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Bringing a legacy into the future
For 60 years, WeightWatchers has supported people around the world looking to build liveable, healthy habits.
From pioneering the peer-support model for weight loss, to developing the WW app and thousands of digital and virtual wellness resources that are backed by science, the organization has always sought to serve their members with the most up-to-date practices.
To modernize their approach to enterprise sales, WeightWatchers Health Solutions Director, Commercial Growth, Traci Shoemaker, set out to empower the sales, client success, and operations teams with a solution that made their efforts more efficient and effective.
Traci says, “I wanted to make sure that my team was getting leads when they were warm and could respond quickly when somebody was thinking about our product.”
But with their previous sales and marketing system, that was a challenge.
A sales team without automation
WeightWatchers sales representatives were reaching out to small, medium, and enterprise businesses across North America to set up employee wellness partnerships. But with limited automation, a frustrating interface, and a scattershot approach, those reps had to put forth a herculean effort to connect with their customers and leads.
Entering contact information into their old CRM required repetitive steps, and account managers struggled to find information when speaking to customers.
Sending out marketing communications was even more onerous.
Traci says, “The process was very manual. We had to copy-paste message templates from a Word document. To reach a large batch of people, we had to either recreate an email for every single prospect, or use blind carbon copy.”
The teams relied on mail merge tools to personalize subscriber names on the batched emails, and spreadsheets to track their sales activities and customer journeys.
This cobbled-together approach was frustrating and time consuming for sales reps, and created a clunky experience for customers.
Needing business insights to grow
For leadership, the biggest issue was that they couldn’t pull customized reports and dashboards for forecasting and planning.
“We weren’t able to track leads through robust deal stages,” Traci says. “And there was no customization in how we filtered or viewed our data.”
WeightWatchers knew it was time to find a more powerful, enterprise-grade sales and marketing solution to support their next stage of growth.
Choosing HubSpot
As part of their plan to refine the sales process and connect more productively with customers, WeightWatchers enlisted HubSpot.
Traci says, “HubSpot shone for us by visualizing our pipeline. It allowed us to identify leads with a viable path to revenue, share that visibility with everyone in our organization, and connect with them seamlessly.”
WeightWatchers implemented Marketing Hub and Sales Hub.
Enabling a powerful new approach
HubSpot’s flexible automations and end-to-end visibility helped WeightWatchers completely overhaul their sales process.
Using the deal pipeline functionality, Traci’s sales reps were able to redefine the way they qualify leads.
Now, instead of trying to manage an enormous pool of low-quality leads, they only create a deal for leads who have a clear path to revenue.
The shift has been extremely impactful.
Traci says, “HubSpot helped us organize and track our sales activities in a way that makes sense for our business. It’s tightened up our process so nicely, it’s actually unfair to compare our deal close ratios. The difference is astronomical.”
Data-based optimization
HubSpot’s customized deal stages and flexible reporting have helped WeightWatchers mature their sales approach.
Some of their refinements include a shift upmarket, as well as moving toward partners who want to offer their program as a fully-covered benefit, rather than a perk.
Traci says, “HubSpot helps us evaluate leads and track stale deals. Now, we can make sure we’re focusing on the most valuable leads and getting rid of the clutter in our pipeline.”
Customized dashboards and data filters give leadership a more functional view of the pipeline, delivering actionable insights.
“Before, our pipeline seemed inflated with unlikely deals,” Traci says. “Now, we have a sense of the true opportunity for revenue.”
Stronger alignment between teams
HubSpot has been key for smoothly connecting the sales, client success, operations, marketing, and finance teams at WeightWatchers.
WeightWatchers Health Solutions Client Success Manager, Kelly Gibbons, works at the intersection where all of those departments converge.
Kelly says, “HubSpot’s deals pipeline has been very important for helping us deliver a seamless customer experience.”
