Case Studies | HubSpot

How HubSpot Helped CancerIQ Rapidly Adapt and Scale its Business

Written by Rodrigo Souto | Dec 15, 2021 11:50:12 AM

CancerIQ needed to scale its business quickly, but struggled to transfer critical knowledge from the founder to its sales team with separate sales and marketing systems. With Sales Hub Enterprise, CEO Feyi Olopade Ayodele was able to quickly onboard new sales team members and empower them with the knowledge and tools they needed to drive new leads and sales — all in the middle of a global pandemic.

Challenges with Scaling and Transferring “Founder Knowledge”

Inspired by her mother, a renowned oncologist, and armed with her background in management consulting, Feyi Olopade Ayodele built CancerIQ from the ground up. From the very beginning, she fostered an inclusive culture that celebrates diverse races, backgrounds, and skills in an industry dominated by white males. But even with a strong team behind her, scaling her business was challenging. For starters, CancerIQ’s sales and marketing processes were inefficient as each resided in a different system.

Feyi explains: “We were using HubSpot as our marketing tool and Salesforce as our sales tool. So when a lead became a sales opportunity, we had to take all the information out of HubSpot and copy it into Salesforce. It was time-consuming and inefficient.”

Also, Feyi struggled to get her unique “founder knowledge” out of her head and transfer it to her sales team. This kept her stuck in the sales process when she needed to shift focus to her role as CEO. Consequently, Feyi started to look for an all-in-one solution that could manage both sales and marketing. She wanted a solution that could scale as her company matured instead of implementing a new system every time her needs changed. At the same time, she wanted to do all this without the added expense of bringing in a CRM engineer to set everything up.

After looking at different alternatives, Feyi decided to implement Sales Hub Enterprise. She chose this solution over Salesforce because it’s part of HubSpot’s CRM Platform. With this group of products and services, CancerIQ could grow without having to implement and manage a diverse stack of tools. To Feyi’s relief, she didn’t need to bring in a specialist to customize Sales Hub Enterprise to her needs.

“We set up our sales process without having to hire a CRM engineer,” says Feyi. “We could set up new fields, permissions, sequences, and reports without adding to our overhead.”

In addition, her sales team found the solution intuitive and easy to use. “Our team could jump in and get started right away,” says Feyi. “Sales Hub Enterprise is elegant and really user friendly.”

With Sales Hub Enterprise in place, the future was looking bright for CancerIQ. But then the unimaginable happened: COVID-19 swept across the United States in March 2020.

Sales Hub Enterprise Helps CancerIQ Grow Despite Unexpected Obstacles

Spring is convention season in the United States — and CancerIQ relies on these live events to get in front of new audiences and develop new leads. However, conference organizers across the United States quickly moved to either cancel events or take them online as the novel coronavirus spread.

Just as quickly, CancerIQ found itself without its primary source of leads. “My biggest fear was that we were going to lose a huge engine of growth for us,” says Feyi. “It was not looking good.”

Health concerns also meant that smaller in-person meetings were also off-limits. Therefore, any new CancerIQ team members require remote hiring, onboarding, and training. In this new environment, how could Feyi continue with her plans to expand and grow CancerIQ? How would she find prospective customers and hire new team members? Fortunately, Sales Hub Enterprise has the features and tools CancerIQ needs to overcome these obstacles.

Some of the most critical features to Feyi and her team during this time are:

Sequences and tasks tools

Sequences and tasks tools help the CancerIQ sales team organize their daily outreach by prioritizing accounts and contacts while also making the process more fun. “Having a long list of prospecting or nurturing tasks can be deflating,” says Feyi. “But HubSpot organizes and kind of gamified these tasks, which brings out the competitive nature of our team and helps drive performance.”

Playbooks

The sales playbooks tool in Sales Hub Enterprise arms the CancerIQ sales team with competitive battle cards, call scripts, positioning guides, and other resources to guide prospects through the buyer’s journey. “Playbooks are an easy way for me to take my unique “founder” knowledge and transfer it to my sales team,” says Feyi.

Single sign-on (SSO)

Feyi needs control over who can access and modify data, especially as the company grows. With SSO, the CancerIQ team only has to log into HubSpot once to have the appropriate security settings and controls across all applications.

Field-level permissions

With field-level permissions, Feyi locks down specific database properties, ensuring that team members can only view and edit what they should to keep the database clean.

Reporting and dashboards

Feyi uses the Dashboard & Reporting Software add-on to measure performance and forecast sales activity. The software makes it easy to serve up actionable accounts and identify data-backed trends for decision making. “More and more of my sales team is working remotely, where they may be more easily distracted, says Feyi. “The HubSpot reporting tools make it easy for us to measure sales activity.”

Growing Today and Into the Future

With Sales Hub Enterprise in place, CancerIQ continues to grow, even with market uncertainties. “With Sales Hub Enterprise, we can adapt rapidly to changes the global pandemic brings,” says Feyi. “It keeps us nimble and helps us adapt our sales process as needed.”

Feyi also continues to grow her salesforce to meet demand. “We’re still scaling our sales team during this crisis,” says Feyi. “If I didn’t have Sales Hub Enterprise, there’s no way I could onboard so many people remotely.”

Today, CancerIQ is successfully adapting to the new normal, even though in-person conferences and meetings aren’t expected to resume anytime soon. "Sales Hub Enterprise made the transition from in-person to digital lead generation easy,” says Feyi. “When in-person presentations are canceled, we can adapt quickly.”

In addition, Feyi feels positive about the future, knowing she has everything she needs with HubSpot as her company expands. “HubSpot is a company that continues to evolve and gets better all the time,” says Feyi.