In Search of One Tool to Unify Sales and Marketing Systems
Before HubSpot, Corinium Global Intelligence used several disconnected systems for their sales and marketing. They used Zoho as their CRM, Adestra for emails, and an industry-specific CMS for website management. The issue? These systems didn’t talk to each other well. The setup was clunky, every change took too long, and they knew they needed a better system.
Corinium’s Group Marketing Director, Amy Brierley, says, “It was tough to see where revenue was coming from. I wanted something that would give us a single customer viewpoint, and that could integrate with a better email marketing tool. Without the connection between CRM and email marketing, we were sending emails blindly and couldn’t tell which marketing efforts are working and which ones are not.”
On top of that, as an events company, Corinium needs to create and run many event-specific websites. Their event-specific CMS helped with that, but it came with many restrictions and didn’t provide the scalability and flexibility they needed.
During her research for a better platform, Amy signed up for HubSpot’s free trial and quickly noticed two advantages: HubSpot’s flexibility and ease of use. “At that point, I was looking at CRM and email separately. Our needs as an events business are complex, and we create a large volume of event microsites, which allow for registrations and payments.
"Once I started looking into HubSpot, I realised we could bring CMS, email marketing, and CRM to the same platform. I knew the flexibility with websites would make the biggest difference to our business,” adds Amy.
Pricing was another significant factor in Corinium’s platform choice. They knew some other platforms could get expensive as you add features and capabilities, and HubSpot stood out with flexibility and cost-effectiveness. In March 2018, Corinium signed up for CMS Hub Professional and Marketing Hub Enterprise. Amy says, “We knew that by having everything on a single platform would help us improve our websites and do everything much faster.”
Infinite Scalability With Automation, Integrations, and Dozens of Websites
Corinium implemented HubSpot with the help of a top-tier HubSpot Solutions Partner, Huble Digital, as well as HubSpot’s onboarding team. “We had at least 60 microsites we needed to migrate immediately, and another 350-400 blog pages as well. There was a lot of complexity, and we knew we couldn’t do it without extra support if we wanted to hit our ambitious deadlines,” explains Amy.
Relying on trusted experts made this transition smooth and painless. The Brand Domains add-on was just what Corinium needed to create branded event websites for their clients.
The marketing team at Corinium sends millions of emails through HubSpot. Amy was impressed with HubSpot’s email deliverability and how well the system works with such volume. “We saw our email deliverability scores improve since working with HubSpot. That’s been huge for us. Features like graymail helped us improve that and remove unengaged contacts.”
Thanks to automation enabled by the workflows tool in Marketing Hub, Corinium now targets their email campaigns more efficiently and with better messaging tailored to their audience’s needs. They also empower their sales team with all the valuable information about a contact.
“We capture information like location, job title and seniority, the pages they looked at, and the forms they filled out. We then use deal creation workflows to send new deals to the right person on the sales team,” adds Amy.
In early 2020, Corinium upgraded their HubSpot platform by adding Sales Hub Enterprise. Their salespeople didn’t get what they needed from Zoho, so they ended up working outside of it. Sales Hub transformed this.
“They were able to see their pipeline, which wasn’t the case before. They also finally had inbound leads and knew exactly how to prioritize them based on those that seem more likely to convert. Tracking these interactions is valuable, so they also use the Documents feature to track intent. There are always many people involved in making decisions, so understanding how many people viewed and shared the content is valuable intelligence for our sales team.”
With the use of dashboards and reporting, managers can also easily track real-time results, KPIs, and goals, and support their reps in the process.
Corinium heavily relies on integrations — they’re using more than 30. Amy points out the importance of being able to integrate with Xero and Stripe for fast and seamless event registration and payments.
“Enabling registrations and payments was essential. We wanted to automate the invoice-sending process after registration, so our attendees can pay with credit cards and other methods. Most of the integrations in the marketplace are easy to set up. I hadn’t initially realised integrations were going to be so significant, but that helps us stay agile.”
Future-Proofing the Company With a Sales and Marketing Platform
With HubSpot, Corinium can now track the complete customer journey on a single platform and accurately predict sales. Both the sales and marketing team are much more efficient. “The fast-paced changes in the events industry put a lot of strain on us. Our business relies on how quickly our marketing can adapt. Thanks to HubSpot, we can build websites and launch new products easily.”
Having everything on a single platform has set the foundation for growth. Corinium finds it easy to hire and onboard a new team member to their sales and marketing process because all HubSpot tools have the same look, feel, and logic.
“The consistency helps, and we know that HubSpot puts a lot of work into it. We’re also aware that we have unique requirements, and our Technical Consultant always figures out the solution for what we need.”
HubSpot helped Corinium grow, scale, and adapt, and they’re not stopping there. “Having HubSpot as a single platform for everything helped everyone see the effectiveness of our campaigns and work more in sync. We can adjust to any industry changes and demands quickly, so we can keep growing while continuing to serve our customers well.”
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