For over 90 years, Boyd has helped businesses around the world make their products better, safer, faster, and more reliable. As a leading innovator of engineered materials and thermal solutions, their processes and technologies solve critical challenges to meet end-user needs more efficiently.
When it was time to review their marketing software, they applied the same design thinking and realized they needed more powerful tools to upgrade their customer experience.
Senior Technical Marketing Manager, Julie Strachan, led the team looking for a new solution.
She says, “We were using Pardot, but it didn’t have the automations we wanted. Our business adapts to our fast-paced market often, so it’s critical our systems are nimble.”
Pardot’s lack of automations resulted in long lags between submission and response for sales and customer service.
Julie says, “We had two main paths for customers to contact us, one for service and one for sales. Users were anxious to get an answer, so they often used the wrong form or submitted requests on both. Our sales team’s time was clogged up with service requests, and our service team didn’t have an easy, central place to receive, manage, and track service requests.”
With no workflow capability to route customer requests to the right team, Boyd had room to improve responsiveness to leads and customers.
Julie and her team knew they could do more to streamline processes and build a satisfying customer experience on their website. But with Pardot’s challenging UI, they couldn’t make it happen.
“Pardot was not a joy to use,” Julie says. “It didn’t offer the agility we needed.”
Not only was Pardot frustrating to work with, it was difficult to onboard team members. And in many cases, the functionality they wanted was simply not there.
“We’d have processes that we wanted to try, but with Pardot, they just weren’t an option.”
After thoroughly vetting marketing automation options, Boyd chose to switch from Pardot to HubSpot.
Julie says, “Price tag, functionality, and responsiveness were some of our top criteria. HubSpot was very responsive.”
Knowing they could easily access HubSpot support to implement the automations they wanted was a major factor in the decision.
They implemented Marketing Hub right away, and soon added Service Hub. Together, the hubs would allow Julie and her colleagues to gain improved visibility into routing and service times, and create automations that would significantly improve the customer experience.
Julie says the transition from Pardot to Marketing Hub was a huge success.
“We migrated in six weeks. We had a tight deadline because our contract was ending with Pardot, so we worked really hard and leaned on our onboarding specialists at HubSpot support.”
HubSpot support helped Boyd set up best practices in their account, and pointed them to the comprehensive resources in the HubSpot knowledge base to implement every tactic Julie and her team had in mind.
“Support has just been phenomenal. Without them at our side, it would have been a rough transition.”
The teams at Boyd were impressed.
“We were all excited about HubSpot automations,” Julie says, “and the visual interface was fantastic. It was cleaner than Pardot and so intuitive. It was easy to explain to other team members.”
Marketers loved that they could easily grasp the elements set up in their workflows.
Julie says, “My measure of success was that the sales team didn’t notice when we switched. Having both marketing and sales happy when we made the transition was a huge win.”
With newfound data visibility and automation capabilities, Julie and her team can easily tailor their processes to meet fast-paced business demands while increasing productivity, efficiency, and output.
“We have a modest-sized team, but HubSpot gives us the ability to do more than we ever could before and amplify our impact to the rest of Boyd. The workflows, reporting, and feedback loops have helped us improve the customer experience and our efficiency metrics.”
The keystone automation that HubSpot enabled for Boyd was automated lead routing on their submission form.
Julie says, “Users were getting mixed up on our separate sales and service contact forms, and it was hurting our response time. Combining both functions into one form really helped the process.”
Not only did the workflow start routing leads accurately from a single contact form, but it allowed the company to gather critical data.
“Both teams got really good metrics to let them know how they were doing in terms of inflow and service time, and what needed to be improved. Plus, we were able to automate confirmation emails and add leads to relevant nurture campaigns.”
They were even able to automatically flag leads whose email was connected to a key account and route them for accelerated service.
“If they’re coming from a big household name, we know they need expedited answers. Being able to assign them an account manager directly helps us serve them within those critical first 24-48 hours when they’re highly engaged and we have the best chance of closing them.”
Another automation that improved the customer experience is self-selection on contact forms.
Julie says, “We’ve implemented a new property called Service Inquiry Type, which allows users to choose how they want to be helped. Instead of us guessing what they need, they can self-select, and we can get them to the right person to help them faster.”
By switching from Pardot to HubSpot, Boyd streamlined their processes, elevated their customer experience, and automated communications that have brought new efficiencies. Julie estimates that HubSpot automations are doing the equivalent work of about 10 additional team members.
Julie says, “Our automated email campaigns help us scale up the impact of our existing team members. We’re nurturing leads with automation, which helps the sales team focus on developing deeper relationships with their accounts.”
Boyd has also seen exciting upticks in lead generation and quality, including 16% more lead submissions, 49% more MQLs, and 82% more leads ranking in their top tier.
“We’re really happy with that. Not only are we increasing the quantity of opportunities that we give to sales, but we’re also increasing quality. Those are the clients that make a big impact for us.”
Perhaps most importantly of all, they’ve completely overhauled their routing process, slashing their response time and beating their 24-48 hour service ticket-close goal.
“With the visibility on our inflow and automations to send customers to the right person, we’ve improved our time to close service tickets by 5 times.”
Julie recommends HubSpot wholeheartedly to other teams looking for a powerful marketing solution.
“The workflows are so easy to use. They’re intuitive and flexible, and you can do anything your team dreams up. For things your business needs that just aren’t possible in Pardot, you can make them happen with HubSpot.”