Transforming The Customer Journey and Sales Process with HubSpot

Overview

SmartAcre worked with a long-time client (a leading US iron foundry) to leverage its investment in HubSpot to help improve processes and provide the leadership team with a comprehensive view of work across all departments. Like many companies with complex manufacturing processes, the foundry needed to find a way to streamline and improve their quoting process to help continue to deliver on their promise of providing a great customer experience. Since they were already using HubSpot’s marketing components effectively for marketing emails, social media, and contact management, SmartAcre recommended using HubSpot’s Sales tools to streamline the complex request for quote handoffs.

SmartAcre implemented the Hubspot-based quote management process to help achieve their goal of 99% on-time delivery of quotes to prospective customers. This approach is one of several business process optimizations the foundry uses to grow their business by integrating actionable metrics. Through a partnership with SmartAcre, they wanted to:

• Increase customer satisfaction through a better user experience with more timely updates, accurate status reporting, and improved communications
• Meet or exceed their sales and revenue goals by delivering more closed-won opportunities
• Maximize their ROI in HubSpot

Challenge

The multi-step sequence involved 5-6 business units within the company and they decided they needed a clear SOP to help optimize hand-offs between units:

• a lead would engage with sales, expressing the need for a quote
• sales would relay this to the pricing office for numerical data
• the quoting team would then collaborate with engineering to ensure clarity on the customer’s objectives
• the customer would receive the project quote
• Once the quote was provided, sales would own all follow-ups, without much organizational visibility to activities or results which ranged from in progress, closed won or lost, or stalled.
• Even after a project was closed-won, the manufacturing process required many additional steps focusing on tooling, quality control, and customer sign-off approval of prototype parts.

Because actions and status reporting were siloed within each business team, communications back to the customer were sometimes delayed, causing them to feel uncertain about the state of their quote/project.

Approach

Strategy

Our strategy centered on leveraging HubSpot’s Deal Management tools within Sales Hub to strategically organize deal stages, owners, and tasks. The primary objective was to establish a scalable process that provided clear ownership and accountability at each deal stage so the internal stakeholders and the customer could know where a project stood at any given time. The initial step involved identifying ownership, acquisition dates, and completion status, and monitoring timely progress in order to address any overdue or overlooked tasks.

Development

In tandem, we defined eight distinct deal stages tailored to encompass the production process and established internal communication strategies using HubSpot’s native task and notification tools. Our system included all production stages, plus it incorporated additional status tracking for “Closed Lost,” “Rejected,” and “Stalled” opportunities to maximize visibility to any possible outcome.

Training

Key to this project was creating complete, easy-to-understand documentation and ensuring that key stakeholders from each business unit were up-to-speed on the new process and tools. Through 1:1 and group sessions, we conducted team training to help them onboard and ensure the smooth adoption of the tools and dashboard. In our sessions, we walked them through the new sales process, showing them how to create deals, move them through the different stages, react to alerts they would be receiving and generating for others, and troubleshoot issues if they arose.

Outcomes