When Chris Gefvert took over as director of marketing and eCommerce at Allied Wire and Cable, he wanted to engage its industrial manufacturing audience and capture valuable leads for its sales team.
Chris had a talented crew of creative marketing professionals and the best messaging in the business, but they struggled to get campaign concepts to the launchpad.
The roadblocks stemmed from their marketing automation tool, Pardot, which lacked the features they needed.
“We had been using Pardot for a few years,” Chris says, “but it had no product evolution. It was five or six years behind the current marketing technology.”
Since Pardot had some native integration with Salesforce, which the sales reps were using, the marketing team tried hard to make it work.
Chris says, “We were using multiple other systems, like web-based design systems and email systems, just to supplement what Pardot could not do. Finally, we realized we needed to change.”
Using so many different tools created major inefficiencies. For example, since they couldn’t build effective landing pages in Pardot, the team turned to Instapage.
“But the landing page forms from Instapage didn't integrate with Pardot properly,” Chris says. “So we had to use Pardot's Form Handlers system.”
Another major sticking point was email design.
The design capabilities within Pardot didn’t meet their needs, so Chris’ designers built emails in a web-based email system called Stripo. Then, they took the HTML code from Stripo and dropped it into Pardot to create each message.
“Essentially, we were paying all of this money to use Pardot as our email-sending tool and nothing else,” Chris says.
In total, Chris’ team had to juggle six tools to assemble every campaign. The patchwork system prevented them from properly tracking campaign performance.
“We tried really hard to bring actionable insights from marketing to the sales team,” Chris says, “But the connection from Pardot to Salesforce was buggy and unreliable.”
For example, Chris wanted to automatically alert the sales team when a subscriber opened an email that showed they were ready to talk. But he couldn’t trust Pardot's tracking codes to capture the subscriber’s action.
That tracking data was also critical for Chris’ team to optimize their campaigns. Without reliable reporting, it was harder for Allied Wire and Cable to nurture leads.
“In this industry, your average time to sale can range from literally the same hour all the way down to five or six months. The marketing touches need to be there. You need to be able to quantify those touches and attribute them over time. We couldn’t do that with Pardot.”
Chris knew that if he could find a more robust solution, it would completely transform his team’s efficiency and results.
After considering other options, including Marketo, Chris decided to implement HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise.
Chris was blown away by how smooth the migration was from Pardot to HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise.
“I've done full switches like this before,” he says, “and I was ready for about three to four weeks of absolute hell.”
He’d seen the worst with onboarding other tools, like field mapping failures that needed a thousand manual fixes before a new software could get off the ground.
But that’s not what happened with Marketing Hub.
Chris says, “It took less than two days to be fully operational. Everything migrated, the Salesforce connection got turned on, and that was it.”
Faster campaign creation
After the switch, the first benefit that Chris noticed was an enormous boost to operational efficiencies.
Marketing Hub replaced at least five tools the team had been using to design, code, and send their campaigns.
On top of that, HubSpot’s campaign creation was so simple, and the asset database so effective, that it enabled team members to work cross-functionally. Designers could craft emails and content writers could create paid ads, and everything held true to the brand.
“Our marketing department has always been segmented into the standard roles,” says Chris. “We have a design team, an SEO team, content writers, marketing strategists, and PPC specialists. But with HubSpot, everybody has turned into a well-rounded marketer. It makes my life really easy because there are no bottlenecks anymore.”
Actionable insights
After operating for so long without reliable analytics, Chris was thrilled to see confirmed opens, clicks, and conversion data immediately in the HubSpot dashboard.
“Attribution was a real wow factor,” he says. “When you can attach a dollar amount to the actual marketing activity, it opens up a whole new world.”
Once Chris had visibility into that data, he started optimizing projects.
He says, “We were able to identify which activities we could improve upon and ramp up from there.”
Segmented campaigns
One of the most impactful Marketing Hub features was the ability to customize subscriber segments to deliver relevant and engaging content at the right time.
Chris says, “Now, we can segment on essentially any filled field within our CRM system. We are pushing out more focused emails to relevant customers on engagement-based timelines—and when you show relevant content to customers, it can turn into sales.”
Advanced Salesforce integration
Although the Pardot’s native integration with Salesforce was one reason that Allied Wire and Cable waited so long to migrate, Chris found that HubSpot CRM’s Salesforce integration was even more seamless.
“With Marketing Hub, we can give our sales team better leads further down the funnel. We have actionable insights so our reps can reach out at the right time. Today, sales engagement is paramount.”
Expanding to Include Service Hub Professional
Allied Wire and Cable was so pleased with its experience with Marketing Hub, they eventually chose to implement Service Hub Professional.
Allied Wire and Cable’s customer service team was struggling to manage service requests as they transitioned into more of a sales development role, so Chris suggested they move that team to the HubSpot CRM platform as well.
Chris says, “In about three days, I had eight people up and running in HubSpot, using a ticketing system they’d never seen before. Now they’re averaging probably 300 to 400 tickets a day.”
Chris’s team saw immediate improvements in efficiency when they switched from Pardot to HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise.
“A campaign that used to take four different team members and six web-based tools can be done by one person with HubSpot. That operational efficiency just scales incredibly,” Chris says.
And thanks to HubSpot CRM’s actionable data insights, Chris and his team can constantly refine their strategy and optimize performance.
“We get views and open rates that are five or six times what we would have with Pardot,” Chris says.
Not only are they getting more views and opens, customers are also more engaged and satisfied.
He adds, “Our spam rate has gone down. Our unsubscribes have gone down. And our surveys show that our customers enjoy our content. Customer satisfaction has improved more than 50%.”
These improvements in efficiency and engagement have led to a nine-times increase in marketing-attributed revenue with HubSpot CRM compared to when the company was using Pardot.
Chris sums it up:
“I love being able to open the HubSpot dashboard and see that our automation has run and we’ve sent out 50 different emails to 50,000 people without lifting a finger. Whereas with Pardot, I’d open the dashboard and only see what went wrong.”