Siloed customer data
Firefly Reservations was using disparate sales and marketing tools, including Salesforce. This left information siloed in different systems, making it impossible to get a complete picture of leads and customers without dumping and consolidating data in spreadsheets.
Doug Kinney, General Manager, Private and Local Government (PLG) at Aspira, explains:
“We would pull data from multiple systems and try to tie it together in Excel. We had to map data from one system to another and figure out what the unique identifiers were. It was a full-time job for an operations person to build out those Excel reports and dashboards.”
Thanks to this complex process, Firefly Reservations’ teams questioned data accuracy, which impacted their ability to make data-based decisions with confidence. “Is the data accurate? Is it mapped properly?” says Doug. “We questioned the consistency of the data.”
The cost of maintaining multiple tools
Maintaining multiple sales and marketing tools also increased costs. Doug estimates Firefly Reservations paid $400,000 a year for Salesforce.
If Doug wanted to make any changes to Salesforce, he couldn’t do it himself. Instead, he had to work with consultants, which was another expense.
Even with help from consultants, Doug wasn’t able to report out of Salesforce the way that he wanted. “The system was built for one group and didn’t have the capacity for us to break out our own profits,” says Doug. “We had a very different process, sales cycle, and SLAs.”
Ready for an upgrade
The situation changed in 2021-2022 when Firefly Reservations separated from its parent company and came under the ownership of Aspira.
This change brought new leadership and recognition that the time was right to reassess Firefly Reservations’ needs. The leadership team wanted to implement a sales and marketing infrastructure that would empower Firefly Reservations to provide an even better customer experience.
Consolidating Sales and Marketing With HubSpot
Firefly Reservations decided to implement the HubSpot CRM platform, including Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and eventually CMS Hub.
A marketing agency recommended HubSpot to Firefly Reservations after analyzing their options. One of the deciding factors was HubSpot’s ability to align sales and marketing on one platform.
“With HubSpot, we have the benefit of keeping everything closely coupled within one system,” says Doug. “Social accounts are tied into HubSpot. Web forms are tied into HubSpot. It brings everything together.”
“Crunch time” that wasn’t
While HubSpot was onboarding Firefly Reservations, Firefly Reservations was onboarding their new leadership team. Each team member was eager to configure HubSpot in a way that supported new, more efficient processes.
This left Doug with the daunting task of getting his team up to speed with HubSpot quickly so they could build out the platform in the way the leaders wanted.
The task wasn’t nearly as difficult as Doug thought it might be, thanks in part to the HubSpot Academy.
“This was a crunch time for getting educated on HubSpot features, how we wanted them to work, and how to build them,” says Doug. “The interesting part was that crunch time wasn’t as much of a crunch as we expected thanks to the resources that HubSpot provided.”
The HubSpot Academy not only helped with implementation, it also guided Doug and his team with their sales and marketing more generally.
“It helped us rethink a lot of what we do,” says Doug. “How do we envision the sales funnel? How do we make it more buyer-centric rather than seller-centric? I was honestly shocked at how good and valuable the content is.”
Dashboards for end-to-end funnel insights
Rather than dealing with spreadsheets, real-time data is at everyone’s fingertips with HubSpot’s dashboards. Each team member can customize their dashboard to get the data they need for decision-making.
“We can see how things are flowing through the funnel. We can see how things are looking at the top and the bottom. We can see the impact of our onboarding and where there might be bottlenecks or challenges we can address,” says Doug.
Restructuring the team to drive qualified leads
These new insights were behind Firefly Reservations’ decision to restructure its sales team. Before, the sales team consisted entirely of account executives, but data revealed the close correlation between time on the phone and number of deals closed.
With this knowledge, Firefly Reservations decided to add a business development rep (BDR) to their sales team to focus on making calls to bring in qualified leads, which would free account reps to focus on selling.
“Seeing the data and understanding how these two things work hand in hand, we were able to make those adjustments,” says Doug. “We’re starting to see that decision payoff.”
Mobile CRM app for trade shows
Firefly Reservations also puts the HubSpot mobile CRM app to use. The company’s sales, marketing, and customer success teams attend trade shows in the fall and spring, and they use the app to scan and input contact information on the trade show floor.
“Rather than coming home to a stack of business cards, we get deals into the system faster and easier,” says Doug.
Email sequencing to keep customers engaged
Firefly Reservations is also a big user of HubSpot sequences to nurture leads.
When someone signs up for a free trial of their tool, for example, they’ll use HubSpot sequence automation to send those leads emails over several days to help them start using the tool. If a customer doesn’t open those emails, the sales team knows to contact them to follow up.
“It’s a pretty clear way for us to identify who we need to contact and who has been self-serviced through the trial period,” says Doug.
Similarly, the customer success team has an email sequence they use to keep customers engaged and let them know where to go for assistance.
“We can let them know we’re here to help without us having to pick up the phone every few months,” says Doug.
20% More Revenue YOY
Since consolidating on the HubSpot CRM platform, Firefly Reservations is achieving 20% more revenue year-over-year.
They’re also closing 10% more deals than before.
“Part of that is having more quality leads,” says Doug. “And we have more quality leads because we are able to focus more time on the most important ones.”
Firefly Reservations is so pleased with their HubSpot experience, they’re in the process of implementing CMS Hub for even greater internal alignment.
“We hosted our website in WordPress previously, but we’re moving that into HubSpot,” says Doug. “Again, it’s all about the customer journey.”
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