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Changing Lanes From Outbound to Inbound
German company Shore is on a mission to revolutionise how SMEs communicate with their customers. With its SaaS platform, businesses can offer 24/7 online appointment booking, view upcoming appointments in a synced calendar and schedule text and email booking reminders. Shore also includes an automatically updated CRM, marketing tools and integration with a point of sale solution.
In 2017, this young company hired Nikbin Rohany as its new CEO, and one of his primary goals was to transition Shore from an outbound-driven organisation to an inbound one.
“To do that, we needed to be able to generate and nurture leads online, and I knew that a powerful marketing automation platform was the way forward.”
“The HubSpot Growth Stack, which is the combination of Marketing Hub Enterprise and Sales Hub Professional, was everything we were looking for. It would allow us to embed the inbound methodology throughout the company and foster closer alignment between our marketing and sales departments. After speaking with the HubSpot team, I knew that they would give us all the support and guidance we needed to implement it effectively.”
Mapping the Buyer’s Journey
Shore got started by creating a more personalised buyer’s journey for its leads. It defined its various personas, which include hairdressers, beauty salons, doctors, coaches, auto repair shops and restaurants, and produced content to attract them.
“Visitors are encouraged to engage through Calls-to-Action and Forms. Once we have their contact details, we enter them into email Workflows and nurture them until they are marketing qualified. We’re also making use of all the analytics available through HubSpot Marketing Hub. We can now get valuable insights with a couple of clicks – everything from where our leads come from and what they are interested in, through understanding which Landing Pages are performing the best. That allows us to make data-driven decisions about what to do next,” explains Nikbin.
Shore’s salespeople are reaping the benefits of the HubSpot software as well. It not only saves them time, but it also helps them to prevent leads from slipping through the cracks.
“With the HubSpot CRM, they can see every interaction that a lead has had with us, which means they have the context to have much warmer conversations. They can also pull up dashboards that track their monthly progress. That’s a great motivator; they always want to exceed last month’s figures! HubSpot Sales Hub helps with that – for example, a salesperson will get a notification whenever a lead opens an email or clicks on a link they sent so that they can reach out at just the right time.”
According to Nikbin, Shore’s HubSpot customer success manager made sure that it got the most out of the software from day one.
“It’s a powerful platform with many functionalities, and she worked with us to get everything set up in the right way. She was so responsive and helpful; if we had questions, she’d get back to us within hours, often within minutes. These days, we are still in regular contact about high-level strategy and about how we can use new features to maximise our success.”
A Rising Tide of Results
Shore has found that the HubSpot Growth Stack has put it on a fast track to results.
“Our leads have increased by 12X, and their quality keeps improving as we continue to refine our nurturing campaigns.”
Nikbin’s decision to embrace inbound has proved to be a profitable one.
“We’ve reduced our customer acquisition costs by 35%, which is huge for us. Outbound methods get very expensive – you have people trying to source leads and cold call, it’s not efficient. With inbound, we've finally reached a cost level that we’re happy with.”
Over the next three years, the company plans to keep on growing actively in its core markets, Germany and the USA. They also want to expand operations in neighbouring countries such as France and the Netherlands.
“The HubSpot Growth Stack will make that easy – we’ll be able to reuse all our Workflows, it’s just a matter of localising them. I can and do recommend it. HubSpot has helped us to become a strong, inbound-driven company, and I’m looking forward to continuing that partnership.”
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