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Looking For a Platform That Can Grow With the Company
Before HubSpot, Agicap relied on spreadsheets in Google Sheets as their CRM. They also tried Zoho CRM for a while. This setup came with many challenges—it was inefficient and disorganised.
Mickaël Jordan, Chief Revenue Officer at Agicap, explains, “When you rely on spreadsheets, you don’t truly have a proper CRM. It’s not designed to monitor your pipeline efficiently. Our spreadsheets quickly became disorganised and unreliable. As soon as we had a few hundred contacts and more than 20 deals, it was no longer sustainable.”
Agicap wanted to track their full sales cycle, from marketing through SDRs and account executives to customer success. “We didn’t want to have one place for sales data, another tool for marketing automation, and a third system for customer support. We wanted to have one platform that covers all our core needs,” adds Mickaël.
Bringing Sales and Marketing to a Single platform With Powerful Features
The 360° view of the customer journey was one of Agicap’s main objectives. Efficiently bringing sales and marketing efforts to a single platform was the other. Agicap is a rapidly growing startup, and they looked for a solution that is easy to use, but that will also scale with them in the long run. They wanted to avoid a platform they can outgrow so they never have to switch platforms again.
They started with the free HubSpot CRM and, as they gained commercial traction and ensured a product-market fit, they upgraded to Marketing Hub Professional, Sales Hub Enterprise and Operations Hub Professional.
As Agicap implemented HubSpot, Mickaël had a feeling they were underusing the capabilities of the platform. He attended a three-day training session to adapt the configuration and capabilities of the software to Agicap's needs. The company then conducted an audit of its needs and deployed HubSpot in the most optimal way possible. “We were up and running in less than three months, with pipelines, roles, properties, and views that made us efficient,” adds Mickaël.
Developing an effective inbound marketing strategy with the Marketing Hub tools
With HubSpot Marketing Hub, Agicap drives demand using inbound marketing. Among their main activities is paid advertising through Facebook and Google ads, all of which lead to landing pages and forms built in HubSpot. This allows the company to track the impact of these campaigns on pipeline and MRR, as well as optimise conversion. This is made possible by the addition of hidden fields that help to better define the products that prospects are interested in. The sales process has been strengthened by the creation of dedicated nurturing.
They also run a blog with over 150 articles on finances and cash flow management that rank highly for the European market. “Our articles include downloads of free cash flow management templates, which is our first step in helping our prospects. Then, these inbound leads are nurtured with email campaigns through HubSpot before sales can take over these leads,” says Mickaël. Agicap also runs one webinar per week, usually with partners, and uses landing pages in HubSpot to collect participants’ information and monitor the performance of the webinar.
More recently, a newsletter was launched in France and then internationally. The latter generated very satisfactory results, with an opening rate of 34% and an average click rate of 4%. In comparison, across all sectors, the average opening rate of a marketing e-mail is 21% and the average click rate is 2.6%. (Source)
Finally, the Marketing Hub has enabled the sales team to become more efficient. This is reinforced by the use of attribution reports. These allow the contribution of marketing actions to the sales process to be analysed and their impact on monthly recurring revenue to be measured. For example, the 110 users in the marketing team are now able to link the promotion of content via email to the creation of a transaction on the HubSpot software. This makes it easier to identify the key conversion points in the lead journey. "With attribution reporting, our marketing team can now make a direct link between the promotion of content via email and the creation of a transaction within HubSpot. It allows these teams to define the major conversion points in the prospect's journey," explains Pierrick Vignon, CRM manager at Agicap.
Optimizing sales processes with the Sales Hub
Sales Hub Enterprise is both easy to use and packed with powerful features. Mickaël likes that they didn’t have to choose between the two. One way they leverage this is the calling and call tracking feature. Sales reps record their calls so they can share their insights with the managers and the team. Managers also follow sales activity on Slack and encourage success thanks to the HubSpot + Slack integration. “We celebrate results on Slack, but for detailed stats, managers use dashboards in HubSpot. They track MRR, close rates, pipeline stages, and many other KPIs and results for a full overview of their team’s performance.”
Whether it was an inbound or outbound strategy, the teams had to adapt their pipeline to the needs of the product line that was launched in 2022, in France and internationally. After a period of reflection, a test was carried out with a few users. As soon as the results were up to expectations, the practice was deployed for the entire workforce.
To facilitate sales and cross-selling actions, two separate pipelines were also created using the Sales Hub. This helps to establish a clear process that meets business needs, while developing a strategy that is adapted to an international operation.
Agicap’s sales team is also more efficient, thanks to HubSpot. Sales team members don’t call new leads right away—they leverage indicators in the CRM to reach out to the best fit prospects. Mickaël explains, “Our sales reps track all prospect activities through HubSpot, including when prospects interact with our website, our resources, and emails. They also use the Chrome extension to get real-time notifications and act fast based on what the prospect is doing.”
Establishing a reliable database with the Operations Hub
The use of the Operations Hub is more recent at Agicap. This tool has enabled the company to address the issue of data quality. Directly on the software, the teams can format data as soon as it does not respect a convention, depending on the type of field concerned. Custom code action, in particular, is very useful for updating information on different pipelines in an automated way, making the database a reliable source for all users.
Multiply turnover with a scalable CRM platform
Agicap’s sales team can move fast and close high-value deals thanks to the flexibility of HubSpot. Mickaël adds, “There’s always this debate in the startup world that you have to switch your CRM when you outgrow it, but HubSpot has proven to be as agile and customisable as we need it.” This customisation has contributed significantly to the company's international development. Indeed, all the actions are thought out in the same tool, so that they can be adapted to all the teams, whatever the country in which they operate.
HubSpot helps Agicap automate their marketing and sales process so they can focus on content creation and actual selling. They’re efficient and laser-focused on goals—and those goals are ambitious. Mickaël finishes by adding, “We are aiming for a 360° view in HubSpot thanks to the CRM development part.”
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