Talmundo founder Stijn De Groef spent much of his career as an HR executive, becoming increasingly frustrated with digital tools that made HR processes more complicated. He set up Talmundo to counteract this, and its employee onboarding app found significant traction in the marketplace.
However, by 2016, Talmundo realised that if it were to continue on its growth trajectory, it would need to rethink its marketing. “At the time, we were using a lot of disconnected tools, like MailChimp for emails and Google Analytics. We also had a WordPress website that the marketing team couldn’t update easily, and a custom CRM that no-one was using because it didn’t provide any insights,” explains Christina Chaplin, Head of Marketing at Talmundo.
Christina is a strong believer in the inbound methodology, so she wanted an all-in-one solution that would provide greater automation and joined-up analytics. She also had an eye on the future. Talmundo was hoping to secure funding that would allow it to scale, so it needed to prove that its marketing and sales functions were on point and could accelerate quickly with additional funding.
She evaluated Pardot and Marketo and considered using Salesforce as an add-on CRM. However, she found that HubSpot had the most compelling proposition. “We loved the look and feel of HubSpot Marketing Hub; it was user-friendly and had all the powerful features we needed under one roof. As well as that, we were impressed by the support that HubSpot was offering – nothing was too much trouble! We especially liked its straightforward onboarding program, which we believed would help us to hit the ground running.”
The fact that HubSpot offered a free CRM and sales software was also a significant draw. Talmundo was a company on the rise, and it needed to choose a platform that could grow along with its teams. Talmundo decided to go ahead and signed up for Marketing Hub Professional in June 2016.
The HubSpot onboarding team helped Talmundo transfer its entire website from WordPress to the CMS Hub. “HubSpot made the whole process so easy. They took our existing website and completely rebuilt it – all we had to do was double check that it looked how it was supposed to,” says Christina.
After that, Talmundo could get down to the business of optimising its site. Christina and her team set up landing pages, calls-to-action and pop-up forms, as well as the workflows that would maximise their impact. HubSpot analytics became a big part of her day-to-day, allowing her to make data-driven decisions in a way that simply hadn’t been possible before.
“When I was using point solutions, all my time was taken up with executing marketing rather than analysing and optimising it. Now I can create reports on virtually any metric and see what is working and what isn’t.”
Sales and marketing alignment has also improved. HubSpot CRM connects with HubSpot Marketing Hub, which allows for better communication between teams and the smoother transition of leads. Every interaction that a prospect has had with the company is logged automatically, making sales outreach more personalised and successful, crucial for an enterprise-level software company. “By mid-2018, we had expanded our sales team considerably and decided to switch from the free HubSpot sales tools to HubSpot Sales Hub. We felt that we were in a position to get value out of all the extra features by that point.”
The sequences tool has proved particularly popular with Talmundo’s salespeople. With it, they can turn their most effective and repetitive sales emails into templates and send them to prospects at just the right time. “The automation features are such a timesaver. Our sales department can service two to three times more accounts now, and it’s virtually impossible for leads to slip through the cracks.”
Talmundo has also made use of all the support that HubSpot provides. Christina has completed many certifications through the HubSpot Academy, and she is in regular contact with her HubSpot account manager who is an Inbound Consultant. “We discuss everything from technical issues to long-term tactics, but sometimes it’s just helpful to have an outside person to bounce ideas off. He brings a lot of knowledge to the table. He knows the HubSpot software inside and out, and he knows our sector so those conversations can be very productive.”
Since signing up with HubSpot, Talmundo has seen improvements across all of its key metrics. However, things took off in 2018, when it aligned its sales and marketing teams and intensified its use of the HubSpot software. “In just the past 12 months, we increased our web traffic by 252% and boosted new leads by 313%. That’s impacted our sales conversions, which are up by 73%,” says Christina.
Talmundo has also adopted HubSpot’s new flywheel methodology, which puts the customer at the centre of everything that a company does. Whereas the funnel approach traditionally encouraged marketing and sales to work together to attract and engage customers, it didn’t account for how important it is to keep delighting them at every stage – including after they close.
“Our flywheel is already turning pretty fast between marketing and sales, so our next step is to spend more time working on customer success. We want to build meaningful relationships with our customers because when they thrive, we thrive. Their word of mouth, reviews and referrals drive new business, and their feedback helps us create a more delightful end-to-end client experience.”
Talmundo’s long-term goal, according to Christina, is to keep scaling. “That’s always been our intention, but I think that now we are ready to really turn things up. Our teams are working together, we’ve optimised our processes, and we have more time to spend on strategy. HubSpot has been a big part of that.”