TrustQuay was using Salesforce CRM—along with a mix of other solutions such as Jira, MailChimp, and a myriad of Excel spreadsheets—which prevented the company from having a unified view of leads and customers across its business.
“We had several spreadsheets, masquerading as CRMs, spread all over the organization” says Andrew Lowerson, TrustQuay’s Senior Product Marketing Manager.
“Instead of using Salesforce for marketing automation, managing engagement, and website integration, it was a dumping ground for emails, sales notes, and client history,” he adds.
Lack of integration among these disparate systems meant that much of the work was done manually, which slowed down the marketing team.
“Whenever we sent out an internal sales campaign, we had to extract information, run it through four subject matter experts, bring it back in Salesforce, deploy it into MailChimp, send it out, update subscriptions, pull it back in” Andrew explains.
This tangled tech stack was also getting in the way of the company’s success.
“There was an organizational barrier with Salesforce. Our teams tried it, and it didn't work for us. Plus, it was expensive and wasn't driving results,” explains Andrew.
Simon Witkiss, TrustQuay’s Global Head of Product and Marketing, agrees: “We were paying a phenomenal amount of money for the license. Whoever sold us Salesforce did a good number selling us everything, but we weren’t using much of it. It was poor value for money.”
In addition, any updates and changes required the help of a developer. “If you want to do something in Salesforce, you need a lot of patience and a developer to hook everything together,” says Andrew.
Given these issues, TrustQuay started looking at other CRM solutions with the end goal of aligning sales and marketing and having a central source of truth for customers. TrustQuay also wanted improved transparency, collaboration, and engagement tracking.
Andrew suggested HubSpot because he’d worked with it before and knew how easy it was to use.Simon also weighed in: “I was aware of HubSpot's growth and wanted to see if it would work for our business.”
After trialing HubSpot for a month, TrustQuay decided to implement Marketing Hub Enterprise and Sales Hub Enterprise.
“When we tried HubSpot, both our sales and marketing teams loved it,” explains Andrew. “We were surprised to see how easy users can drill down into information, whether advanced or beginners.”
Simon also found that onboarding users was easy thanks to the easy interface, especially when compared to Salesforce. Today, TrustQuay has 100% adoption of the HubSpot CRM.
Sales and marketing managers can also easily customize HubSpot CRM without having to bring in a developer.
“We were able to architect and design the system ourselves without dev work or technical knowledge,” he explains.
Having only one source of truth has been a game-changer for the company, improving cross-team alignment and collaboration, says Joe Sefton Jenkins, TrustQuay’s Head of Technology and Development.
“HubSpot has consolidated our data and interactions in one central repository. Every customer activity is recorded, and everyone in the organization has access to it. It’s our point of collaboration, and it's powerful,” he says.
Now that sales and marketing are on a single platform, integration between the two is no longer a problem.
In addition, Simon loves how the HubSpot CRM Platform seamlessly integrates with other tools to provide a cohesive online experience.
“A great thing about HubSpot is how easily it integrates with our WordPress website. Even though they’re different systems, the landing page, blog, and website all have consistent branding,” says Simon.
HubSpot’s powerful workflows have allowed the marketing team to simplify and automate processes to improve efficiency.
They’re also able to track engagement. “Before HubSpot, we didn't know who was engaging with us and who were our top prospects. We had to rely on our people to tell us that instead of the system. Now, we know what’s happening with every single lead,” says Andrew.
TrustQuay was so impressed with Sales Hub and Marketing Hub, the company decided to implement Service Hub Enterprise as well.
“We looked at all the big players in the market. HubSpot got the vote because of its high performance on the sales and marketing side. Rather than bringing in a third-party solution, we once again gained a single view of the truth on every customer,” says Andrew.
The decision to add Service Hub came from a place of trust, adds Joe: “I had tremendous confidence that as our needs become more sophisticated, HubSpot will continue to evolve with us and develop more and more capabilities.”
Today, customers are the beating heart of TrustQuay’s customer service.
“Service Hub engages customers instead of just shuffling tickets. It makes it easy for customers to interact with you through multiple channels simultaneously,” he says.
Content also plays a vital role in TrustQuay’s marketing efforts; however, before HubSpot, the company struggled to track performance.
“HubSpot gives us the confidence that we can generate good quality content based on what customers want. Plus, the speed with which we can put up a landing page on our website it's fantastic,” explains Simon.
“We’re a small marketing team, and HubSpot allows us to punch above our weight,” he adds.
After implementing the HubSpot CRM Platform, TrustQuay achieved a 10X increase in qualified leads in 2020—even as COVID hit and lockdowns were put in place.
“By August, we started to see an increase in the number of leads coming from a combination of LinkedIn integrations, campaign tools, and live chat. It was a big unexpected success,” says Andrew. In fact, the sales team’s biggest deal in 2020 came through live chat.
With sales, marketing, and service aligned and workflows in place, TrustQuay teams are saving time and increasing efficiencies. Webinars that used to take Andrew five days to set up can now be done in one day—five times faster than before for a savings of 120 hours.
Today, Simon trusts HubSpot’s ability to scale as TrustQuay enters its next growth phase. “As we scale and our model changes, HubSpot scales and changes with us” says Simon. “It successfully walks the fine line between power and simplicity.”