How many digital tools are you using at your company?


February 22, 2023


How many digital tools are you using at your company?

The needs of a growing company ramp up over time. As it grows, tools that help automation are bought on an as-needed basis because it helps with one particular function. For meeting that need, the cost is reasonable. But as the base of customers increase, the tool may prove too expensive when evaluated on a cost to returns ratio.

Let us take this up on just one activity. Imagine that a company attends 6-8 trade events in a year. At each of these events, it gets introduced to about 100 customers who ask for additional information or samples or a demo. Various offices of the company at different locations decide to invest in an email automation solution paying about $30 a month to send out monthly newsletters and product promotions.

Individually, the small amounts add up. And getting a clear picture of the total spends and doing an analysis is tough, especially with fragmented activity and reporting from sales teams that range from 10-100 people.

Different teams within the company in marketing, sales and service invest in tools that have specific functionality, especially if there isn’t a central IT team managing deployment. And then, a company-wide MIS system is required to consolidate activity and reporting. The number of reports required keeps ramping up over time.

Fragmented activity makes it hard to track progress

Take a company case study from HubSpot. Seed Legals provides the legal documents companies need to get funded and grow their businesses. Within six months from launch, they had 1500 companies on the platform.

Cutting down the number of digital tools used to manage multiple functions within the company drives greater efficiency and cuts costs

With this rate of growth right out of the gate, SeedLegals’ sales, marketing, and customer service teams scrambled to keep up, implementing whatever tools they deemed necessary to do it. Thus, over time, SeedLegals accumulated disparate sales, marketing, and customer service tools, including Typeform, Survicate, and Intercom. 

Soon, the company saw the need to consolidate those tools to streamline processes and increase efficiency.  SeedLegals’ new Head of CRM immediately got to work replacing third-party tools with the HubSpot CRM Platform

Before long, SeedLegals discontinued use of Campaign Monitor, Drip, Typeform, Survicate, and other tools. It’s also in the middle of migrating its customer success team and knowledge base from Intercom to HubSpot CRM chat for customer service.

The team discovered a problem with duplicate records. They realised they were probably over-reporting because of legacy duplicate records. With HubSpot, they were able to identify and solve the problem, which has helped improve data integrity.

Consolidating tools onto one platform also streamlined SeedLegals’ sales, marketing, and customer service processes, with email marketing a prominent example.

Before, several third-party email marketing tools were being used because one team would sign up for a tool and then a different team would sign up for a different tool. Some of them were not even known because there was no ownership record.

BO_Blog_The-importance-of-building-a-single-source-of-customer-data

The importance of building a single source of customer data 

The built-in automation of the HubSpot CRM Platform helped to increase productivity and efficiency. 

They were able to automatically send emails at certain steps in the product journey—for example, letting people know when SeedLegals experts had completed a review, or when it was time to prepare a new R&D tax credits claim. That minimised the manual work needed to contact clients

Some third-party tools, such as Stripe, have been retained and integrated with the HubSpot CRM Platform—something made possible by the HubSpot CRM Platform’s APIs. 

This confers a huge advantage because adding invoice data from Stripe means the sales team can access up-to-date payment data in HubSpot, and chase outstanding invoices.

HubSpot has built APIs with industry leading software to seamless manage scale and integrate with them to keep company operations humming

The HubSpot CRM Platform remains the central place where sales, marketing, and customer service teams can go to get a complete picture of a customer. And the ultimate source of truth for all customer journeys.

Audit the tools and platforms the company pays for

Based on an audit of the number of services and tools used across marketing, sales and services, Blueoshan can show how many of these can be consolidated within HubSpot. That is possibly the best way to arrive at a price vs value equation.

Then, our consultants can demonstrate you how every single aspect can translate to greater efficiency. Whether it is scheduling, managing and tracking social media campaigns. Then go deep into how leads are generated, distributed and tracked. Figure out how the flywheel of customer delight can be put in place – whether it is by enhancing content, diving deep to see which of the campaigns drive the highest engagement and conversion.

It is a step-by-step process that will take months to execute and put in place. The objective is to streamline and align fragmented processes within. The end result is a view of company operations, customer journeys and getting to the single source of truth – customer touch points that give insights into purchase patterns.

It's also  the perfect way to scale company operations without adding significant human resources. When marketing, sales and services can see the effect of their effort, teams within get to work far better together than in isolated pockets.

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By automating the most repetitive aspects of customer connect, the effort shifts to managing relationshipsand that’s where HubSpot’s CRM comes into its own. It gives every department the way customers have engaged with the company – and what their expectations are.

Talk to our Hubspot Experts

Venu Gopal Nair
Venu Gopal Nair

Advertising and Branding Specialist, CEO - Ideascape Communications, A professional journey through the tumultuous years of advertising and communication, starting in 1984. Started out in the age of print, saw the changes with the entry of satellite TV and the momentous transition to digital. Advertising and branding today is vastly different from its practices in the 20th century and the last two decades have seen dramatic changes with smartphone domination. As a Creative Director turned CEO, making the transition personally and professionally has been a tremendous experience.