Manufacturing Client Gains Full Funnel Quote Management with HubSpot

Overview

EIC Solutions, Inc. is a manufacturing client that has been working with SmartAcre for 15 years. In the time we’ve been working with them, we’ve seen their business enjoy exciting growth and they look forward to continuing, and accelerating, that growth pattern. To help them meet their exponential growth targets, as a recurring theme in our RevOps strategy conversations this year we’ve focused on developing strategic ways they could optimize and measure their sales, follow-up, and quote management to support their business objectives. This exercise included a rapid assessment of their current tools and processes. In their current state, EIC used a custom CPQ solution SmartAcre built for them, which has been meeting their needs well for the last eight years. The CPQ, or cost, price, and quote, system is used to manage requests for quotes and orders, and informally also provides some operational CRM, customer service, and sales reporting functionality. In addition to this custom CPQ application, EIC’s business operations tech stack also includes HubSpot Sales & Marketing Tools, Fishbowl Inventory Management, and Quickbooks Accounting, however, the systems were only very loosely integrated which hampered operational efficiency and prevented end-to-end reporting capabilities.

Challenge

In 2020, EIC migrated from Pardot to HubSpot as their marketing automation engine which brought many new features and functionality, but despite the updated capabilities, there was still a gap in their ability to completely connect the dots from lead to revenue funnel. That was because they were managing all of their quotes externally from their marketing automation and CRM platform. In essence, their CPQ system was partially acting as a secondary CRM for sales and order data. We were managing marketing in one stack and orders, revenue, and customers in another stack. Recognizing this inefficiency and the blindspots it was creating, we launched a project to bring these two stacks together. With that, a significant opportunity arose to change the dynamic of how sales follow-ups occur through increased efficiency, reduced redundancy, and improved messaging. Not only was this important for improved sales and marketing performance, it was imperative to help this client reach their sales goals.

Approach

We have incrementally launched pieces of our HubSpot CPQ/CRM solution along the way. The future state will have leads flowing through a custom-built system in HubSpot: custom-built workflows, a bespoke quote management system, deal management system for sight-lines into a singular view of the lifecycle of the customer (from initial interest, through to final closed won orders). Plus along the way, we have a prescriptive set of sales touches that are optimized to meet their business needs, reduce unnecessary marketing touches to leads who are in active contact with sales, and make sure the sales communications are always on point and are of the highest quality.

In their previous system, the marketing team had to make educated guesses about the lead lifecycle using the best available data. We knew the quotes were in progress but we had to fall back to generalized nurture follow-up when there was an open quote  – which we knew could be improved.

Now the sales team has SLAs that they’re held accountable to which include:

• Initial outreach to inquiries
• Cadences for post quote followups
• Defined sales revenue targets

All of this is managed through a well-integrated workflow and task management process using Hubspot’s SalesHub.

Outcomes

New Sales Enablement

We’ve developed a system that is wholly based in HubSpot using a series of event and data-based workflow triggers, a series of internal task notifications, internal emails cueing sales activity, and reporting dashboards that deliver real-time visibility to sales, operations, and organizational leaders. With these tools, instruments to track progress, and a clear set of SOPs, progress against monthly and annual sales goals can be tracked so the organization can close more deals and grow its business revenue. All team members have easy access to at-glance reports showing the number of new deals that have been opened, what state is each one of them in, and team activity/leaderboards.

New Native Integration

SmartAcre secured the sales team’s buy-in at the onset of the project as the first of a multiphase rollout program that included integrating Fishbowl, their inventory, and manufacturing ERP.

• Phase 1 – Begin integrating CPQ data from their current system into Hubspot to provide a proof of concept of our planned future state and establish the reporting framework and dataset.
• Phase 2 – Develop and launch the Sales Enablement framework including event-based triggers to create Deals, tasks, and notifications, to help the small sales team track and successfully manage hundreds of quotes simultaneously.
• Phase 3 – Launch the new Hubspot-based quoting system and integrate it with their Fishbowl inventory management and ERP software via a bi-directional data feed.

Informed Marketing Campaigns

In addition to the native sales benefits this new system offers, we will use this new integrated sales data to more strategically target marketing messaging to customers based on buying history, leads based on closed lost reasons, and to look for new ways to expand sales opportunities with ABM campaigns targeting ideal customer profiles in ways not possible with the previously fragmented business data.

We also know that the process improvements and better reporting tools will minimize the number of quotes that end up stuck in a pending state (neither won nor lost) and that the sales team has the best opportunity to focus their efforts on the most lucrative deals sales to help them hit their revenue targets.

Through a strategic implementation approach and integrated solutions, we have achieved significant milestones in our sales and marketing operations, including:

1. Meaningfully improved their ability to track marketing efficacy and increase the visibility of sales tasks and results
2. Unified CPQ and High-Level Revenue Overview Reporting
3. Boosted Operational efficiency and increased reporting capabilities so we can operate channel performance for a data-driven sales pipeline

Together with EIC, we’ve implemented a comprehensive sales enablement system within HubSpot, featuring event and data-driven workflows, internal task notifications, and real-time reporting dashboards. Through a phased approach, we successfully integrated CPQ data into HubSpot, launched a Sales Enablement framework for efficient quote management, and introduced a new HubSpot-based quoting system. Now we have informed targeted marketing campaigns based on buying history and closed lost reasons, resulting in improved tracking of marketing metrics, increased visibility of sales tasks and results, and enhanced operational efficiency for a data-driven sales pipeline.