Moving From Spreadsheets to a CRM Platform
Before HubSpot, Market Financial Solutions used Excel spreadsheets to manage customer contacts and track sales activities like call logs and deals. Legacy operations like this often resulted in duplicates and corrupted files. It was also unnecessarily time-consuming to audit accounts and close sales. The MFS team also used Mailchimp for email marketing, but they had no automation in the customer journey.
Joey Whitehall, Digital Marketing Manager for Market Financial Solutions, explains these challenges. "Our reps tracked everything in spreadsheets, and it was draining productivity. They often had to write Excel formulas to pull information together or flick between multiple files. They couldn't easily see their full performance at a glance. It also wasn't as secure as we wanted it to be, and we knew we needed a CRM system," adds Joey. Before choosing HubSpot, Market Financial Solutions picked a different CRM solution. It was costly and wasn't enough for the company's needs. At the recommendation from their IT web partner, MFS found HubSpot and started researching it. "We wanted to avoid switching to another CRM once again, and our research showed us that HubSpot was the best on the market for our needs. The HubSpot Academy and the support HubSpot offered were huge factors in our selection process," explains Joey.
HubSpot also stood out with its ease of use, and in December 2019, Market Financial Solutions started with Sales Hub Professional. MFS soon upgraded to Sales Hub Enterprise and added Marketing Hub Professional to the mix.
A Single Platform For Maximum Efficiency, Collaboration, and Nurturing
The first step in Market Financial Solutions' HubSpot journey was to set up its new CRM Platform. Implementation was smooth and quick, including importing their contacts and deals. Joey adds, "To us, it's crucial to tailor the CRM fields to our financial services needs, which was easy to do right away and allowed us to start segmenting and analyzing our contacts from the start."
The instant benefits their sales team got with Sales Hub were time and efficiency. All contacts, deals, and pipelines were now in one place. Once the lead underwriter receives new leads, he divides them between sales reps. Because Market Financial Solutions often works with recurring clients, HubSpot makes it easy to assign leads to reps that already have a relationship with the contact.
The sales team at Market Financial Solutions can now report their pipeline, new inquiries, and call volume to the CEO instantly and daily, which is difficult with spreadsheets. Reps can also see exactly how they're performing that week or month at any moment, and they work faster thanks to snippets and automation. "Having everything in one place helps us move deals from completed through to servicing faster. All the details are in HubSpot, so the servicing team can pick up exactly where the rep left off without delays, duplicate contacts, or messy paperwork," explains Joey.
The MFS Marketing team takes advantage of the various tools available to them within Marketing Hub. This included setting up Forms, Calls-to-Action, Landing pages, and Email Marketing, ensuring that new inquiries never has to wait long to hear back from them. When a new lead submits a quick inquiry form, it automatically schedules a call with one of the underwriters and triggers the marketing inbox. Joey adds, "Every new contact gets sorted into a segment, such as valuers, solicitors, direct clients, and brokers. We use smart rules to then email each segment differently based on their needs." We publish one blog post per week, industry reports, and run competitions on social media to drive engagement.
HubSpot massively helped Market Financial Solutions improve the relationship between marketing and sales. Because both teams work from HubSpot, sales reps now understand the need for specific information, and marketing can build effective targeted campaigns that support sales goals.
Reaping The Rewards And Striving For Best-in-class Service
Market Financial Solutions has seen great results with HubSpot in a short timeframe. They had a 30% increase in new user inquiries and a 45% increase in loan value. Their email open rates saw an absolute percentage increase of 10%, from around 30% to over 40%.
Finally, before HubSpot, 95% of their customer base were returning customers, with only 5% being new customers. Since using HubSpot, they've grown the share of new customers to 10%.
Market Financial Solutions pride themselves on speed, transparency, and trust, and HubSpot helps them keep delivering this promise to their clients and partners. Their next goals include automating even more of their workflow with emails, chatbots, and more. Joey finishes by saying, "Running every stage of our customer journey from HubSpot and streamlining it will help us to make sure we provide the best in class service that we strive for."
.png)
