“We had a huge influx of leads from organic search and paid campaigns,” says Bhanu Chawla, Global Head of Demand Generation and Growth at Tractable. “We used to get 1,000 leads a month and now we get more than 4,000.”
Tractable’s growth is one for the record books. Since 2019, it’s grown 600% and doubled its headcount to over 400 employees.
Naturally, this deluge of leads created challenges for the sales team.
Tractable didn’t have a well-defined process for qualifying leads, so the sales team spent a lot of time on leads that were unlikely to convert.
Consequently, Tractable’s conversion rate from inquiry to MQL (marketing qualified lead) was very high, while its MQL to SAL (sales accepted lead) conversion rate was very low.
“The sales team is very busy, and we only want them to spend time on the right leads at the right time. But sales and marketing weren’t fully aligned,” says Bhanu.
Bhanu and his team wanted to improve its lead qualification process as efficiently as possible. Employing automation was a natural fit, especially given Tractable’s position as a high tech leader.
“Rather than using spreadsheets, we wanted everything automated and natively integrated,” says Bhanu.
At the same time, Bhanu and his team wanted the capability to track leads across all channels and report on conversion rates.
“Whether leads were coming from Google searches or LinkedIn advertising, we wanted everything integrated in one place,” says Bhanu.
Lead scoring was another missing piece. Bhanu and his team wanted to use automation to identify the most promising leads to further focus the efforts of the sales team.
While Bhanu and his team had big ideas about how to reinvent the lead qualification process, Tractable didn’t have unlimited funds to invest in a solution.
“As a startup, our budget isn’t the same as an enterprise company, so that was a consideration as well,” says Bhanu.
Fortunately, Bhanu found that Tractable already had the perfect solution: the HubSpot CRM Platform. Tractable had just started using Marketing Hub for its email marketing. But when Bhanu came onboard, he quickly realized how much more the HubSpot CRM Platform could do—and that it could solve Tractable’s lead qualification challenges.
Thus, Tractable enrolled in HubSpot for Startups in 2020 through one of its investors, Georgian Partners. Tractable began at Entrepreneur First (who are also a HubSpot for Startups Partner), when co-founders Alex and Razvan met through the global talent investor’s London programme.
The HubSpot for Startups program enabled Tractable to experience all the benefits of the HubSpot CRM Platform while staying within their budget.
In addition to Marketing Hub, Bhanu and his team also implemented Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub and Operations Hub, thereby utilizing the full HubSpot CRM suite.
Bhanu and his team immediately got to work implementing website forms and workflows to automatically qualify leads via the HubSpot CRM Platform.
“We can easily create forms on our website, either native or non-native to HubSpot, and integrate them with the HubSpot CRM,” says Bhanu. “All new inquiries are qualified into MQLs using the workflow functionality without human intervention, which has helped us massively.”
As a result, only qualified leads are passed to the sales team, saving them time and increasing conversions.
“Now, of all the leads that come in, only the right ones are passed to sales,” says Bhanu.
Bhanu and his team are also using the HubSpot CRM Platform to automate lead scoring.
He explains:
“We defined a lead scoring process within HubSpot using workflows to nurture leads within the lifecycle of a buying cycle. The lead score is increased or decreased automatically based on intent or activity at different touch points.”
The team is also using HubSpot CRM workflows to nurture leads that aren’t ready to convert.
“We can nurture leads at scale using automation rather than looking at every single lead one by one, which isn’t a scalable effort,” says Bhanu. “This allows us to spend our time on other sales and marketing activities.”
Bhanu also has the cross-channel tracking he was looking for with the HubSpot CRM Platform.
“Right now we have our Google and LinkedIn accounts all integrated within HubSpot, and we can natively track customer activity across those channels,” says Bhanu.
The HubSpot CRM Platform also makes it easy to set up dashboards and report on this cross-channel activity.
“We have out-of-the-box dashboards within HubSpot, but it’s also easy to set up our own custom reports and dashboards to create our own metrics and share them with different people and roles,” says Bhanu.
The Tractable sales team is using the HubSpot-Vidyard integration for outbound sales emails. They’re embedding case studies and product videos into emails to make them more interactive and using the HubSpot CRM Platform to track and measure engagement.
“If a salesperson sends an email to a prospect that contains a video link from Vidyard, we can see if the prospect opened the email and watched all or part of the video,” says Bhanu.
While the HubSpot CRM Platform forms the backbone of Tractable’s marketing tech stack—and provides a single source of truth for all leads and customers—Bhanu and his team are also taking advantage of other HubSpot CRM integrations.
“We’ve been using Clearbit, Salesforce, Unbound, Zapier and Dreamdata for different things,” says Bhanu. “As a startup, it really helps to know that almost every other platform can integrate with HubSpot.”
Bhanu has also been impressed with the support he’s received from HubSpot customer service as well as the resources of HubSpot Academy.
“All the people I’ve worked with at HubSpot have been truly outstanding,” says Bhanu. “They truly want to help you get a resolution as quickly as possible.”
Since joining the HubSpot for Startups program, Tractable has continued to grow, quadrupling its total number of leads as well as its MQLs.
More importantly, it’s improved its rate of conversion from MQLs to SALs, meaning that leads are much more likely to convert once they’re accepted by the sales team.
At the same time, Tractable continued to grow. Over the last three years, for example, it grew revenue by 4x.
Today, Tractable is valued at over $1 billion and is the world’s first computer vision unicorn for financial services.
“We’ve had tremendous growth since starting with HubSpot,” says Bhanu. “They really helped us manage that growth and scale to meet it.”