How We Simply Closed 2x More Deals than a HubSpot Platinum Agency
Our motto: MARKETING + SALES = GROWTH
To make it easier, I divided this article into 4 parts:
Establishing ScaleOps - A Sales Operations Consulting firm.
My First HubSpot CRM Project.
How I Met a Leading HubSpot Agency in Israel and How It Became a Success Story.
What We Actually did to Close More Deals and Increase Revenues.
Establishing ScaleOps - A Sales Operations Consulting Firm
It started three years ago. Up until then, I was a sales operations manager, employed by another company. I was working with Salesforce, one of the leading CRM software in the tech industry. For most of my career I worked with Salesforce, which brought me to be a Salesforce Admin -- in that role I spent time creating new processes, and improving the company’s existing ones.
Salesforce Event in Tel Aviv
Shortly after I became self-employed and opened ScaleOps, I got a new project with a cybersecurity company. Their goal was to implement a CRM and train their sales team to use it. The cybersecurity company chose to implement HubSpot CRM, as they already used the marketing platform and thought it would be great to have the CRM in the same place as their Marketing Automation tool.
My First HubSpot CRM Onboarding Project
At this stage, I FELL IN LOVE WITH HUBSPOT.
One month after the project began, I had done research and auditing for them, and we started to implement their sales strategy in HubSpot. We did an implementation process which included:
Positioning – defining the goals and success criteria.
Onboarding – educating the customer about the new system.
Executing – Data migration, system setup, automation, content creation, business alignment reporting, integration, and configuration as needed.
Tracking – monitoring the project through the agreed-upon timeline and checklist of implementation tasks.
Off-boarding – Train the client and giving them everything they need to be successful.
It was a successful project. When we started, I learned that HubSpot was upgrading their platforms regularly. They began to focus on sales, and added more and more sales oriented features within a YEAR!
HubSpot understands and educates people to work with both teams—Sales and Marketing. In the last year, they also released the Service Hub, and began to encourage companies to merge all Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success Operations into one place! The world is, without a doubt, changing too fast!
How I Met a Leading HubSpot Agency in Israel and How It Became a Success Story
A year later, I wanted to have more HubSpot projects.
I wanted to train sales teams to work with HubSpot, implementing the processes and sales strategy through HubSpot, and of course, work closely with marketing teams to increase revenues. I started to contact marketing agencies in Israel and suggest we collaborate. When I started, I didn’t realize the impact collaboration would make. I was pleasantly surprised at the effect it had.
Through LinkedIn, I met a super lovely and well-known woman in Israel named Resa Gooding. Many people would agree she’s the #1 marketing automation expert. She opened a successful marketing agency called Cacao Media, together with Joseph Efraim. Nevertheless, at some stage, they realized they needed a sales expert to make their agency even more exclusive and valuable. That's where I came in.
After one meeting together, we knew we had a great plan. We would bring together their strengths of marketing from the agency’s side and strengths of sales operations from my side to complete the whole approach and bring more significant value to the customer.
What We Actually did to Close More Deals and Increase Revenue
We added these four main sales services packages to our proposals, which increased the proposal amount and helped to align Sales and Marketing teams for our clients:
HubSpot Sales CRM Implementation and On-Boarding
HubSpot and Salesforce Integration
Sales Operations/Enablement and Support
Sales and Marketing Alignment Training – Building a Robust Revenue Machine
HubSpot Sales, CRM Implementation and On-Boarding
This may seem like the most straightforward part, but it's not so simple. Implementing a CRM is a critical point in which you need to understand your sales strategy and build the right processes for your company to use for years to come.
The sales CRM implementation process includes various factors that may change aspects and habits of the company when they start using the CRM. The process involves sales strategies and an in-depth understanding of business. It goes as follows:
A full audit of procedures, software, and existing policies and guidelines.
In-depth interviews with team members across different departments to assess synergy among departments.
Research on existing sales strategies, including exploring the current state of sales, client profiles, your salespeople’s processes for customer engagement along with the tools and materials they use.
Explore current lead to cash processes, sales forecasting, sales pipelining, booking and backlog analysis, management of renewals, strategic marketing, conversions, and more.
Identify problematic areas and craft solutions.
Develop a CRM and sales processes to create a reliable infrastructure.
Put KPIs into place and monitor metrics to ensure that goals are met.
Steer sales and train team members to collaborate for efficient work.
HubSpot and Salesforce Integration
Some companies choose Salesforce as their CRM, but prefer to use HubSpot as their marketing automation tool instead of Pardot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
In this case, to keep the sales and marketing teams aligned (which will allow them to get leads generated from HubSpot and measure ROI) they must integrate the two systems.
As a customer, or as their agency, you must execute a few necessary steps to complete the integration successfully:
Understand and design the entire Marketing and Sales process --> leads to cash.
Recognize which information you will need to take out from HubSpot to Salesforce or vice versa.
Map all fields and properties first in an excel file.
Transform companies, contacts and deal properties into accounts, leads and opportunities.
Create mapping solely with compatible properties and fields.
Verify that Salesforce and HubSpot contain the same field values.
HubSpot and Salesforce integration can get more complicated if the company uses customizations in their Salesforce.
Remember, in the end, that Salesforce and HubSpot are two different systems with different technological infrastructures -- we need to find the best way to make them work with each other.
Sales Operations/Enablement and Support
Sales operations is all about helping the sales team focus on sales by spending less time on operations -- this simplifies the sales processes.
Every company reaches a point when it's necessary to hire someone to perform sales operations for its sales team. The sales operations role includes many responsibilities. To demonstrate them, I have shared this chart (made by LucidChart) which describes the role of Sales Operations (you can also find it here.)
Strategy Includes:
Sales process optimization
Sales technology and methodology evaluation
Sales coverage model and territory planning
High-level planning and goal setting
Data analysis
Sales forecasting
Performance Includes:
Implementation of sales methodologies and best practices
Identifying KPIs and sales metrics
Compensation and incentive plans
Lead management
Operations Include:
Product training
Sales training
Hiring and onboarding top talent
Market intelligence support
Contracts and SLAs
KB management
Technology Includes:
Integration of apps and tools
Adoption and customization of a CRM
Communications management
Data management and reporting
Task automation
Sales and Marketing Alignment Training – Building a Robust Revenue Machine
According to HubSpot, sales and marketing alignment can help your company become 67% better at closing deals and can help generate 209% more revenue from marketing.
Over time, as we kept working with Cacao, we better understood the importance of alignment between the sales and marketing teams. So, we promptly partnered up and collaborated with both teams -- Cacao lead the marketing team and we lead the sales team. As we learned to better connect the two teams, projects became more successful and increased in value. Today, more and more companies are deciding to merge their operations -- they are having both teams report to the same person. This helps the company at large and the individual teams define the same goal, which decreases overall competition.
Once we understood the importance of this methodology, we started to help companies improve their sales and marketing alignment. We began training them to go through the sales and marketing alignment process. This includes: scheduling marketing meetings, defining SLA between the two teams, having a content creation process in place, and most importantly getting to know each other better by developing good relationships with one another.
We are looking for additional partnerships with agencies around the globe. We would love to work with your agency and help you scale your business.
Let’s e-meet and decide if we are a good fit to work together: Click here to schedule a meeting.