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The Challenge
Lack of Connection Between Departments, Regions, and Teams
Unipart’s enduring success is built on helping its customers grow by streamlining their supply chains and performance improvement technologies.
However, Unipart’s five divisions had grown and developed independently, and each ran a variety of software systems and spreadsheets, with three CRM tools used across the group.
Without visibility across the business, Unipart couldn’t easily meet clients' end-to-end needs. It was also hard to accurately define the pipeline of potential new business and cross-sell opportunities it would need to convert to achieve its goals.
In October 2022, Unipart CEO Darren Leigh took the reins with a bold ambition to double revenue, unify customer experience, accelerate sales growth, and efficiently manage increased demand to ensure profitable growth.
When Adam Jones joined as Director of Business Development with a mandate to deliver these targets, he knew to achieve them, a major digital transformation was needed.
"The data I needed to fuel revenue and manage customer satisfaction was non-existent. Contracts, past sales, contact details, and reports were scattered across multiple systems – sometimes on individual account managers' laptops or in their heads." - Adam Jones, Director of Business Development, Unipart.
For an enterprise with thousands of major contracts and customers worldwide, there was significant untapped potential to be realized by unifying its systems, broadening its solutions, and taking the brakes off global growth.
The Solution
Unipart unifies five divisions of its global operation in just months
Unipart decided to invest in one global customer platform to manage everything from new sales pipeline and existing client relationships, to communications and customer service.
As an important strategic decision, Unipart researched the market and assessed a range of enterprise solutions. According to Adam, there were distinct differentiators when it came to HubSpot.
"HubSpot took the time to understand our business needs fully. The pre-sales and subsequent support really stood out from the start. They committed to engage with us deeply and work side-by-side with us on the implementation. They’ve since more than met this commitment," says Adam.
And, Sales Hub’s ease of use and visual user interface were the deal-makers.
"I’ve used HubSpot before with great results, so it wasn’t a hard choice. Everyone hates admin – especially sales people! So I knew it had to be intuitive and painless to use, with minimal training, on laptops or mobiles. That’s the only way people will embrace and update it to build the accurate data you need to give customers a seamless service experience," Adam said.
HubSpot also offered the scalable long-term platform Unipart needs as it grows and has proven easy to customise and integrate into existing systems to bring it all together.
The first step in implementation was to collate every sales opportunity, including spreadsheets and other CRM systems, and centralise them into Sales Hub. BabelQuest, Unipart’s implementation partner and top Global HubSpot solutions partner, played a key role in ensuring a smooth and efficient deployment. While Unipart had allowed nine months for this process simplification and migration, with the help of BabelQuest they launched HubSpot five months early. Their expertise helped create custom dashboards and provided the visibility Unipart needed to manage its sales pipeline with newfound confidence. BabelQuest continues to work closely with Unipart, optimising their HubSpot instance toward conversion rates and accelerating revenue growth.
The 100% commitment to change from the top is a significant driver of the initiative's success.
"From division heads to managers and staff, everything has to be recorded on HubSpot. Forget slides, emails, phone calls, notes, and meetings scattered everywhere. We have a saying, ‘If it’s not on HubSpot, it doesn’t exist!’ It’s the only version of the truth," says Adam.
Transformation
Sales Hub supports Unipart’s growth and customer service agenda
From the moment Unipart had visibility across all divisions, it had achieved its return on investment. And within a year, fuelled by collaboration, accountability, and informed decision-making, Unipart saw the pipeline grow from millions into the billions, and is still growing.
This has been made possible by the ability to analyze data in real-time reporting dashboards, enabling Unipart to track monthly, quarterly, and annual targets and make accurate forecasts for resourcing and budgeting.
In addition to new business, Unipart identified opportunities to further support customers across regions, divisions, and solutions.
With centralized information, Unipart can interrogate data by account, region, and service to assess which customers are most profitable, what investment is needed, and where there is unmet need and growth potential.
Unipart has also boosted its NPS score by 5 points within 2024.
On a growth journey together with customers
From strategy and growth to service and reporting, Unipart's CEO and leadership team now run the global operation out of HubSpot.
With its operations unified across regions and divisions – from logistics and manufacturing to technology and consultancy – Unipart is equipped to help its customers grow faster by streamlining their global supply chains.
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