Drowning in a sea of sales reports
Before HubSpot, the sales teams at Yondu were managing and tracking their deals on individual spreadsheets. When it came to strategy and planning season, the pain of disparate reporting was truly felt. Ray Robin Fortuno, Corporate Strategy and Innovations Manager at Yondu, Inc, shares: “In order for me to build analytics reports that can inform our strategic decisions, I had to go through multiple google sheets and trackers, restructure them, and analyse them individually. This took up so much time that could otherwise be saved with a single source of truth. At the same time, this current way of tracking and measurement meant we were missing out on deeper insights.”
Manual and inefficient marketing processes
From executing our marketing campaigns to reporting on results - everything was a manual process. The team relied on multiple Google Sheets and platforms - including MailChimp - to execute, manage and track results of their marketing efforts. Not only was it a time-consuming and inefficient process, each marketing channel and touchpoint with the brand was assessed in silos. The marketing team struggled to connect the dots to holistically view their consumers’ entire customer journey.
Lead nurturing was also a struggle for the marketing team. The team had no way to understand the actions and interactions taken by their contacts, such as the web pages they’ve viewed or emails they’ve read. “It was almost impossible to nurture the leads in our database. We had no way to understand lead behavior at scale, and even if we did we did not have the tools to automate email engagement based on actions taken. Not being able to nurture our leads was such a huge missed opportunity for Yondu,” recalls Khia Cerazo, Digital Marketing Manager at Yondu.
Evaluating CRM platforms
The need for a CRM platform to consolidate customer data and touch points, track deal progress, connect sales and marketing teams, and automate marketing processes was clear. Yondu embarked on a journey to evaluate different solutions, including HubSpot, Salesforce and Zoho.
“What I really liked about HubSpot was the way they approached the deal process. HubSpot took the time to understand Yondu’s situation, needs and deal breakers, recommended a solution that suited our current and future goals, and was extremely transparent with communicating their limitations. The HubSpot sales rep took on the role of a consultant for our team and that gave us a lot of trust and confidence,” recalls Ray.
1. Ease of use
The Yondu team decided to run a free trial with HubSpot. In that trial period, the sales team was able to adopt the platform quickly. Ray adds, “Another reason why we went with HubSpot is its ease of use and intuitive interface. We liked how our teams could learn the platform rather easily during the trial period versus platforms that were way more complex. And doing so without compromising on what we wanted to achieve.”
2. All-in-one marketing and sales platform
Most importantly, HubSpot offered both a CRM and marketing tool within a single platform. The ability for both marketing and sales teams to work on the same platform and a single source of truth was the deciding factor to go with HubSpot. This saved Yondu significant time and costs, instead of having to purchase two different softwares, and invest additional time and manpower to integrate data and workflows.
Comprehensive and customised onboarding experience
Once Yondu became a customer, the team was put on an onboarding program with weekly sessions for the next three months. “Beyond just teaching us the different functionalities on the platform, our onboarding specialist took the time to understand what we wanted to achieve as well as our existing processes, and customised the onboarding experience accordingly,” shares Ray.
Not only was the Yondu team able to implement HubSpot almost immediately, the onboarding sessions empowered end users to become self-sufficient as well. Coupled with the comprehensive HubSpot knowledge base, both the sales and marketing team were able to master the platform with ease.
Automated lead nurturing with workflows
One of the biggest improvements to Yondu’s marketing efforts since adopting HubSpot is the ability to engage their leads with targeted content at scale. Yondu’s marketing team heavily relies on the Marketing Hub’s workflow tool to create automated nurture email campaigns based on enrolment triggers.
“HubSpot’s marketing tool allows us to send automated emails triggered by actions taken by contacts in our database. We’re engaging our prospects at the right place, at the right time at scale. We’re no longer seeing leads and opportunities slip through the cracks, but this creates a more personalised experience for our customers too,” shares Khia.
Improved sales and marketing alignment
With both the sales and marketing working on the same platform, they developed better collaboration and alignment. The sales team has a deeper understanding and context on the leads generated by the marketing team, and the marketing team now has visibility on how sales reps are following up with leads. Both teams are now able to have a common understanding of their prospects as they are working off a single source of truth.
Ray explains, “Our marketing and sales teams trust the data that is being reflected on HubSpot. It leaves no room for disputes and discrepancies between the two teams."
Turning HubSpot into a connected customer platform
As the team continues to expand their use cases with HubSpot across marketing, sales and services, their long-term goal is to turn HubSpot into a true connected customer platform.
Ray adds, “The long-term goal for HubSpot is to make it the centre of our universe. We are excited to continue building workflows that trigger a whole series of actions and processes that we are currently doing manually. For example, when a lead enters the deal pipeline, or when a deal becomes a customer - these events will trigger a series of automated actions to alert the relevant teams with next steps, and send automated communications to our prospects and customers in a timely manner. HubSpot is and will continue to become our Yondu’s engine for productivity and growth.”
