant-seller model. Now, their consultants—who do customer coaching and training, and know their client needs the best—would also be in charge of selling the services they would eventually provide.
“We were betting that our consultants could sell their services effectively,” Jessica says. “They were already comfortable talking to prospects and participating in the sales discussions. But it was still a big risk.”
Centralizing business data
With revenues declining, IMPACT’s leadership team needed a closer finger on the pulse of the business, to spot opportunities the business could capitalize on and understand the rapidly changing landscape.
They chose HubSpot to serve as their single source of truth for all information across the organization, in order to give leadership maximum visibility. “At IMPACT we say, ‘if it’s not in HubSpot, it didn’t happen’,” Jessica says. “So while people were working with different tools, we started to really push this culture of creating a paper trail for every action. We couldn’t let anything fall through the cracks. It’s too mission-critical for our business to be able to see new growth opportunities in order to drive new revenue…If we didn't adopt that mindset of HubSpot as our single source of truth, we'd all be working in these disparate tools, and it would be impossible for leadership to have that clear vision of what was happening on the ground.”
Streamlining processes
But consolidating all company information into HubSpot was easier said than done when most of their consultants had never used a CRM for sales processes. At first, they encountered roadblocks: consultants were logging notes after hours, taking too long to follow up with leads, or getting burnt out. “We needed to find a way to streamline and make it more efficient, without adding to our consultants’ already busy schedules,” Jessica says.
To succeed, IMPACT needed to leverage Sales Hub’s integrations, so that they didn’t overburden their team with too many new processes. “When you shift who is doing the jobs within your organization, you have to make the processes easy for the people doing these new jobs,” Jessica says. “And the only way you can do that is through integrations and finding the right fit tools for the right people.”
Working with familiar tools
Now, HubSpot’s integrations allow IMPACT’s consultants to operate in the tools they are used to, while still having all of the data centralized and visible in their single source of truth: HubSpot.
One of IMPACT’s most-used integrations is Slack, a tool their team uses for all internal communication. To make sure data was flowing between Slack and HubSpot, IMPACT used the integration to create workflows that would ping the relevant Slack channels when a MoFu or BoFu lead came through the company’s website. They even created a system within Slack using emojis to flag the status of different leads. “By bringing that conversation into that space where people were comfortable and already interacting, it made HubSpot adoption much easier, because it allowed us to seamlessly jump back and forth between the two tools,” Jessica says.
Leveraging integrations
IMPACT leverages HubSpot’s Chorus and Zoom integrations to record sales calls and feed call notes into HubSpot to ensure that information is tracked and logged, without having to write notes manually. The integration saves the team roughly 2.5 to 3 hours of admin work each week. Beyond the time savings, the automated call notes system guarantees that notes get logged 100% of the time, which wasn’t the case before.
HubSpot’s Vidyard integration is also fundamental to how their team communicates with prospects, Jessica says. “One-to-one video is a big part of how we train our team to communicate with prospects. With HubSpot, they have the ability to go into our video libraries and quickly pull or record videos. It’s been a game-changer for efficiency,” she says.
344% increase in HubSpot activity
Today, Jessica and the IMPACT team can confidently say that the changes they made have paid off.
The average number of days for the new consultant-seller team to close a won deal has decreased from 36.91 days to 22.51, and this team has seen a 26% increase in deals closed this year compared to last. Since adopting their consultant-seller model, deals created by the current reps have increased 233%.
And best of all, all of this activity is tracked and recorded in HubSpot. “By making it as seamless as possible for them, we were able to increase HubSpot activity by 344% for the new consultant-seller team in just a few quarters.”
None of this would have been possible without HubSpot’s integrations. “Without the integrations, our transition would have failed,” Jessica says. “These integrations allowed us to meet people where they were and make it easier for them to adopt new processes without overburdening them.”
Today, the IMPACT team is confident in their ability to adjust to changes and seize new business opportunities as they arise. They have plans to evaluate their tech stack further and see if any of their tools can be eliminated and replaced with HubSpot’s native solutions. “Business is only going to keep getting more competitive, and we need to keep getting better. That means finding the right solution for the right moment.”
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