A game-changer for our Sales, Marketing, and Underwriting collaboration
Updated November 23, 2015
A game-changer for our Sales, Marketing, and Underwriting collaboration
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
With HubSpot Professional
Modules Used
- Mostly Contacts and Deals
Overall Satisfaction with HubSpot CRM
HubSpot CRM is being used by our marketing, underwriting and sales teams. We migrated from SugarCRM. Our sales team usage had declined on our old CRM. It was not helping them sell and it felt like a tax by corporate and management to record all their data. The biggest impact it's had on our company is related to data gathering and inter-department communication.Our proposals take quite a bit of data gathering as we collect what we need from a business in order to provide a quote for our PEO services. Our sales reps used to gather all this information on offline forms that they would then pass to underwriting and emails were passed back and forth to work the proposal out. It was a tedious process and we were not capturing a lot of data that would be valuable for our marketing, underwriting, sales, and executive teams. HubSpot has provided an excellent platform where we have managers from all three departments (marketing, underwriting, and sales) as well as team members in each department now gathering all data in one central spot (deal timelines), with a central spot for communication (notes,mentions, tasks, and attachments) on the deal timeline.
- Integrated database. Beyond providing this central spot for data gathering and communication between sales and underwriting, the integrated database that our marketing and sales team now shares has made a huge impact. The ability for your sales and marketing teams to access and share data about a single contact is huge for closed loop analytics that are imperative for efficient marketing these days.
- Digital Tools for prospecting. The sidekick integration for email sending and tracking is awesome. Visiting a site and then bringing company info into the CRM with one click using the Sidekick extension has been awesome as well. We love the email templates too.
- Providing context for sales reps. Each contact has a timeline of all events and interactions related to that contact. After our marketing team generates a lead that is read to pass to sales all the data we have for that contact goes with the contact and the rep has incredible historic and contextual information that they can use to customize their followups. This helps us provide more value and close faster as well as waste less time.
- Workflows. We use workflows on the marketing side based on certain CRM field triggers. For example - When a rep has collected the data they need on the deal timeline the check a box that then sends automated emails to our underwriting team alerting them they need to generate a proposal for that contact etc... Saves tons of time. Links back to a central spot where all data related to the deal is located. Lots of other uses and benefits we use workflows for.
- The visual deal stage view is amazing. So useful to customize your stages and then allow reps to quickly visually see their pipeline and change deals to a new deal stage with click and drag.
- UPDATE: there was a new @ mention feature added to the CRM. Now a rep can @ mention any team member in a note on a contact's timeline. The person they mention gets an email and it takes them straight to the contact's timeline where they can then respond. It's been huge for us because we work out a lot of proposals and details on the contact timelines and it has completely eliminated the need to draft emails and insert a contact record link for this back and forth comm. A very nice feature!
- UPDATE: The view issue has been fixed! HubSpot listened to their users and they have now changed the marketing view of a contact to look just like the sales view so that I can make all the same edits and adjustments I could in the sales view right from the marketing view! This has been a major improvement.. There's not a lot of improvement areas I can think of. There was at the beginning and they have fixed quite a few of them like timezone issues, default field issues, and view issues when going back and forth from sales to marketing contact views. I'd say the views issue is still something to work on. When a marketer is viewing a contact and a sales rep is viewing a contact I'd like to be able to (as an admin) control what each team members sees. Instead sales rep have ability to change fields they view and it makes it challenging to have a consistent experience for all users.
- More templates instead of just 5 for emails would be useful as well.
- The first reporting dashboard you see after logging in should be much more useful than it is. It really doesn't do much for reps or managers.
- Reporting is still a big weak spot. I like all the things managers and admins can do when we use custom views, but a few template reports to quickly customize would be nice to see as well.
- From a manager/admin perspective there's much that could be done to give us more options on what we control as far as which users see which fields and be able to control and limit customization of end users.
- Increased prospecting power is a definite plus. The tools it puts in your reps hands will help them propspect more efficiently and powerfully, e.g. Sidekick and HubSpot company database.
- Better deal tracking and reporting.
- More effective followups using the rich background information available on the timeline.
- Better communication internally to make our sales, marketing, and underwriting teams more effective and work better together.
Both of the CRMs I've worked with in the past were too bulky and cluttered. They also did not have the integrated database with marketing that give me such powerful closed loop analytics. From first touch to sold this helps us track what happens to leads better than any I've ever seen. It is simpler to use, cleaner, and helps reps sell better than any I've ever seen.
HubSpot CRM Feature Ratings
Using HubSpot CRM
15 - Marketing, Sales, Underwriting, c-suite.
2 - There's really not much. Basic import and export capabilities with csv formats and a basic understanding of the platform.
- Lead management. Marketing uses to deliver leads to sales rep. We have automated workflows when assignments happen to help reps manage their leads. Seeing lifecycles, and getting them closed. This CRM is a pivotal part of our sales process and following up with corporate assigned leads.
- Proposal process. Because of the simplicity AND the power of the CRM and how it can be customized we've been able to create a custom process that allows our underwriting team to work alongside our sales and marketing team together on a contact's timeline. Proposals are more centralized and communication is more organized.
- Activity tracking. Using the CRM, our national sales manager can pull weekly reports that are based on our custom sales funnel for each rep and their weekly activity.
- Data collection. Without a CRM your organization is not leveraging the data your sales team collects. The CRM has allowed us to combine marketing data with real sales data that our sales reps collect while gathering what they need to do proposal.
- Using custom fields, workflows, internal emails, contact timeline notes and mentions and the ability to attach documents on a timeline, this tool has opened up possibilities that we would have never dreamed out. It has transformed how we generated and communicate about proposals. It continues to spark new ideas and process improvements daily. This list could go on and on.
- We plan to do more deep integrations with Zapier and Trello to manager proposal processes with underwriting and also automate more of the processes using data collected in the CRM, dumping into g sheet on and then automating proposal generation.
- Improved sales forecasting and improving our target personas based on closed won deals and data we have been collecting.