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M&C Saatchi Group Accelerates New Business Growth with HubSpot

M&C Saatchi is a group of creative solution agencies that span the globe. HubSpot helps M&C Saatchi consolidate its growth efforts — from pipeline visibility, to spotting growth opportunities, to GDPR compliance, and more.

  • 385 new leads in the first month

  • 34.1% landing page conversion rate

  • 200% increase in MQLs

About
M&C Saatchi Group

M&C Saatchi Group is a creative solutions company that connects specialist expertise, fuelled by data and technology, to help clients navigate, create and lead meaningful change.

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Unifying global entities

Though it’s headquartered in London, M&C Saatchi has operations spanning 23 countries, including major hubs in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia and Australia.

Specialists within the M&C Saatchi Group have the freedom to benefit from both their individual ability to work with clients as well as opportunities to collaborate in an integrated way with other specialists in the Group for total solutions. Each entity has its own team and area of expertise, such as M&C Saatchi One-to-One, a CRM MarTech solutions marketing agency, and Re, a global brand-led design and experience business.

Diana Scott, Marketing Operations Specialist at M&C Saatchi One-to-One, explains, “One entity might be strong in CRM, while another might specialise in branding and media. Using this technology helps us to supercharge our ability to work together to solve client challenges.”

M&C Saatchi’s unique structure brings specific challenges. There was a need to be able to connect the collection of specialist companies across time zones, entities, and currencies, in order to make global operations smoother and more effective.

Needing a single source of truth

M&C Saatchi needed a single source of truth for all entities — one platform to paint a complete picture of clients, prospects, and pipeline. This was especially true for the global centralised marketing and new business operation working out of the London headquarters, which saw the opportunity to leapfrog from manual operations to automated operations.

HubSpot is the optimum solution provider

After a thorough procurement exercise looking at suppliers in the CRM space, HubSpot clearly offered the right technology and the right value, especially because it had the potential to connect with existing tech platforms within M&C Saatchi.

Diana had worked with HubSpot in a previous role at a large global brand. She’d found it easy to use, so it was welcome news when M&C Saatchi One-to-One joined the HubSpot Solutions Partner Program.

Wendy Dixon, Global Chief Growth Officer at M&C Saatchi Group says:

“We wanted a solution that could help us spot opportunities and identify synergy between entities. We chose HubSpot because it’s clean, intuitive and easy for users to pick up.”

As the CRM specialists, Diana and her team quickly became the organisation’s HubSpot MVPs. They rolled out Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Operations Hub and Service Hub. They also created training and onboarding material for other M&C Saatchi entities.

“HubSpot is great because it’s a completely usable platform out of the box, but the components that we were able to customise were a key part of our success.”

According to Diana, everyone was impressed by the quick and smooth onboarding process. She says that most entities were up and running with HubSpot within three weeks.

“We were blown away by how easy the individual tools are to use. Even somebody who has never used a CRM can still maximise their use of HubSpot’s features because of the way the interface is set up and how intuitive it is.”

Limitless customisability

Though it was usable out of the box, HubSpot’s implementation team did work closely with multiple entities to customise pipelines and dashboards to fit their needs.

For example, Gary Hess, Business Development Director at Clear M&C Saatchi, quickly became a power user of HubSpot and he was integral in the development of the portal from a strategic perspective, especially in the early days of implementation.

“We were able to customise the sales pipeline, deal stages, and lifecycle stages — then build out what the reporting would look like on those criteria to meet our business goals.”

Empowering marketing teams

Before HubSpot, users from across the various entities had different levels of experience with CRMs. Some had never used a CRM and were wholly reliant on spreadsheets. Others had some experience, but the platforms they had used proved unintuitive and frustrating.

Marketing Hub flipped the script on those negative past experiences.

“The entities that handle marketing activities love the built-in tools. The social media scheduling tool and being able to integrate directly so we can schedule and post in one place — that’s a big one. We also use it to build out landing pages, including forms, create marketing emails, and promote things like white papers.”

While some business units had tools to help with marketing efforts pre-HubSpot, they’d never had so much interconnected functionality in one place.

“Some entities might have used scheduling software or maybe email marketing software, but it was very disjointed. Now with Hubspot, all of those marketing tools are under one roof. It makes for efficient reporting and we’re able to spot wins faster.”

Within just a few months of the platform going live and getting users onboarded, some individual teams were already running inbound campaigns that resulted in over 385 new leads with an average conversion rate of 34.1% for those landing pages.

Sequences augment sales

HubSpot also empowers the sales team with built-in contact, deal and task management, email tracking and integration, document sharing, meeting scheduling, and more.

M&C Saatchi’s favourite Sales Hub feature is the sequence tool, which enables paid seat holders to enroll contacts in sequences and automate outreach with their contacts.

“It’s a really helpful sales tool, especially for some of our larger entities who have an extensive contact list and can’t spend the time sending one-to-one emails.”

The sequences tool is both more efficient and more personalised than a segmented list. They enable M&C Saatchi’s team to prescribe email send times, edit delays between sequence steps, and personalise replies to increase response rate.

One sequence-promoted article about Artificial Intelligence yielded:

  • 223 contracts enrolled

  • 71% open rate

  • 13.5 click rate

  • 19% click through rate (CTR)

More efficient global entities

The HubSpot CRM Suite has helped connect M&C Saatchi’s independent entities, improving efficiency and visibility across the board.

“The rising tide lifts all boats,” Wendy quips. “If one agency is winning clients, it can help other agencies by providing instructions or adding its own area of specialty.”

She cites Re as a prime example. After being onboarded to HubSpot, Re leveraged the platform to promote an industry-specific white paper to its contacts and prospects. The campaign was a resounding success.

“After promoting the white paper, Re had over 615 contacts in its marketing pipeline. That’s a 66% increase.”

Enabling GDPR compliance

Upon switching to a shared database that anyone could access, some entities were understandably concerned about privacy — especially if they were operating within the GDPR.

Fortunately, HubSpot’s got a ton of built-in functionality to enable easier compliance.

So while M&C Saatchi gained a shared pipeline for visibility and easy tracking, they also increased measures to how much data is visible and to whom. This enables each entity to enforce least privilege and ensures that sensitive customer data stays confidential.

“Any M&C Saatchi user can access broad info, such as if we have an existing relationship with a customer, but specific data — like contact information — is more restricted.”

Progress to support a culture of sharing

Lily Hawkins, Global Marketing Director at M&C Saatchi Group says, "We’ve only been using HubSpot for 6 months, but we already can see how it’s supercharging our business. From pipeline visibility across our whole business, to spotting growth opportunities, to ease with reporting and GDPR compliance." 

With Hubspot, M&C Saatchi has made great progress toward unifying individual entity client lists and bringing all of their disparate data under one roof. User feedback from across various entities has also been overwhelmingly positive.

Diana says, “Having the Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, Operations Hub, and even the Service Hub under one roof provides a single source of truth. When all of our different teams have visibility into the same data and we share the same goals, it leads to a better customer experience.”

Diana Scott

From a marketing and sales standpoint, the value that HubSpot brings is being the single source of truth. We’re able to paint a complete picture of each client or prospect, because everything is in one spot.

Diana Scott

Marketing Operations Specialist

M&C Saatchi Group

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