Salesforce + Six Other Products
Stephanie Hunter, COO and Co-Founder at Ving, never imagined implementing HubSpot a second time.
Ving used HubSpot in its early days, but implementation wasn’t a priority.
As a result, Ving eventually moved to Salesforce as a cost-saving measure for the company. By signing up for only two or three seats for the sales team, Ving thought it would get what it needed and come out ahead financially.
But after three years of using Salesforce, switching back to the HubSpot CRM became a topic of discussion. The projected cost savings didn’t materialize because Stephanie and her team had to implement additional tools to get the functionality they needed — and the cost of those tools added up.
Stephanie explains:
“We needed a platform for our blog content, then marketing, and then customer service. Over time, we accumulated six products in addition to Salesforce, including Act-On, Mailchimp, Google Analytics, WordPress, and Zendesk.”
Not only were the accumulated costs of these disparate tools expensive, they also made it hard to get a complete picture of leads and customers. Stephanie spent a lot of time pulling data from separate systems and manually combining them.
While Stephanie and her team considered their options, Tony DeAscentis, Ving CEO and Co-Founder, attended INBOUND, HubSpot’s annual user conference. He was struck by the stories of businesses using HubSpot to grow.
So the Ving team took another look at HubSpot, using an evaluation grid that included partner relationships, goals, expected outcomes, internal resources, and costs. It soon became apparent that HubSpot had all the features Ving needed in a single platform.
Thus, Stephanie and her team decided to implement the HubSpot CRM again. But this time, they would make implementation a top priority.
“HubSpot isn’t complicated, but it is super powerful,” says Stephanie. “If you don’t put effort into it, you won’t get what you want out of it. We decided that if we were going to spend this money on HubSpot, we weren’t just going to succeed, we were going to crush it.”
Consolidating Sales, Marketing, and Service on HubSpot
Ving got off to a strong start by putting Success Manager Karen Gerberry in charge of the implementation.
Karen’s dedication, combined with the efforts of HubSpot’s implementation manager, made all the difference this time around — and was a marked contrast with their Salesforce implementation three years ago.
“With Salesforce, you had to basically teach yourself and just wing it,” says Stephanie. “But HubSpot assigned us an implementation manager and set up a schedule. We knew exactly what we needed to do at each stage.”
A Smooth and Fast Implementation
Thanks to Ving’s dedication and commitment to the onboarding process, Karen and her team implemented HubSpot in record time.
Stephanie was particularly impressed that her HubSpot implementation manager made improvements at every step.
“We had a very short window to download information from Salesforce that we would need to upload back into HubSpot, which was stressful,” says Stephanie. “HubSpot not only uploaded it for us, but they also applied best practices throughout the process, particularly with the templates.”
Stephanie was also impressed by the attention to detail and consistent follow-through.
“If we asked about something in a meeting, the implementation manager would always get back to us with an answer,” says Stephanie. “She was always one step ahead of us.”
The Ving team was so impressed with the implementation, and with HubSpot in general, they eventually expanded Ving’s tech stack to include Marketing Hub, CMS Hub, Service Hub, and Sales Hub.
Tracking Leads and Customers Through Every Stage
One of the biggest benefits of having sales, marketing, and service on one platform is that Ving can track the journey of leads and customers from beginning to end in one place. So when a customer interacts with any Ving team, every team can see and understand the context.
Stephanie explains with an example:
“When someone clicks on a LinkedIn ad, we already know a lot about that person. We can see if they’ve visited our site before and what pages. We can see if they’ve already engaged us in a conversation. By the time that lead is served up to sales, we already know a lot about them and their interests, which gives the sales team a huge advantage.”
These cross-functional data insights have been particularly important for identifying and retaining at-risk clients when their contracts come up for renewal. Three months before the contract is due, workflows flag the renewal and pull client information together so the sales team can easily see the revenue, upgrades, customer service tickets, and other important information.
“We can determine who is at risk of leaving, which has been really powerful for retention,” says Stephanie.
Ongoing Proactive Support
Ving continues to get proactive support from its HubSpot customer success manager, long after the onboarding process has concluded. In fact, the customer success manager is often working on issues before Ving is even aware of them.
A recent example is an email campaign with several hard bounces.
“Before we could even pick up the phone to reach our customer success manager, she called us to talk about what happened and look into it,” says Stephanie. “She’s always watching out for us.”
This proactive support applies not just to troubleshooting but also to finding new opportunities.
“We don’t always have time to dig in and look at what else we could be doing with HubSpot,” says Stephanie. “Our customer success manager does a lot of this for us because she completely understands our business and where we’re going. She lets us know when we’re ready to progress to the next stage.”
A Voice in Future Development
Stephanie and her team also have sway with HubSpot when it comes to product and feature development. Not only have they been invited to participate in beta trials, but they also feel their voices are heard when they ask for a feature or function.
For example, Ving is a longtime user of Quickbooks and wanted to continue using it. But Quickbooks wasn’t integrated with HubSpot at the time.
“We raised the issue with our customer success manager, and she took the issue forward for us,” says Stephanie. “And guess what? Now HubSpot has Quickbooks integration.”
Maximizing Team Efficiencies
Now that sales, marketing, and customer data all live inside HubSpot, Stephanie no longer spends hours pulling data from multiple tools, and the data is more complete and accurate.
It also helps Ving keep its sales team lean. In fact, the team is smaller today than it was when using Salesforce, even as revenue has increased.
“We’re very, very, very lean and a lot of that is because of HubSpot,” says Stephanie. “We don’t have to hire people to do certain things because HubSpot does them automatically.”
96% Increase in Revenue
With the help of the HubSpot CRM platform, Ving is growing its revenue by 96% per year on average.
It also increased site visits by almost 150% in just one year and increased leads by 360%.
Further, its NPS scores are strong, with 88% of respondents categorizing themselves as “promoters” of the Ving brand year-to-date in 2021.
With these outstanding results, Stephanie is thrilled that Ving decided to implement HubSpot a second time — and maximize what they could do with it.
It’s not surprising that Stephanie recommends HubSpot over Salesforce in most cases.
“If you’re just looking for a regular CRM, then fine, stay with Salesforce,” says Stephanie. “But if you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that goes far beyond a CRM, that takes into account how you work with your customers on their entire journey from qualifying to retaining, I would 100 percent go with HubSpot. It will help you go further, grow your business and understand your customer.”
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