No matter what stat you read, the effective use of a CRM drives leading businesses. And all of us know the established promise of a CRM:

• Increase in sales
• Improved communication with customers
• Enhanced transparency and reporting

And that is what happens when you successfully implement a CRM.

But, before effectively implementing a CRM, this is what you see:

• Sales targets missed
• Lack of sales quotas
• Forecasts are “hopecasts” and rarely hit
• Sales teams are reactive in responding to the market as opposed to proactively hunting the market.
• Documentation frustrations (from sales hand-off to delivery)
• Lack of clarity on sales team efforts (what are they doing all day?)

No idea on:    

How long does it take to move a lead to a deal?

• How long does it take to close a deal?
• How many interactions does this take?
• Which leads have the highest close rate?
• Customer Acquisition Cost    

How you go from the ‘before’ to the ‘promise’ is through a company culture change and becoming an accountable data-driven organization.

The How of the Promise:

• Your sales plan and processes are supported in the CRM, adding force to your sales process and removing friction.
• Knowing your metrics (Close Rate, Average Transaction or Account Size, Deal Velocity);
• Having a Forecast
• Having transparency into activities and the ones that move the deals forward.

The journey from the before to the after is often met with failure (at least 50% of CRM implementations fail).  

This is why you need more than a technology partner to implement your CRM. 

You need a team that can support the culture change by creating and modifying your processes, which are then amplified by the technology.

Digital Media Academy | Automating Operations with a HubSpot Integrated Tech Stack

Digital Media Academy (DMA) enables schools to prepare students with the skills they need for their future, offering technology education and learning experiences to middle and high school aged children. Supported by Stanford educators, researchers, and industry experts, DMA has impacted the lives of more than 500,000+ students in 125+ countries. 

The Need

Digital Media Academy had been expanding, and recognized the need for a streamlined automated system they could use as a central source of truth to enable them to scale. HubSpot referred us to DMA to help them with this project, as it would involve custom work, intensive project management, consulting, overall end-to-end customer journey and process mapping, and integrations. DMA needed to integrate their full operations into one system including:

• Lead management
• Ecommerce sales
• Customer and vendor support
• Course communication with parents of students
• Creating student course credentials and providing access to the education portal
• Information on students, parents/guardians, educators, vendors, leads, and courses
• Business reports in a dashboard
• Management and clean up of contacts and email lists
• On-demand developer support

The Challenge

These were the challenges within this project;

• Information was housed in many places and needed to be consolidated 
• Salesforce data was not organized in a clean way for import
• A new website was in the works when we started working with them and needed to be considered in the integration
• Integrations needed to happen with many SaaS platforms including HubSpot, Google Classroom, WooCommerce, WordPress, Calendly, Gmail, Mailchimp, Google Sheets, Google Admin, Stripe, and RingCentral 
• Short timelines
• Coordinating with multiple other third parties
• They needed to move from a “Frankenstein system” to a user-friendly, single source of truth intuitive system

The Solution

Given the complexity, the first step was to audit the current state of where all their information was stored, and map out the future state to model how their system should function. This way allows us to troubleshoot if we know where down the line something failed during testing. 

The first goal was to migrate everything from their current CRM (Salesforce) into HubSpot so that all data was kept intact for customer service reps to reference back to. 

Part of the foundation of your go-to-market strategy must be a streamlined CRM.

We recommend HubSpot. Why? Simple: it creates a single source of truth.

According to a study from Nucleus Research, the average ROI for a CRM is $8.71 for every dollar spent. With HubSpot, your sales team can easily access all the customer information they need to efficiently close deals:

Every email sent Every attachment clicked on

The ability to call from an app on your phone or your desktop and log and record every call (optional)

Notifications when emails are looked at

What webpages the customer has viewed

Marketing campaign ROI tied to closed deals

Plus when a lead from your website comes in, automatically a contact is created for you to reach out and connect to or assign to the appropriate rep.

By streamlining your business processes, your business saves time, money, and stress.

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