The Challenge
With the North American sales team already working in HubSpot, it was positive in the sense of having a foundation to build from. But it also created difficulty: out of GDPR concerns, Europe couldn’t see North American deals, contacts or companies — and vice versa. That made proper partitioning a critical piece of the HubSpot puzzle.
The European sales team was resistant to the idea of trading in their old way of managing sales processes with a new system. Blackline needed to prioritize sales enablement training so their European sales team could see the value in the HubSpot platform and readily adopt it.
The Strategy
HubSpot as a solution
When it came to selling HubSpot as a solution, Kuno focused on HubSpot’s CRM and business units. With HubSpot business units, companies can manage multiple brands from the convenience of one HubSpot portal. For Blackline, this meant that they could bring together their North American and European sales teams in one CRM. Achieving this outcome would require the use of permissions and custom properties.
The process began with a discovery period where the Kuno team learned about and mapped out the European sales team’s current business practices. Since most of the sales process was conducted in spreadsheets, the project started from the ground-up. Some of the initial steps were creating task queues to track sales initiatives, automating touchpoints with clients, automating deal movement based on data points, and enabling reporting to monitor accounts and pipeline success.
HubSpot Implementation
A strategic roadmap
While all HubSpot implementations require familiarity with an organization’s structure, the nature of this project made it even more so the case. The use of HubSpot business units, coupled with complex permission sets and teams, required a complete view of the organizational structure that included North American and European offices. We gave key stakeholders a strategic roadmap that helped ensure buy-in and met with them on a weekly basis to discuss the implementation, progress and needs.
Kuno took a pilot approach to the rollout of the HubSpot CRM, sales tools and business units. We first worked with a small group of power users with previous CRM experience, implementing HubSpot and training them on the software. We empowered the pilot group to request changes and ask questions to ensure the platform was configured in an optimal way before rolling it out to the rest of the team. The pilot group also became advocates for change, helping to curb resistance and encourage adoption of HubSpot across the sales team of 70+.
The Results
With a centralized HubSpot CRM versus two enterprise portals, the client saved an extra $76,800 a year
By approaching the solution through business units, Kuno saved the client from needing two HubSpot enterprise portals. A centralized CRM allowed for better tracking capabilities and also saved the client an additional $76,800 a year.
Because of Kuno’s robust training program, a once reluctant sales team felt comfortable moving to HubSpot and stopped using spreadsheets. From logging daily activities to creating new deals and contact/company records, the European sales team of 70+ has taken full advantage of using HubSpot to streamline their sales processes and efforts.
