Lining up Sales and Marketing Operations
Over the last six years, Benjamin Jack has been Eastridge's Managing Director, and recently stepped into leading sales operations and marketing. One of the first challenges in his new role was to standardize operations and systems for the various sales teams. For that, Eastridge expanded the use of MS Dynamics as its singular sales CRM. On the marketing side, centralized campaigns were limited until they selected HubSpot last year for their journey into marketing automation."Last year, a top initiative for the company was to launch marketing automation and a planned company-wide approach. At first, we tried a marketing solution as an add-on to Dynamics called ClickDimensions, but it did not optimize outcomes due to some functional limitations. Then we chose HubSpot, which I knew mostly as a CRM. In the case of marketing automation, the more you use it, the more you like it, as usage begins to improve your database and metrics over time" says Benjamin.
Benjamin faced new operational challenges with this new system’s adoption: How could they bring MS Dynamics and HubSpot together? And overall, how could they align the efforts of marketing and sales to drive revenue?
Operations Hub: The Missing Piece
Eastridge had an experienced sales team collecting extensive customer data in MS Dynamics for years and by the end of 2019, the marketing team was ready to use HubSpot for marketing automation. It had a technology stack with an enormous potential to generate highly optimized marketing efforts based on their sales process. But there was one big problem.
Having the customer data from Dynamics in HubSpot and vice versa required hours of manual updating, importing and exporting.
“There was no connection between the applications. There was visibility only by merging spreadsheets and spending hours reviewing the document. Updates were then manually entered into Dynamics and HubSpot or delivered to the sales team which caused a gap in information. We couldn't start sending out campaigns if the data was not reliable.”
That's when Operations Hub's Data Sync came along. "We were researching several solutions, but when I tried Operations Hub, the level of integration with HubSpot made it clear to me that it was the only iPaaS that seemed to understand HubSpot,” says Benjamin.
The Eastridge sales team uses MS Dynamics' Marketing Lists. Those lists allow them to group leads according to particular criteria easily. Each one of those groups acts as a segment, and it then populates a specific marketing campaign within HubSpot. "The idea behind it is to minimize the effort that it takes for a salesperson to enter someone into a campaign. I want to make it easy for them just to check a box and know that those leads will go into the right campaign or multiple campaigns," says Benjamin.
In the other direction of the connection, Benjamin created a sync to have the HubSpot lead score always up-to-date in MS Dynamics. That way, when a lead starts to engage with the campaign, HubSpot's scoring system available in Dynamics gives the salesperson an idea of the level of interaction and specifically what is driving the interactions.
On top of that setup, 'contact owners' from MS Dynamics are also automatically assigned to the HubSpot leads. That way, each salesperson knows when to follow up with their assigned contacts.
According to Benjamin: "Operations Hub links Dynamics and HubSpot and automatically updates lead scoring, latest marketing communication, campaign designation, and new leads generated from marketing efforts are put directly into the sales process."
Even with open API applications and a big IT team, achieving this two-way software integration can be challenging and time-consuming. That's why one of Benjamin's favorite aspects of Operations Hub is the fact he can easily set it up himself.
“It took me one try to have things working, and it was pretty straightforward. I like Operations Hub because I can create and work independently, without having to ask an engineer or someone else to assist. Self-service is critical because I can easily test different ideas and modify them myself if necessary to reach the desired outcome.”
Growing with Operations Hub
By implementing HubSpot and Operations Hub, Eastridge started sending out continuous marketing campaigns that are aligned with their sales process and core service offerings. That new marketing effort has made their customer growth rate increase by 10%.
And since Operations Hub is automating the workflow between HubSpot and MS Dynamics, there's no need for spreadsheets or manual work. As a result, Eastridge's internal employees' satisfaction rate has experienced a 25% growth.
“We can put together two or three times as many campaigns in the same amount of time, with the same staff due to automation and curation of marketing lists.”
Even with these amazing results, Benjamin says there's still work to do, and Operations Hub are part of that future. From an operational standpoint, the three main challenges for Eastridge right now are automating, ensuring a centralized database, and guaranteeing data integrity and structure.
As their MS Dynamics database expands, Eastridge wants to supercharge its integration by syncing their 'Contacts' and 'Accounts', which are different types of objects within MS Dynamics. That type of setup could increase the reach of the marketing team and escalate the way the sales team visualizes the customer journey. “Right now, we're focused on tracking leads. The next step? I'd like to sync Microsoft 'Contacts', which are qualified decision-makers and existing clients for expansion into other service lines.”
They also want to start using HubSpot to communicate internally with their employees for newsletters and other notifications for candidates.
"Using Operations Hub is easy. The data sync interface is intuitive enough to establish integrations on the fly, and I have great reporting for tracking. I know I'll use it to manage my future integrations."
Overall, Benjamin is excited to have such strong integration features built within HubSpot:
"With Operations Hub, we can intuitively control the way our data flows between HubSpot and Dynamics 365 without the hassle of going to a third-party tool to establish every detail needed to sync. It saves the marketing and sales teams hours of work."
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