The Challenge: Speed to Innovation
For rapidly growing scale-up businesses, innovation isn’t optional, it’s the key to longevity. Unlike early-stage startups still defining their business models or large enterprises with dedicated in-house development teams, scale-ups must execute more quickly. They have the vision and the funding, but they often struggle with a critical bottleneck: securing software development expertise at the speed they need to innovate and grow.
Rapid Scale-Up Growth Outpaced Available Talent
This challenge isn’t just frustrating, it can lead to missed market opportunities, delayed product launches, and falling behind competitors who move faster with expert talent.
Scrums.com sought to strategically solve this problem. As a software development company powered by AI, they partner with businesses across the world and across the spectrum, from early-stage startups to established enterprises. Scrums.com identified a key opportunity to help rapidly growing scale-ups transform their ideas into reality at unprecedented speed with expertise from their network of 10,000+ developers.
Scrums.com Faced Internal Bottlenecks
To solve these challenges for their customers, Scrums.com first needed to address their own sales process inefficiencies that were hampering their ability to quickly match the right expertise to each project. As more scale-ups started to form, the demand for the Scrums.com network of developers also grew.
"We had thousands of deals open across multiple fragmented pipelines split between our African and international leads. It was difficult to maintain and almost impossible to tell where we were performing from a reporting perspective," explains Le Roux.
Their sales team had trouble meeting this growing demand and their disconnected internal systems made it hard to quickly pair customers with developers.
- Lead Qualification was Insufficient – Promising leads took too long to advance into customers through their former system, causing delays in starting projects.
- Deals Weren’t Leaving the Pipeline Quickly – Without a connected system, the sales team couldn't quickly match customers with the right development talent.
- Manual Tasks Slowed Down Progress – Sales teams spent valuable time chasing down deal status updates instead of being able to easily connect with customers.
"We couldn't trust our reports, which meant we were completely in the dark about our pipeline status at any point in time. This uncertainty directly affected how quickly we could match our customers with the exact expertise they needed."
The Solution: A Revolutionized Sales Approach
This realization pushed Scrums.com to restructure their sales approach. They needed a new system that would solve their internal challenges to help support their growing customer base. So, the team turned to HubSpot's Sales Hub to transform from managing disconnected pipelines to becoming a true innovation enabler for their customers.
Strong Foundation Built on Sales Hub
With Sales Hub as their foundation, Scrums.com experienced immediate benefits that transformed their operations:
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Pipeline visibility finally gave leadership a clear view of their sales landscape
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Automated lead objects ensured prospects reached the right sales representatives faster
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Streamlined data management eliminated duplicated work and reduced administrative burdens
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Enhanced reporting provided actionable insights into sales performance
AI Enhancements Powered by Sales Workspace
However, Scrums.com didn’t stop there. They took their AI powered customer-focused approach to the next level by adding sales workspace to their Sales Hub implementation. This powerful enhancement became the catalyst for pushing Scrums.com toward meeting customer development needs more quickly and cutting their time to close from 60 to 30 days.
"Sales Workspace enabled us to hyper-focus our attention on customers in specific segments. By adopting the new leads object instead of relying on basic contact properties, our approach to each prospect conversation has transformed."
As Africa's fastest-growing AI-powered software development company, Scrums.com leveraged three game-changing capabilities that transformed their sales process:
- Guided Actions now direct Scrums.com's sales teams through every customer interaction. "We've eliminated the communication gaps that plagued typical development relationships," says Le Roux. "Rather than guessing next steps, teams focus entirely on customer needs, delivering faster, more attentive service."
- Deal Scoring helps Scrums.com identify and prioritize urgent opportunities. "Being able to filter within the deal board and select the highest-priority customer needs has reduced our time to close by 50% and doubled our conversion rate," Le Roux explains. “We went from 10% to 20% conversions.”
- Meeting Preparation ensures the team understands customer challenges before conversations begin. "We come fully prepared with tailored recommendations from the start with AI," says Le Roux. "Customers move forward with clarity and confidence, accelerating their path to market."
The combination of these features on a unified platform has fundamentally changed what's possible for growing businesses partnering with Scrums.com. The internal transformation that was set up to fix fragmented sales pipelines evolved into a complete reinvention of how software development partnerships work between Scrums.com and their customers.
The Transformation: Redefining Development Partnerships
From Innovation Barriers to Market Leadership
For businesses racing against increasingly short innovation cycles, Scrums.com has become more than a development partner; they're the secret weapon transforming market followers into industry leaders.
Growing businesses once trapped in development limbo now bring products to market twice as fast.
Teams previously searching for specialized talent now instantly connect with the perfect development partners, turning waiting time into market advantage.
Scrums.com sales teams now have quick access to customer information, all in one place and are more prepared to solve customer challenges.
"For growing businesses, speed is everything," explains Le Roux. "Now, the businesses we work with can move from concept to product launch in weeks, not months, completely redefining what's possible in their industries."
The Future of Customer Innovation
With HubSpot’s Sales Workspace, Scrums.com has transformed its sales process into a growth engine, not just for their business, but for every scale-up they support.
"HubSpot has allowed us to see clarity in understanding how we can best serve our customers and give them the right information at the exact moment they need it," says Le Roux. "This clarity has transformed what's possible for businesses seeking world-class development expertise previously available only to large enterprises."
Customers become part of a larger global vision when partnering with Scrums.com. "We ultimately want to try to change the world," Le Roux states with inspiring ambition. "The biggest software development companies have not come out of Africa, and we believe we are that business. Without the right partners and tools like HubSpot, I don't think that's possible."
When asked what advice he'd give to companies considering a similar transformation journey, Le Roux offers this perspective from experience: "If you are a customer looking at the right sales software to use, I'm here to tell you that I've gone through all of them. The differentiator with HubSpot, is that it can 10X your ability to make an impact on your customers with complex solutions that don’t feel hard to use."
This transformation has proven that with the right technology foundation, customer innovation can happen at a pace previously unimaginable. The businesses Scrums.com serve aren't just keeping up with the market; they're defining the future of their industries by turning yesterday's challenges into tomorrow's competitive advantages.
