As The Knowledge Academy’s Global Sales Director, Talveer Sandhu’s main focus is revenue. When the pandemic hit and sales started dropping, he knew he needed to course correct. “COVID highlighted some problems that we were already experiencing before, and our sales dropped,” Talveer says.
The biggest issue was visibility: they couldn’t track or record calls and emails, which made it hard to understand why conversion rates were dropping. Their lead tracking was limited, so they couldn’t gauge the effectiveness of their marketing spend, either. “Not being able to track emails was causing a lot of stress,” Talveer says. “I had no way to know if our emails were going out to our clients correctly.”
Talveer and his team decided to take advantage of the pandemic slowdown to implement a new CRM with minimal disruptions to their business and set them up for success in the future. “We were stressed about not hitting our sales target, but at the same time, we were expecting not to hit target, because of our leads’ pandemic budget cuts,” Talveer explains. “We chose to make an investment and use that slower period to upgrade our system rather than tightening our belts.”
When he began looking for a new CRM, Talveer compared several options: Salesforce was too technical, and Pipedrive lacked the security features he needed. He wanted something user-friendly, that the sales team could configure without the help of developers.
“That was one of the things that I loved about HubSpot,” he says. “We are the sales managers. We know what our sales policies and our processes are. So we should be capable of building and architecting the system.”
HubSpot’s active and supportive community was also a big selling point for Talveer. “There’s always fresh content available,” he says. HubSpot seems a bit more advanced compared to other options. They let their users take control. And they've built things for us to configure rather than building things for developers to build onto.”
Once Talveer got HubSpot configured to his liking, he was able to dive into the call recordings and email tracking to pinpoint the issues the Knowledge Academy was facing.
“It was humbling,” Talveer says. “We had achieved such great results in the past, but there was a lot of room for improvement. Our salespeople weren’t building rapport with leads. We sounded very transactional. It was not how I wanted them to sell.”
Talveer used these insights to completely revamp the sales team’s recruiting and training processes, focusing on the quality of each team member’s interactions. “We changed the way we recruit based on the data we collected. We retrained people on how to close, and how to identify larger opportunities. They didn’t understand that. But now that we have the data and insights we need, and we have the information behind the contact, it’s easy.”
When the Knowledge Academy started making these insight-driven changes to their sales process, they saw improvements almost immediately. “We didn’t sell more units until we started getting more leads, but the average order value increased very quickly,” Talveer says.
Having access to the information that HubSpot provides relieved the stress Talveer was experiencing previously: “It helps alleviate any anxiety, because I know that all of the information is there in front of us,” he says. “If something goes wrong, I can see immediately what’s happening.”
In addition to the changes to their sales processes, switching to HubSpot gave the Knowledge Academy’s marketing team much better insights into lead attribution, which allows them to maximize ROAS and allocate more budget to more lucrative leads. Sales and marketing alignment has improved significantly.
The Knowledge Academy has increased their leads 4x since implementing HubSpot. And more importantly, they can more accurately target higher-value leads that have a higher chance of converting. “HubSpot allows us to increase our spend in the right places to be able to get the correct leads,” Talveer says.
With HubSpot, the Knowledge Academy has been able to maximize their advertising budget, improve their sales efforts, and work more collaboratively across teams. Sales have increased by 192% since they started using HubSpot. They’ve also closed 125% more deals, and seen a 25% average increase in order value.
Not that Talveer is surprised: he knew that the insights HubSpot could deliver would make a difference right from the beginning. “When I saw what HubSpot could do, I knew that when things were back up and running, sales were going to double. I knew it straight away.”