A leading ecommerce payment solutions provider approached Kuno Creative with a disjointed revenue operations process. The company was growing fast and, while HubSpot offered the tools they needed to tie their processes together, they lacked the internal expertise and bandwidth to close the gaps and accelerate their revenue growth processes for a booming market.
The Kuno Creative team took a deep dive into the client’s RevOps processes and interviewed department stakeholders to gain a better understanding of what areas needed the most attention. Documenting and prioritizing these processes was the first priority to develop a well-defined set of objectives that would deliver immediate impact for the client.
It was important that, while interviewing and gathering needs from individual departments, Kuno strategists worked towards a single project scope to drive home the fact that fragmented RevOps processes actually impacted everyone working within their HubSpot instance. Furthermore, viewing and leveraging HubSpot tools in a way that complemented each department would provide optimizations that were needed but had been to that point unidentified by users working in silos.
Once the discovery and interview process was completed, priorities were laid out into a comprehensive document that dictated ownership (for both Kuno and the client), timeline, resources needed to achieve and what success would look like.
With a small marketing department, the client was seeking ways to leverage HubSpot to simplify and optimize their lead acquisition process without compromising website user experience. Incoming leads were not being segmented and, in some cases, falling through the cracks entirely, as the team relied mainly on manual touches and sourcing. These missed leads left the team exposed to unforced errors, ultimately requiring more employee hours to correct. In addition, reporting was lacking and in need of attention to properly attribute successes and, again, eliminate manual sourcing.
As a company that plays in an often-times complicated and ever-shifting landscape, the marketing team’s primary avenue for lead generation was through informational webinars. The team invested significant time managing these presentations and manually importing/exporting data to ensure current systems and databases.
The Kuno team discovered that their form strategy was a clear area of opportunity. Kuno strategists and automation specialists developed a process to utilize hidden fields, naming conventions and automation to create a seamless lead collection mechanism poised to handle a scaling marketing team and all related processes. Additionally, the Kuno team assisted the client in standing up a Zoom integration to facilitate their webinar processes going forward. Once configured, Kuno trained the client on using the integration to ensure they had the tools needed to be self-sufficient and thrive in future initiatives.
All of these were built with reporting in mind in order to correctly and accurately attribute contact creation and activity in accessible and easy-to-digest dashboards.
What used to take the team hours of work is now almost entirely automated. Additionally, the Zoom webinar integration – which, with their Zoom subscription tier came at no additional cost – opened up new opportunities within Marketing Hub for a team that was still acclimating to the tool, allowing them to rapidly scale to meet their market’s demands. This allowed marketing a greater part in the revenue acquisition process, underscoring their efforts in the sales process.
The client came to Kuno with a solid, established sales game plan, however, they wanted to augment their efforts by incorporating an outside tool focused on commission structure, close a number of crucial data gaps and optimize processes surrounding existing integrations.
CaptivateIQ, a commission management platform, allows sales teams to create structure and define their commission process around important data points from third-party systems. From a HubSpot perspective, the platform where the sales team books meetings and manages deals, this meant a need to package data in a way that translates to the client’s commission payout points and integrated with CaptivateIQ’s system.
Because these data points were not something HubSpot tracks by default, the Kuno team created and populated new data points with calculated custom properties and automation. This ensured the systems had the data needed to make payout decisions and properly incentivize the sales team in the areas that are proven difference-makers in closing deals.
In addition to closing data gaps for CaptivateIQ, the client had ZoomInfo connected to HubSpot to source new leads for their sales team. The issue here was that records from ZoomInfo didn’t have all the needed data points in order to set pricing or to accurately sell once a deal was created.
After completing a full audit and optimization of the existing integration between ZoomInfo and HubSpot, the Kuno team implemented automation to pull information from associated object records in HubSpot. The next step was to develop a checks and balances process intended to remind sales reps to fill in missing information on an ongoing, as-needed basis. This process was also configured to report and notify on data gaps until all necessary fields were filled. This led to better data in HubSpot and a smoother selling process.
By addressing the need for accurate data and tools to close sales, Kuno helped reinvigorate the sales team and focus their efforts. Coupled with a streamlined, transparent and accurate commission program, the team is now poised and incentivized to reach sales goals.
In addition to an active sales team, the client also engaged in co-selling with partner companies in offering and presenting their ecommerce payment processing solution. They were actively seeking and signing new partners, starting from scratch in HubSpot with managing partner prospecting.
