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Harmonizing Global Sales and Marketing Teams
Liquidity Services was founded in November 1999 on the belief that there is a better way to serve the current $600 billion reverse supply chain industry—a way to transform surplus from a burden into a value-added opportunity.
With more than 600 asset categories, Liquidity Services’ global sales and marketing teams turned to HubSpot to help streamline and coordinate their communications strategies and processes.
“We have assets around the world—from Asia to Europe to South Africa and North America,” says Liquidity Services Director of Digital Marketing Megan Beer. “Because of that, we needed a centralized system to harmonize our sales and marketing initiatives.”
Disparate tools across marketplaces
Liquidity Services has unique business marketplaces serving different asset categories, including: AllSurplus as a surplus aggregator, GovDeals for government surplus, Liquidation.com for retail surplus, and others for real estate and consumer surplus.
Each marketplace has its own sales and marketing team with expertise in its specific asset class. Each team was using different sales and marketing tools.
“While some software systems were shared between marketplaces, some were not,” says Megan. “While the teams were successful, we knew we could be more productive if we joined systems and created a collaborative, global strategy to unite our marketplaces.”
Consolidating for insights
The customer base for these marketplaces overlapped to varying degrees, making it clear that Liquidity Services needed to use a single sales and marketing platform.
The company embarked on a multi-year journey to consolidate their sales and marketing tools across marketplaces to gain improved insights into the operations of the global team at micro and macro levels.
“Our first step was to centralize our email marketing channel onto a single platform,” says Megan. “With increased data security and compliance regulations, we needed a platform that would not only support these protocols and become our center of truth but also evolve with our business as we continued to grow.”
Implementing the HubSpot CRM Platform
In just four months, Liquidity Services successfully migrated from their existing email platform to Marketing Hub and consolidated email programs from all marketplaces into a single, unified operation.
Armed with centralized data and unified customer insights, the Liquidity Services marketing team unleashed its creativity using HubSpot’s workflow automation tool to launch new trigger-based campaigns that aligned with the customer journey.
“We saw improved conversion times from registration to first purchase, and the improvements continued to soar from that point on,” says Megan.
Implementing Sales Hub
Liquidity Services’ global sales organization was eager to match marketing’s success with Marketing Hub. They asked Megan to investigate Sales Hub as a way to consolidate the global sales and account teams from Salesforce and internal CRM systems. Their goal was to better equip them with data, reporting, and lifecycle management.
“It didn’t take long to see HubSpot would be a great platform for our sales team. Not only would they be able to segment their ‘top of the funnel’ activities, but they could also take on more control of their ABM campaigns,” says Megan.
Sales Hub implementation was fast and furious, with the transition taking place in the span of a single month.
“We had reached a point where we needed a more streamlined way to aggregate data insights to better equip sales and marketing to work together more effectively,” says Megan. “After carefully considering other options, we saw that HubSpot was the best fit for our needs and could fast-track the platform for an easy transition.”
Managing inbound leads
Consolidating on HubSpot helped streamline Liquidity Services’ process for managing and responding to inbound leads.
“We use HubSpot forms, landing pages, and workflow automations to route new leads to the right team and provide real-time communications to all parties,” says Megan.
Inbound lead management is particularly important when auction items go viral on social media and traffic levels—and new buyer signups—spike. With HubSpot, Liquidity Services can automatically segment and route leads to the right teams, which saves time and effort.
New data insights
The more Liquidity Services uses HubSpot, the more data insights they have to further refine their strategies and processes.
From real-time dashboards to integrations with Microsoft Power BI and Google Analytics, Liquidity Services is leveraging data more than ever before to guide strategy year after year.
“We’ve learned so much,” says Megan. “And we’re constantly re-evaluating how we use HubSpot to get even more out of it to preserve our core strengths.”
Email sequences for nurturing
The Liquidity Services sales team has had great success with email sequencing.
They send broadcast email newsletters to showcase recent sales, while also nurturing individual prospects based on where they are within the customer lifecycle.
“They’ve had success in reaching out to existing sellers to say, ‘Hey, we haven’t heard from you in a while. Here’s what’s on our site right now. You have similar products, so you should take a look and come back,’” says Megan.
Going deeper with HubSpot
As HubSpot continues to release new features, the sales team is eager to evaluate and test them.
“From integration with Microsoft Teams for meeting links to parent-child company relationships to custom objects, our sales team is harnessing these features to their maximum potential,” says Megan.
In addition, Liquidity Services recently adopted Service Hub and Operations Hub, which further consolidated their sales and marketing tools and increased efficiencies.
”We implemented Service Hub, migrated our surveys there, and launched the NPS with built-in automation,” says Megan. “These automations alert our customer service team of detractors so we can address their concerns faster and elevate promoters for testimonials and brand ambassador potential.”
Improved Auction Performance
So far, Liquidity Services has consolidated eight different software tools onto HubSpot and reduced their overall costs by 50%.
With a 70% improvement in sender scores for their marketing email channel, Liquidity Services is reaching more of their audience.
Megan also estimates that teams have 80% greater visibility into the inner workings of sales and marketing. This empowers Liquidity Services to make constant and steady adjustments to campaigns for further conversion improvement—and to ensure that everyone can continue to live the company’s core values of integrity, relentless improvement, and putting clients first.
“I’m always amazed at how much we’ve grown over such a short time period, but then again I’m not,” says Megan. “We’ve always been capable of so much, and HubSpot has unleashed us. I can’t wait to see what we do next.”
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