When Dennis K. Burke (DKB) relaunched its website in 2010, it was time-consuming, expensive, and nerve-racking for Kelly Burke, Marketing Manager at DKB.
“I had to pay this web developer guy a zillion dollars a month, and then wait for him to get content up,” says Kelly. “It was a lot of money and aggravation.”
At the time, the marketing team couldn’t discern which types of content were driving leads and conversions.
“I focused our content on the commercial and wholesale sides of our business because I figured those people were more likely to visit our website,” says Kelly. “But I had no data to back it up.”
While Kelly struggled with DKB’s marketing platform, the sales team had issues with its own platform.
“Our reps were bogged down in minutiae,” says Kelly. “They needed to know things like tank size and a number of sites, not order history and things like that. But their CRM was built for finance people, so our reps were drowning in irrelevant information.”
The overwhelming amount of detail and data also made the platform slow to load, which was a major inconvenience for the field sales team.
Even when they could get the CRM platform to load, the sales team struggled to get basic information out of it, such as deal status.
Consequently, reps resorted to putting customer data into spreadsheets—and then sending those spreadsheets to Kelly to input into the CRM.
“It was a nightmare,” says Kelly. “I’d have to manually log all the data, which was time-consuming and not very fun.”
New Data Insights With Marketing Hub
When Kelly was ready to rework the DKB website again, she didn’t want a repeat of the previous relaunch.
So she decided to work with a HubSpot Solutions Partner and implement HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise.
To Kelly’s relief, the implementation process went quickly and smoothly.
“It was easy peasy,” says Kelly. “It only took a couple of weeks instead of the months and months it took last time.”
Making updates and changes on the fly
Kelly also found the user interface intuitive, allowing her to make most changes and updates without having to bring in an outside developer.
“We’re able to update content on the fly, change things, integrate blogs, and all that stuff without outside support,” says Kelly.
Data insights to drive content creation
With the move to Marketing Hub Enterprise, Kelly could build her marketing strategy on real data insights. She soon discovered that commercial and wholesale fuel were not the only product lines getting traction.
“When we looked at our analytics, we saw a lot of traffic and interest in the lubricant side of the business,” says Kelly. “We changed our strategy to create more content for that audience.”
These data-driven shifts in strategy are generating more traffic and higher conversions.
“We’re building out content that moves people down our funnel, which means our conversions are ticking up,” says Kelly.
Consolidated social media inbox
Marketing Hub Enterprise also consolidated social media channels into a single inbox, making it easy for Kelly to monitor, respond to questions, and join conversations.
She’s also using insights from the consolidated social media inbox to inform DKB’s content strategy.
“I don’t have to log into six different social networks and hope I catch every response,” says Kelly. “I can just check one inbox to see what content people are engaging with.”
Qualifying Prospects With Sales Hub
Given the marketing team’s positive experience with Marketing Hub Enterprise, DKB eventually decided to consolidate marketing and sales on the HubSpot CRM platform by implementing Sales Hub Professional.
High levels of sales rep adoption
Given the sales team’s resistance to their existing CRM, Kelly was relieved to see them quickly adopt Sales Hub.
“Sales Hub is so intuitive to use, it didn’t take long for our reps to learn it,” says Kelly. “It’s a lot like using Google.”
In particular, DKB’s on-the-road sales reps quickly saw the value in using Sales Hub as a central source of truth for deals and customers.
“They don’t like doing a bunch of paperwork when they’re out on the road because they’re busy driving around and talking to people,” says Kelly. “Once they saw they could just keep their notes in HubSpot, instead of putting them into spreadsheets or keeping them in their heads, they were sold.”
Growing the inside sales team
Thanks to Sales Hub and Marketing Hub, DKB is growing its inside sales team.
“Our inside sales team is pre-qualifying our leads before reps ever have to get in a car and visit them,” says Kelly. “It saves everyone a lot of time.”
This shift from a field sales team to inside sales is not only more efficient, it became essential once COVID-19 arrived and made in-person sales calls more difficult.
“We went live with Sales Hub before everything shut down,” says Kelly. “Our teams were already accustomed to using it, so pivoting to remote selling wasn’t a big deal.”
Consolidated insights for sales managers
DKB’s sales managers are also big fans of Sales Hub because it helps them to manage the 12-member sales team more efficiently.
“They can see which reps are doing what and where,” says Kelly. “And they can take action proactively, instead of getting copied on an email chain three days later. They have their fingers on the pulse with the HubSpot dashboard, which frees up their time for other important tasks.”
With the HubSpot CRM platform, DKB’s marketing team is generating more traffic and conversions than ever before.
In addition, the sales team was able to pivot to inside sales, mitigating the impact of COVID-19 on in-person sales visits.
Furthermore, sales managers estimate they’re saving five hours a week in reviewing sales rep activity and deals.
For Kelly, the biggest revelation has been just how easy a CRM platform can be to use.
“Having a consolidated marketing and sales platform you don’t need a Ph.D. to use is huge,” says Kelly. “You don’t need to know UX design. You don’t need to get certified in Google Analytics. You don’t need a major in marketing because HubSpot makes it all so easy.”