Aligning 10+ different business units
Headquartered in Dalton, Georgia, Recreational Group has more than 20 business units and brands under its corporate umbrella. Each has its own dedicated team, products, and location.
Director of Marketing at Recreational Group, Delanie Nelson, needed to compare and measure the marketing efforts of each brand, stay seamlessly aligned with sales teams, and meet the demand of her C-Suite for real-time insights to support decision-making. Legacy tech stacks weren’t making it easy.
“We were using a hodgepodge of CRMs and apps to manage marketing across so many units,” she says. “Comparing units was a manual process. We were stuck sifting through Excel sheets or bouncing between Google Analytics, Dynamics 365, and Shopify just to piece things together… and that’s just for a singular business unit.”
Lead tracking and management
The business also needed to capture leads quickly, score them accurately, and pass them swiftly to the right team to speed up the sales cycle and grow revenue. However, with different brands with different sales teams, it was tough to create a standardized process.
Recreational Group needed a unified platform that could manage leads, automate marketing, and accelerate performance across its entire family of brands.
Powering up with the HubSpot App Marketplace
By the end of 2022, Recreational Group decided to consolidate their data, brands, and teams on HubSpot’s Customer Platform. HubSpot quickly put Recreational Group brands on the same page, streamlining and standardizing processes.
At the same time, the business was excited to explore the HubSpot App Marketplace to extend the power of HubSpot to its diverse teams even more. HubSpot apps made it easy for Delanie to integrate the tools already favored by Recreational Group teams with HubSpot—delivering even more flexibility and value.
Improving lead capture with the Typeform app
Recreational Group started by using the Typeform app for HubSpot to turbocharge its lead generation for VersaCourt, Swisstrax, and Ultra Base Systems. Delanie and her team easily create forms and quizzes, and the captured data automatically syncs with HubSpot, eliminating the need for spreadsheets or manual data entry.
At one trade show, Recreational Group used the Typeform app to create an eye-catching form on an iPad to capture contact information on the spot. The form captured nearly 500 leads, worth almost $2M in potential influenced new revenue. The form seamlessly connected to HubSpot, triggering automated, personalized email sequences matched to each prospect’s journey, moving them closer to making a purchase.
The company also uses Typeform quizzes on its brand homepages to attract even more leads and automatically send them to HubSpot. These quizzes continue to average nearly $1M of potential influenced revenue every quarter they are live.
Delanie says, “With one of our products, the quiz was at the bottom of the homepage. We didn't even promote it, and it had a ton of traffic and conversions natively.”
Those leads automatically became part of the HubSpot sales funnel, increasing the odds of closing more sales—and closing them faster. Delanie also estimates that the automated lead follow-up saves the team about 15 hours a week per business unit.
“Everybody's getting notified now; the customer's getting notified, workflow is immediately active, and we're able to follow up instantly, which closes the gap on lead time and speeds up the sales cycle overall,” says Delanie.
Optimizing advertising with the RollWorks ABM app
Recreational Group also uses the RollWorks app for HubSpot to identify target audiences, prioritize valuable accounts, and create tailored digital advertising campaigns that forge deeper connections with customers.
Delanie explains, “We're able to have this cool communication between paid ads that are targeted within Google and other search efforts. And then they're triggered within HubSpot as a new account possibility with high intent. RollWorks also flags re-engagement from people returning to the Ultra Base Systems website. Again, that information gets transferred into HubSpot, and it notifies my sales team in real time.”
As a marketing leader, Delanie finds the granular level of detail in HubSpot pure gold. “When the Board asks why I should have more money for marketing, I now have the data to prove it. I can demonstrate that if I spent $900, got 27 conversions, and nine of those turned into paying customers. With RollWorks and HubSpot, I can attribute all of that in one spot.”
A connected tech stack yields increased efficiencies
Recreational Group receives even more benefits from using various apps as part of a complete ecosystem.
It starts with crafting content. The Canva app for HubSpot slashed 20 hours a week of design time for the Recreational Group team. Because they can quickly adapt designs to meet different platform requirements, they have more time to focus on other important priorities.
Delanie says, “The Canva app for HubSpot saves a ton of design time just for email marketing purposes. I think it saves even more time for social media creation, as we can adapt designs quickly to different specifications.”
From there, the team relies on the Shopify app to help convert leads, driving a 42% increase in orders year over year.
“With Shopify, its default field mappings enable us to personalize our marketing and easily create different abandoned cart emails, which boosts sales,” says Delanie.
Their Purchase Green business unit securely routes leads using the NetSuite app, which ensures they get leads to the right franchisee locations quickly. Automating data transfer saves 30 hours a week while eliminating manual data entry and human error.
Delanie and the Recreational Group team are also working to integrate HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics 365, which will effectively close the loop between Sales, Marketing, Finance, and Operations on a larger scale.
“Once we're able to sync that with HubSpot, I think it's going to be an even bigger game changer,” Delanie adds.
4,000% increase in social media clicks
Recreational Group is also benefiting from a major boost in brand visibility and website traffic. Since integrating social media apps with HubSpot, like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube, they’ve seen a 4,000% surge in clicks across their social media campaigns.
Delanie explained, “Once the social accounts for Xgrass, Recreational Group Event Surfaces, Swisstrax, VersaCourt (and so many more) were connected, we've been able to dive into that live data. We’ve seen a 114% increase in interactions, 172% increase in impressions, and 1,200% more sessions generated on our family of companies’ websites, which is all pretty cool.”
When existing leads express new intent by interacting with ads on social media or Google, the follow-up is personalized with the help of automated email sequences, lead scoring, and an overall personalized experience and customer journey.
She says, “I don't know if you can put a price on personalizing emails based on the pages people are visiting, especially when it comes to the kind of high-end products we sell. All of it adds up to a lot, and we have only just begun.”
Delanie concluded, “At the end of the day, HubSpot is the star of the show, and every integration exists to simply get the information to HubSpot so that HubSpot can ‘do its thang!’”
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