When the sales team identifies a qualified lead, they create a deal. Once the lead becomes a client, the client success team creates additional deals to manage renewals and mid-term changes to the contract. Once a new contract is accepted, all the information goes to the operations team, and they set up the services.
“It’s super important that accurate information gets communicated across all of our departments. For us, HubSpot is the most effective way to do that,” Kelly says.
Skyrocketed productivity
With HubSpot’s sales and marketing workflows, WeightWatchers has automated the bulk of their low-value tasks.
Traci says, “You don’t want your sales folks spending their time doing administrative work. With HubSpot, our contact details feed automatically into the company record, and our nurture messages are created right inside the system using templates stored inside the sequences.”
With no more duplicate data entry or manual email creation, and an effortless way to track sales activities, the reps are spending more time delighting their leads and winning new customers.
“The biggest thing to me is that the salespeople want to use the system. They see the benefit it's having within their book of business,” Traci says.
Outstanding integrations
Traci says that HubSpot’s robust integration ecosystem has streamlined sales operations even further.
“I love that HubSpot integrates with ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and other prospecting tools we may use as an organization. We used to have to manually copy-paste lead info into our system, but now it just automatically filters over. It’s freeing us up to do more valuable work for the company.”
HubSpot also routes incoming emails to the right sales rep and automatically subscribes leads to a relevant nurture sequence.
Another connection Traci appreciates is HubSpot Meeting Scheduler, which syncs to calendars on Google or Office 365.
“When we need to book a meeting, we can just send a link to our calendar. So many of our prospects and partners are jealous of that functionality. We used to pay for a scheduling tool to get this kind of booking automation and customization, but now, we have it right inside HubSpot,” Traci says.
She’s thrilled with the ease that has come from amalgamating so many functions in one user-friendly solution.
A solution everybody loves
HubSpot’s ease-of-use has made it a favorite across the enterprise team.
For leadership, Traci says, “Creating unique dashboards is really easy and it saves us a lot of time. For example, when a salesperson left recently, I was able to pull a filter with all of her deals and pass them on to another rep. I didn’t have to individually open up records or export and reupload the information. The system lets you move data around really easily.”
The client success team appreciates how simple it is to access account data.
Kelly says, “We’re in HubSpot every day, and it’s our source of accurate information for every account we have. We can all see what’s happening for each client, so it’s really easy to move CSMs from one account to another.”
Another feature that client success loves is that HubSpot automatically connects every Gmail communication to the client profile. That means that anyone on the team can effortlessly review an account’s communication history and jump in to provide support.
A powerful new sales engine
WeightWatchers used HubSpot’s powerful marketing and sales workflows to completely revamp their business-to-business sales strategy. Now, enterprise sales teams can easily identify and deliver an outstanding experience to their highest quality leads, and leadership has a crystal-clear window on operational data.
Traci says, “Our close-to-win ratio is near and dear to my heart, because we’ve worked hard to tighten up that process. On our large and jumbo accounts, it went from around 1 in 50 to 1 in 7. HubSpot made that easy for us to achieve.”
In just 12 months, the optimized process contributed to seven figures in annual contract value with additional revenue generated from recurring sales.
Along with automating administrative tasks, HubSpot’s data visibility contributed to a strategic shift that helped the sales team focus their efforts where it made the biggest impact.
“Being able to shorten the sales cycle has allowed us to prospect the type of leads that have the strongest close ratio. There’s a better match now between what we offer and what they’re looking for,” Traci says.
By replacing 4 disparate sales and marketing tools and integrating seamlessly with several more, HubSpot has become a one-stop shop for everyone involved in the sales process. From leadership to sales, across multiple marketing teams, and with operations and client success, there has been enthusiastic, 100% adoption.
Traci says, “Everyone loves using HubSpot because it’s allowed us to work smarter. Our sales strategy and operations are much more efficient. Best of all, we can now accurately forecast our pipeline. As we continue with this approach, we’re going to get even more intentional and effective. I’m super excited to look back next year and compare the results to our old process.”
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