Streamlining complicated processes
As one of the leading fintech companies in the EU, Pleo is a high-growth company with ambitious targets. And as the Head of Business Architecture & Technology, it’s Jeppe Wienziers Stenbæk’s job to help the company’s sales, CS, and marketing teams reach those targets by increasing efficiency, automating processes, and reducing both the time spent on each task and the cost of the tools used.
“One sales rep should not have to go to multiple tools to do their job. They need to be able to do it all within the same tool to streamline their workflow,” Jeppe says. “When I first started at Pleo, reps had to go into one tool, to another tool, and then to a third tool to look at some dashboards. We wanted to make everything centered and integrated into the same platform.”
Centralizing their processes onto one platform would also allow them to build up more automation and eliminate redundant tools to reduce wasted spend. “When our processes are centralized and integrated into one platform, we can create workflows to do some of the tasks that were being done manually before. Automating between different systems is a lot more difficult and complex.”
Technical crossroads
Pleo had been using HubSpot since the company’s inception. But the CRM platform was underutilized, and they weren’t getting the value they needed from its different tools, especially Marketing Hub. Different teams had created their own external solutions to do their jobs. But this approach created silos: the marketing team could track their MQLs, for example, but the sales team had no way to access that information.
At the time, HubSpot didn’t offer custom objects or custom code actions, and the lack of customization options made it tricky for Pleo to set up their operations the way they needed to.
In fact, Jeppe was originally hired to migrate their entire company to Salesforce.
“I wanted to move to Salesforce. I'm really happy that we didn't,” he says.
The decision to stay
Pleo was poised to make the switch. So, why didn’t they? When Pleo went to HubSpot with their concerns, HubSpot listened—and took action. “We told HubSpot we were considering a move to Salesforce, and listed out all of the gaps we saw,” he says. “Within five or six months, HubSpot managed to close most of them, and laid out the foundation to ensure the rest of them would be closed swiftly.”
HubSpot’s support convinced Pleo that the CRM platform could—and would—deliver everything they needed and help them create that streamlined, centralized experience for their employees and their customers.
“We’ve been really impressed with the support we’ve been getting from HubSpot,” Jeppe says. “HubSpot is a big company, but we’ve been able to influence the roadmap. I’ve seen features being rolled out that I requested from our project manager eight weeks earlier. We feel included in the roadmap, and we feel heard.”
With the addition of Operations Hub, custom objects, and custom code actions, Pleo can create all of the workflows and customized processes they need to get the most out of HubSpot, Jeppe adds. “Those additions in HubSpot have been a game-changer. They removed all of the blockers we had before. We can do whatever we want inside HubSpot now,” he says.
A platform built for speed
Apart from HubSpot’s customer support, CX, and the platform’s new features, the Pleo team also realized that having their work centralized onto one tool was an important advantage for enablement, especially for a large company like theirs that was growing so quickly.
“HubSpot is a one-stop platform that can do everything. The value of having a single tool that does everything outweighs the value of researching the best tool on the market for each individual function,” Jeppe says. “We’re growing so fast, we’re changing direction every six months. The simpler the setup, the faster we can change directions. Simplifying gives us the ability to move faster in the market and implement new things. With the Salesforce setup, we would have had one platform with ten different tools. To change something, we would have had to change the same thing in ten different places each time.”
Consolidating and eliminating tools
Since choosing to build up their HubSpot platform, Jeppe and the Business Architecture & Technology team have been able to get rid of several external tools whose functionality overlap with HubSpot’s.
For some of those functions, moving them to HubSpot has actually increased utilization—employees no longer have to hop between platforms to get the full use of their tech stack. When Jeppe consolidated sales call intelligence onto HubSpot, for example, utilization of the tool increased significantly.
With less tools to manage, both overhead and maintenance times have decreased as well. “It’s a lot easier to maintain one tool,” Jeppe says. “And then we have more resources available to develop solutions instead of just maintaining the ones we have—we can focus on developing new features instead of random maintenance. A lot of the work my team does involves pushing information between systems. When we remove a system and consolidate tools, we remove this chunk of work and we’re freed up to do other things.”
Using a single platform is also much easier when it comes to compliance: “Having data in one platform is a lot simpler than having to integrate different platforms and vetting that each of those platforms meet security standards,” Jeppe adds.
$350,000 saved each year
Consolidating tools and eliminating redundancies saves Pleo approximately $350,000 each year. Jeppe has plans to eliminate and consolidate more functions onto HubSpot soon, and he estimates those savings will at least double when he does.
In fact, Pleo is so happy with their CRM platform that they recently re-signed their HubSpot contract. Instead of switching to Salesforce like they had once planned, they’ve now upgraded to the Enterprise plan for all Hubs. “Life without HubSpot would be a lot more complex,” Jeppe says. “It was the right decision to stay with HubSpot, and I’m glad we did. It solves a lot of the things that I need it to solve.”
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