LIVE FROM #INBOUND22
When someone that talks the talk has also walked the walk. We joined Frank Loughan, VP and Revenue Operations at ARC Document Solutions, Dilo Wijesuri, President and COO of ARC Document Solutions, and Kari Fairbanks, National Sales and Marketing and Operations Manager at ARC Document Solutions to learn about how they migrated from Salesforce into HubSpot and how that has led them to a 133% increase in new business growth year-on-year.
To provide you with some context, ARC Document Solutions is a printing solution provider. They offer digital printing, document scanning, and managed print services to all business segments in the market, and their outreach is global. Whist located in the US, they are also active in UK, Middle East, and India. With 140 service centres, and 45,000 customers, they needed a bullet-proof CRM that would allow them to feel a little bit more streamlined as a company.
ARC were not new to CRMs, they had used Salesforce for over ten years and they were using it *a lot*. They were considering changing CRMs, indeed, but they were terrified. Migrating 10+ years’ worth of data? Yet, Salesforce was making their everyday processes more and more difficult, affecting their overall productivity and efficiency. Complexity was the main challenge, but that frustrations kept appearing overtime.
Amongst other reasons, with Salesforce, they ARC was experiencing poor customer service and no support or help, constant price increases with no relevant value, no marketing functionality and the need to have separate marketing software, lack of management information and proper dashboards, and low forecasting tools. As a consequence, sales reps did not see the value of the system and user adoption was at risk.
“It was a patchwork quilt,” Frank mentioned when he was interviewed for a previous case study for HubSpot “We were bolting solutions on and nothing had the same look or feel. We had to log in to different systems, even though it was all supposed to be integrated.” He then went on to add “In truth, our user adoption was awful,” says Frank. “When people don’t use your system, your data is never going to be accurate.”
And, thus, they were scared of losing data they have gathered for 10+ years but the question they needed to ask was whether their data was any good! “We didn’t have solid, trustworthy numbers,” Frank said, “they might be directionally correct, but we couldn’t use them at the strategic, C-suite level.” And they decided that enough was enough. So, they knew they had to make a change, and they triggered that.
The decision of switching CRMs took research and it went over 3 years, making sure that the CRM that they went for ticket all their boxes. It is no secret that there was a CRM that did so, HubSpot.
The adventure began and, before they knew it, they started speaking with HubSpot to move all their data to their platform. To do this, ARC had put a lot of thought into what they wanted and what they needed and had created a list of “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” that they wanted their new CRM to have. A platform with a single database, integration with Outlook, open API, and quoting tools was non-negotiable. They also wanted something consistent, easy to navigate, and fast.
Even after finding HubSpot, ARC looked back at Salesforce and tried to make it work, but it did not. They also considered Microsoft Dynamics and Zendesk, but none of them could met the requirements they had. Little by little, over a period of six months, they checked every single detail to learn about the success other businesses had had with other CRMs and reflected over whether that success could also be translated into ARC’s processes. With 10+ years of data behind, they needed to take the right decision.
A meeting between ARC and HubSpot CRM executives finally tipped the scales and ARC and HubSpot worked together even before contracts were signed, to guarantee that the migration was going to be a success. The executive team at ARC committed themselves to get HubSpot-proficient before they moved any data into the platform and used resources like HubSpot Academy so they were as informed as they could regarding the platform that they were about to adopt.
A key goal when migrating data from Salesforce to HubSpot was to increase user adoption. And they set up pilot groups to that introduced gradually into HubSpot, each of those groups led by a member of the executive team that, as mentioned above, had trained themselves and were familiar with the different tools that HubSpot offered. This phase lasted for a few months, making sure they could collect as much feedback they could from the pilot teams.
To their surprise, user adoption rose dramatically with the HubSpot CRM Platform because of its easiness of use. Regardless of how tech-savvy they were, Frank reported that everyone was using the platform, their dashboards were filled with data they could trust, and that allowed them to do better planning and strategy. It was a true game-changer!
If you have been involved in a process of data migration, you know it is never as easy as it seems. And, for ARC, it already seemed difficult so… They were up for a treat! Kari said it clearly, they data was really *really* messy, full of duplicates, inconsistencies, and even typos. Before they migrated their data, they needed to look at those issues and make sure they were not inheriting any problems from their previous platform that would jeopardise the process.
Once clean, importing that data was not an easy task either, since they needed to make sure not only the data was solid, but that it was optimised for the future. For that to happen, they needed to make sure HubSpot has customised in a way that would allow them to input new data in the right way, preserving the consistency and coherence that they had so carefully earned themselves throughout the previous months!
The rollout of the platform took almost a year. Each month, the team would be introduced to a new HubSpot feature, such as email templates, sequences, snippets, dashboards, analytics, etc. Training the team and giving them the time to do so was part of this phase, which helped get everyone on the same page, aligning different departments of the company that, until then had been completely separate from each other.
Finding themselves using a single platform took the team to a new level of trust, with everyone being aware that they were using data they could rely on. This phase also included the bespoke production of APIs that resolved integration issues and that made using other software easier and more streamlined.
When asked which HubSpot feature had made the biggest difference to ARC, Frank, Kari, and Dilo all pointed to sequences, a feature they could not access with Salesforce. They actually did not know about the feature, and it has become a must-have that helps sales reps communicate with customers in a genuine way. This powerful feature, together with other tools, led to fantastic results that the team was happy to share with the audience.
Kari estimated the volume of marketing emails sent has increased by 200%, moving from 20,000 a year to 60,000. This was due to how comfortable and easy it was to create emails on HubSpot when compared to Pardot, the previous software they had used to manage their marketing activity. Building emails, forms, and landing pages was 30% faster, without the need or the expense of an external developer.
Since consolidating sales and marketing on the HubSpot CRM Platform, the ARC sales team was responding to leads 94% faster, which helped them close more deals. Sequences, as mentioned above, might have played a particularly important role on this, since it allowed the team to get to more leads thanks to the automation of their outreach. Sales reps knew they were speaking with the right people, at the right time, with no extra hassle.
Partly because of these positive changes, new business growth went from $12 million to $28 million YOY after switching to HubSpot CRM, an increase of 133%. This set ARC in a really good direction, encouraging them to grow and accept new challenges. Together with the clarity that they gained with their new CRM, forecasting and reporting on the future became a much easier task for the executive team.
Overall, these improvements helped the cost per customer acquired to drop. The time sales rep had to devote to planning, data managing, and logging their interactions with customers was reduced, allowing them to invest their time in having quality conversations with their prospects. Real and genuine conversations helped their conversion rate and they managed to exceed every single goal they had set themselves to achieve.