In 2018, Joyous was an early-stage startup just finding its feet and setting the foundation for scale. The company had the foresight to augment its marketing practices with automation right from the get go. Six months into business, the team developed a content-centric approach to reach its target audience at the right time and right place. The next step was to look for a platform that could facilitate this outreach and offer a structure to sustain growth.
Kai Crow, Head of Marketing at Joyous, recalls, “We had built a subscriber database long before the product was ready. Our content pipeline was growing and we needed something to orchestrate our email outreach.”
Joyous had a small team but was eyeing rapid expansion. As a result, selecting an automation platform involved addressing the current needs of email outreach and managing a growing subscriber base. While the team had prior experience with HubSpot, they evaluated several tools, including email-centric ones like Campaign Monitor, Marketo, and CRMs such as Salesforce. They wanted something robust, but cost-effective, and easy to use.
Kai says, “With a small team, it all came down to ease-of-use and implementation. We wanted a platform that didn’t involve high-management overhead and was easy to set up. Cost and usability were the two primary factors for the team. Thus, HubSpot’s pricing and first-year discount made our decision very easy.”
Beginning with Marketing Hub Pro and Sales Hub Starter allowed Joyous to bring efficiency to processes like maintaining distribution lists, scheduling publishing, and pushing email updates to garner subscribers. The expertise offered by HubSpot’s onboarding team also ensured that Joyous set a smooth, robust, and end-to-end marketing automation system in place. As the company started growing its sales team and outreach in 2020, adding Sales and Service Hub Pro to their toolkit became the next logical step.
Enhancing Productivity Across All Teams
With HubSpot’s onboarding services, implementation was quick and seamless for Joyous. With Marketing Hub in place, Joyous looked to optimise the use of its workforce, automate baseline activities, and drive value for its business. “As an early-stage startup, automated nurture flows and routine activities meant that even with a small team, we could work on evolving our messaging and try new approaches with various top-of-the-funnel activities,” says Kai.
By 2020, Joyous was growing quickly as a business — shifting upmarket in its target customer base and enhancing its content strategy. “Our content focus kept changing as the product matured. HubSpot played a key role in allowing us to move from secondary branding on channels to our own branded content and leverage that to offer gated assets to website visitors. Moreover, the target accounts tool meant that we could create ads-audiences and perform cost-effective account-based advertising.”
Joyous’ sales team had also boosted its productivity since adopting HubSpot. With target accounts, the platform enabled sales reps to populate lists of prospects and better track deals.
Over the years, the company’s sales strategy evolved to include direct conversations with the management and top leadership of prospect accounts. On top of this, a large ticket size and a long sales cycle made it critical for the company to be on point with its messaging and follow-ups.
“While we rely on reps to add a human-touch to conversations around deals, HubSpot’s templates and snippets enable us to ensure consistency in top-of-the-funnel messaging. These pre-formatted templates also help smoothen onboarding for folks who join our expanding sales team. Our focus on a specific customer segment also gives rise to several situations that HubSpot’s conversations tool helps us navigate through – such as politely shutting down conversations, recommending alternatives, and offering helpful resources.”
After oiling up its sales and marketing systems, Joyous shifted its focus on making most of the Service Hub in 2021. The company already had a chat tool in place that helped resolve incoming queries. However, the growing customer base and subscriber pool warranted a more efficient approach.
Talking about the Service Hub, Kai said, “We spent a considerable amount of time consolidating our internal documentation and getting customer-facing versions prepared to set up a knowledge base. In addition, HubSpot’s tickets tool allowed us to track outstanding activities while dealing with the product owners within a customer organisation. We also utilised HubSpot surveys to send out feedback forms regularly.”
Growth Across Key Metrics
Joyous started seeing the benefits of implementing HubSpot almost immediately – having implemented automation that drove efficiency and improved outreach. With all three hubs carefully set up and in action, the company witnessed remarkable results.
In the last six months, Joyous has increased its ARR per employee by as much as 91%. “Our focus has always been on growing efficiently- without relying solely on more salespeople to get more customers. HubSpot has enabled several improvements in our processes, leading to each sales rep bringing in more revenue.”
Joyous believes that avoiding the unnecessary proliferation of its tech stack and disciplined data storage is vital to its cost-effective approach to business. The company has, so far, avoided the temptation to find quick fixes for each problem with a new SaaS tool. HubSpot, being the central base for its customer data, has helped create a structure and discipline that saves considerable time.
Offering an example, Kai explained, “Before opting for Service Hub Pro, we did look at tools like Zendesk and Freshdesk. However, we concluded that the amount of work and overhead having separate tools would create would have far outweighed any benefits on offer.”
Going forward, Joyous plans to focus on creating valuable engagements and long-term relationships with its customers. The company aims to resolve real issues for its customers and approach product development with the market’s needs in mind. To achieve this, it has created a unified view of the customer lifecycle and has tried to ensure that the same members manage an engagement throughout the cycle. “HubSpot will be critical in enabling us to keep all team members engaged at all times and also making the process scalable,” says Kai.
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