CoachHub has been part of the “HubSpot for Startups” program since 2018. The talent development platform qualified for the HubSpot for Startups program through HubSpot's venture capital partner HV CAPITAL and received a 90 percent discount on its first subscription (Marketing Hub & Sales Hub Professional) during the first year. The first priority for the Berlin-based company was to find a platform on which it could easily integrate its sales and marketing activities and run analyses with varying levels of detail. Service Hub and Operations Hub followed later. CoachHub is currently exploring the implementation of Service Hub.
HubSpot Tools Are Straightforward and Powerful
Daniel Foulkes Leon, Senior Marketing Operations Manager at CoachHub, has been at the HR tech company since June 2021. He says: “My first reaction was that HubSpot is remarkably straightforward in many ways, but it also offers extremely powerful tools.” Daniel explains how HubSpot has supported the growth of the company, which has now become the European market leader in its field, after it acquired its French rival MoovOne in 2021. “In the last twelve months, we have grown from 250 to around 1,000 employees,” says Daniel. “So, we needed to find some quite elaborate ways to prioritize the work and automation that we do with HubSpot. Our team has grown in all areas of the company. We had to adjust quickly to the fact that a large company has different reporting requirements than a small one. We also had to evolve in the way we look at data.”
The integration of HubSpot was easy according to Daniel: “HubSpot is very easy to use in every way. And the setup itself is also simple. But if you want to take things to the next level, then you need to understand them. Just because it’s easy doesn't mean it’s done right.” He explains this in more detail: “There is a transitional stage when a company grows and wants to use certain data and data points, for example in terms of the engagement of the sales team with leads or the time needed to close a deal. For these types of metrics, the company needs a deeper understanding of the data and the data needs to be standardized. And having consistency in terms of metrics and data input is difficult when there are teams in different countries and time zones. This is why it is so important that employees receive training in this,” Daniel says. He adds: “One of the benefits of HubSpot was the high-quality support we enjoyed. As we have grown through the different phases, HubSpot has been very proactive and helpful—any time we have run into any problems or obstacles. We were always able to rely on this—and still can.” Whenever there is a support issue, it is usually resolved quickly by HubSpot.
Sales and Marketing Form a Single Universe
As the company continues to grow, the interaction between marketing and sales teams is of vital importance. Daniel explains: “We are enriching sales data with marketing activities. This means that we work together very closely and can identify the actual impact of marketing on sales activities and the benefits of marketing for sales. You could say that HubSpot gives us tools that we don’t use in separate universes, but rather together. And everyone benefits from that. Communication between different teams is central to this. The transfer of leads is a process that needs to be understood throughout the organization. It is something that continually needs to be discussed. HubSpot enabled us to improve in this regard.”
Expansion of Marketing Activities
When Daniel Foulkes Leon joined CoachHub, the company’s marketing activities were not monitored in the way they are today. “That was one of the things that I had to tackle with my team,” the Senior Marketing Operations Manager explains. “The goal was to use end-to-end tracking to evaluate what was happening with all the leads who were interacting with us. And we wanted to record marketing activities through custom form fields.” He continues: “The form fields also brought data fields, and automation also increased. When I started out at CoachHub, there was only a handful of marketing forms. We had a central marketing form field to keep track of everything. We now have over 40 fields that monitor all types of behavior. Now that we have this extensive visibility into contacts, we are working to obtain this insight from the deals themselves. As HubSpot features a campaign attribution model, we want to take a much more detailed look into when a contact has a marketing activity.”
The marketing team has now grown to around 40 members. CoachHub has expanded its marketing activities throughout the world over the last few years. With this has come all sorts of new channels from content syndication providers. “We run content syndication campaigns that add leads directly to the CRM via a Forms API, or we train the marketing team on site to carry out enriched imports of their contacts,” the Senior Marketing Operations Manager explains. Daniel:
“The biggest challenge for us is creating clear, precise reports on our marketing activities. And this is something that we have been able to do well with HubSpot, as it is very easy to track overlapping marketing activities.”
CoachHub benefits from the collaboration with HubSpot in numerous ways. Daniel says: “HubSpot makes it easy for us to create assets. We rely heavily on HubSpot landing pages, HubSpot emails, and templates. And once we have established certain tools and have the basics in place, our sales team can then easily create them and look after themselves. In this way, it has helped us to become very dynamic, as there are no waiting times and there is no central team that needs to create the landing pages for a field marketer. They simply do it themselves. And we create automations in the backend. Our marketing team has a lot more control over its own resources and doesn’t need as much technical support to do these things.”
Growing Sales
The rapid expansion of CoachHub also led to the dramatic growth of the sales teams in all regions, while marketing and sales services also needed to be coordinated with one another very quickly. “It was therefore very important for us to show the sales team when there were marketing activities for a contact and what form this took. So we relied on both automations to automate triggers and create specific reports,” Daniel explains.
CoachHub produces reports across all business areas of sales. “We report on the performance of all of our teams and across all regions, including within marketing. This allows us to see how our marketing activities impact the pipeline of a region and how marketing closes, affects, or facilitates deals. This is very important in order to identify which marketing activities or services we should do more of and which we should maybe not use so much,” says Daniel.
Various Integrations in Use
CoachHub uses integrations for various prospecting and data enrichment tools. Additionally, it uses its own internal data and BI teams, which also pull data from HubSpot for its own analysis and reporting purposes. CoachHub also uses many of the Operations Hub tools. “We run automations and custom codes in our database to support internal processes like (regional) lead forwarding,” says Daniel.
For CoachHub, the biggest asset from the use of Operations Hub is custom codes. “We currently have custom automations that use custom code that is constantly available to improve the quality of the data in our database, for example in our CRM,” Daniel explains. “We use programmable automations. This is great, as it allows us to create more complex data functions within the database. We can basically run code in our own database that we can do whatever we like with. If you have the technical capabilities and you know what you want to do with your data, then the sky’s the limit with HubSpot.”
Looking Ahead to the Future
CoachHub is planning to continue using HubSpot into the future. The growth phase of the talent development platform is not nearly at an end. “Our mission as a company is to democratize coaching globally for all career levels. We are therefore expanding our sales and marketing services worldwide. In terms of marketing, we have podcasts, webinars, and individual events,” says Daniel. “Now we need to ensure that reporting remains a key part of campaign planning and design.” For CoachHub, it is important to have a precise understanding of the data. And HubSpot makes this possible. Daniel Foulkes Leon says: “The mindset we need is: I’m going to do something, but how will I prove that it works? This requires a different understanding of data. It is also the key to understanding that it is not all about sales figures, but also about understanding where they come from. Growth is our future. To achieve this, standards need to be established and conversion must be increased and accelerated. HubSpot is a key partner for us in this.”
-1.png)
.png)
.png){kind=logo}
.png){kind=logo}
