TOOTRiS, a one-of-a-kind service provider connecting parents with high-quality child care, was in need of an efficient way to engage with its clients, prospects, and leads. From the beginning, Eric Cutler, CMO, understood the importance of having a CRM and marketing platform that would enable them to communicate with clients quickly, track their actions, identify roadblocks, and highlight user behavior. HubSpot proved to be just the right fit for their needs with scalable add-ons that could be purchased as the team expands.
TOOTRiS was established in 2019 to help families get access to the high-quality child care they deserve, and bring more parents – especially women – back into the workforce faster and with peace-of-mind. Their service uses mobile and web applications to help parents find, vet and enroll their children into educational programs. Although child care impacts parents, families, employers, and the economy, the founders found that the options haven’t adapted much in recent years. So, the company was built to work around the expectations of the “new normal” in family dynamics.
Focusing on the company’s growth and scalability, as a recently founded brand, the team didn’t want to struggle with juggling a lot of different tools and platforms. “I didn’t want to put ourselves in a position where we’re too busy setting up, integrating and managing a network of different marketing enablement tools that are all trying to talk to each other,” Eric explains.
TOOTRiS wanted a platform that could manage all the communication and touchpoints with their clients. The ability to frequently interact with parents was a crucial from day one. The initial research was narrowed down to six different tools, including Intercom for chat, Salesforce for CRM, and MailChimp for email marketing. “HubSpot’s competition was a half dozen companies combined, and my choice was to set up independent contracts and agreements, or go all-in with HubSpot,” Eric recalls.
When looking into the day-to-day activities of their team, Eric thought about all the work that having separate tools would require for the team. “Traffic comes to websites via a variety of channels and mediums, that must be passed back into your CRM and other marketing platforms. Systematically, keeping this clean and organized can be challenging, when relying on multiple systems. When you’re in the type of hyper rapid growth we are, I can’t have difficulty understanding or second guessing my analytics,” Eric adds. HubSpot could offer an integrated approach where the team only had to learn one tool and have the option to scale with it through the multiple tier offerings. It would then become the all-in-one platform across their marketing, sales, and operation teams to streamline their processes, ensure constant communication with their customers, and support future growth.
For the marketing and operations teams at TOOTRiS, having a comprehensive marketing platform makes a massive difference since it allows them to communicate in a timely manner and maintain a close relationship with their customers. “We are the subject matter experts when it comes to everything childcare, and there’s a lot of different ways that we interact with our clients,” the CMO explains.
In under a year, the company has leveraged HubSpot Marketing and Sales Hub Professional across the board. Eric says that the most loved features are the Automation, and Workflows, as the latter has improved lead management by 20%, as well as the ease in which they can be integrated into TOOTRiS’ marketing campaigns. HubSpot captures in-depth analytics on email activities, website traffic, form submissions, and lots of other performance metrics in a digestible view. This enables them to create triggers and automate actions across a lot of different channels, all within one tool.
“I can stay on top of where my clients are. If I see a client spending a lot of time in a particular area, we can use HubSpot’s native analytics to learn why, and either encourage that, or use as a trigger for an additional action. I can create automations, workflows and variant testing as quickly as we can see the use case, which frees us to stay focused on growing our company” – Eric Cutler, CMO.
The numerous integrations available through the HubSpot App Partner Program are not only valuable but also an added attribute. Having countless options through the marketplace makes it easier for them to choose the best supporting tool for any additional need. Taking advantage of the many integrations available, they recently began using SMS as a new communication tool, fully integrated into the HubSpot platform using Sakari SMS integration. As Eric explains: “The marketplace for HubSpot is pretty robust. For the SMS service, there are more than a dozen different options. We chose Sakari because it’s the best for what we need, but I appreciated that there are other options out there as well, testament to HubSpot’s Marketplace.”
Choosing HubSpot as the tool to be at the center of the sales and marketing efforts was an advantage for TOOTRiS’ communication tactics. It also represented robust cost savings as HubSpot proved to be about 30% cheaper than hiring multiple separate platforms. This is without even taking into account any additional work that might have been needed to tie all of them together and manage integrations.
Despite initial misconceptions about all-in-one platforms, HubSpot has proven to be just what they needed to be able to scale. “The main concern with all-in-one systems is that a sacrifice is being made when it comes to scalability. Once you pass a certain number of customers or data or web traffic or revenue, all-in-one systems must be broken up. But HubSpot’s already disproven that stereotype with the large clients out there that are using HubSpot to its full potential, so I’m not concerned that this is an issue at all.”
As TOOTRiS grows, so does the opportunity to leverage HubSpot for more initiatives. The team is confident that when a new need arises, they will be able to simply purchase an additional service within the platform and run operations seamlessly within HubSpot.
“There is no shortage of marketing and sales applications that we can use HubSpot for. Child care is an incredibly large challenge for our country, and as we work to fix it for parents, providers, and employers, I’m happy to know we can depend on HubSpot as an integral part of our marketing, content and communication efforts.” Eric reveals.