Additionally, once partners were in the door, the client needed to be able to accurately attribute revenue share and track co-selling engagements. Before engaging with Kuno, they attempted to use custom properties to try managing partner revenue within HubSpot, but this method wasn’t providing the flexibility or transparency into the process needed to adequately manage a partner program. Custom objects were discussed as a possible solution but, without an enterprise-level subscription, the client was keen to stay within their current HubSpot tier and find a creative solution to this crucial component of their sales process.
The Kuno team employed flexible association labels in HubSpot, allowing the team to attach multiple companies to a single deal record and clearly label why that association existed. This allowed us to eliminate restrictive custom properties at the deal object level and instead attach two or more companies to the deal record, relying on the associations of objects to tell the story of why the association was made, how many deals were associated and how much revenue each of their partners was responsible for at any given point in time. Additionally, this removed additional extraneous fields for the sales rep or the client partner team to complete: the data already existing at the company (partner) level could be leveraged based on the association and association label.
Now that the Kuno team determined and demonstrated that flexible association labels were the best path forward for the partner process, they went back and completely mapped out the entire partner process, starting with how a company would become a partner to attaching partners to deal records. From there, the Kuno team was able to build out robust reporting for partner relationships so the client could make more-informed decisions about the partner program as well as its participants.
The Partner Team now has a clear, established process to reference as well as reporting to keep them on track with their initiatives. Without spending another dollar on their HubSpot subscription or an outside partner relationship management (PRM) system, their partner processes and initiatives live in HubSpot to ensure ease of use and visibility across teams. Industry-leading PRMs can cost anywhere from a couple hundred to thousands of dollars a month – a cost that HubSpot and Kuno were able to offset with existing tools and a well-designed roadmap for partner management, freeing financial resources for outreach efforts or other strategic needs.
This team was responsible for both overseeing the implementation of sold solutions and keeping current clients happy. To perform these duties, the team was spending a great deal of time manually building ad hoc tasks and reminders covering both new and existing clients.
Kuno got to work with a clear understanding of the team’s issues and mapped out potential solutions to their problems. Kuno provided a demo of Service Hub and, while there was definite interest in the ticketing and surveying tools, the team lacked the budget to increase spending in that area. The client still needed a solution to the very real time commitments burdening their team. With an eye toward adding Service Hub in the future, the Kuno team implemented a ticketing pipeline that would usher them into a world that could contain Service Hub and implemented easily-deployable task sets based on setting certain custom properties that trigger automation. In some scenarios, those task sets were even set automatically to further remove time investment from account managers. Like every other department, reporting and surfacing process-related data was at the top of Kuno’s mind throughout the process, allowing the team to provide insights directly in HubSpot on account management initiatives.
What used to take the team a significant amount of time was now reduced to a few seconds. In most instances, the team enjoyed a 99% reduction in time spent performing tasks that were now automated or only required one manual kickoff point, allowing them to focus on more important matters to help retain and sustain client relationships. Based on these results, the client team obtained approval to move forward with a Service Hub upgrade to supercharge their processes and incorporate outside tools like Jira into their HubSpot portal to enjoy even greater efficiency.
Through their engagement with Kuno, each department now has the tools at their disposal to do their jobs effectively and focus on RevOps to protect and grow their company’s margins. Additionally, while departments were addressed individually, the optimizations made were always tied to everyone involved in driving company revenue. Marketing now delivers accurate and timely information to the sales team, sales acts on that information in a more timely manner with increased insight and well-structured incentives, the partner team is better equipped to close partnerships as well as help service the sales team with co-selling opportunities, and the account management team then takes those closed deals and benefits from increased bandwidth to effectively onboard and manage clients, enhancing both relationships and revenue.
The result is a cohesive team working together and a fully-optimized flywheel that the client team now confidently manages and can readily scale for the future.
With implementation and optimization now in the rear-view mirror, or at least the pieces in place in order to support revenue operations today and into the foreseeable future, the client’s thoughts turned toward incorporating even more of their team and company initiatives into the HubSpot ecosystem.
Kuno is now working with the client’s data team to craft a custom object within the client portal to offer transparency and insights into their sometimes complex pricing structures. HubSpot would serve both as a repository and archive for their robust pricing structures as well as offer a way for the reps presenting those structures to potential clients to interact with them in ways they never could before: Empowering users, putting guardrails around offerings, amplifying operational efficiencies and further bridging gaps between all involved stakeholders. Operations Hub Enterprise would be the chosen path forward to accommodate this solution as both the avenue for the custom object as well as a way to implement a data sync with Snowflake.
If you’re struggling to get the most out of your existing tools to accelerate your revenue operations process and growth, consider employing an expert team like Kuno Creative. We have been at the forefront of HubSpot revenue operations and sales enablement for more than 20 years.
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