Colt is continuously looking to improve, so when they started searching for a new marketing automation platform in 2014, they wanted to make sure they got the right fit for an agile business. Before HubSpot, Colt used a system which was costly and challenging to maintain. Colt Senior Manager, Sales Enablement, David Bass says, “We realised there were better alternatives out there for Colt’s needs, so we began evaluating different tools.”
Because of Colt’s size, they initially started looking at larger platforms, but David says, “We found that the supposed benefits weren't justified by the ongoing costs of development, management and purchase of the platform. Plus, it would have taken a long time to build, which would have caused a lot of internal disruption.”
Instead, Colt wanted an intuitive platform that would not only support their marketing and sales needs as a large organisation but would also be easy to set up, use and adapt. So, the company evaluated HubSpot and signed up in 2014. David says, “What I really love about HubSpot is that it’s cutting edge, intuitive and flexible — a modern-day platform.”
To support the scale of their operations, Colt uses HubSpot’s Marketing Hub Enterprise and Sales Hub Professional products — they even boast 45 Sales Hub Professional users.
Even with the size and complexity of the company, Colt found HubSpot easy to set up and fully integrate into their website and across their suite of tools. David says, “We’ve connected HubSpot with lots of tools we use. Setting up integrations is really straightforward. We just share some information across fields and in a few steps we’re good to go.”
More recently, Colt integrated HubSpot with its sales CRM (customer relationship management) platform via a webhook. This has already saved the company a lot of time. Within six months of setting up the integration, Colt shaved one man-month off their lead assignment process. “It’s significantly reduced the time it takes to get a lead to the right salesperson,” says David.
Colt primarily uses HubSpot for global lead generation. Because they are a large company with lots of customers who speak different languages, Colt’s marketing team use HubSpot to create multiple instances of forms in different languages across the website. Then, when a lead fills out a form, the data gets captured in HubSpot.
Colt also uses HubSpot to segment their 100k+ customers and prospects, based on who they are and what they do. Then, armed with HubSpot’s targeting capabilities, Colt’s marketing team sends relevant emails to specific groups of customers. David says, “We target customers with various upsell and cross-sell offers, based on their product profile, who they are, their language, etc.”
HubSpot’s all-in-one-platform also helps create consistency across how Colt’s global marketing team operates. For example, Colt’s digital marketing team create content templates in their central UK office, then they ensure the same style is adopted in Asia, the US, and Europe. David says, “I think it's fabulous having a single system that keeps the marketing team operating in a consistent way. Consistency is particularly important when we're speaking to some of the big global companies we work with.” David adds, “Since migrating different countries to HubSpot everything is working far more effectively and cohesively.”
David is also delighted with the level of support Colt receives from their dedicated Customer Success Manager. He says, “The technical support is brilliant, especially when the marketing team has a particularly complicated problem to solve. Our Customer Success Manager typically suggests a range of alternative approaches to help us solve whatever problem we have.”
Colt has seen tremendous results with HubSpot. In just two years they generated 25% more marketing leads and 70% more website traffic. The company also shaved one man-month off their lead assignment process in less than six months.
For example, with HubSpot, David has been able to quickly create workflows, restructure how the database is stored, match up data and remove any unnecessary data with ease. So, David can keep Colt’s database clean to fully support the marketing team.
Flexibility is also key. David says, “HubSpot is the right fit for us because it's so intuitive and flexible and it can expand to fit our needs, which is the most important thing for us. For example, we have an unlimited number of users to work with.”
David finishes up by saying, “No matter how Colt evolves in its systems and the types of customers we serve, there will always be a range of HubSpot solutions, and we can pick the one that serves us best. That's what gives me total confidence in continuing to use HubSpot as a platform as we continue to grow.”