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Modernising the entire sales process of a heritage business using HubSpot Sales: HubSpot Impact Award WINNER for Sales Enablement

4 mins read

Whilst the product is crafted in a hands-on, highly bespoke and labour intensive way, there's no need for the sales team at Revival Beds to work similarly when it comes to leads. This is the story of how HubSpot Sales Hub was used to modernise and improve the effectiveness of our client's sales process. Insights and data is now available in an automated and easy-to-use way, for the first time in the company's history.

This blog post was submitted for a HubSpot Impact Award under the Sales Enablement category in Q4 2019. It won the quarterly award with a score of 87.5 out of 100.

digital 22 hubspot impact award winner for sales

Approaching the factory, you immediately get a sense of the heritage this company holds. Its location on a tight, terraced street, with back-to-back houses, gives heed to the industrial past of the South Retford area.

Right in the face of the houses is a stately wooden gate that’s beautifully hand-painted with the Revival Beds logo. Big enough for a delivery truck to back up into, the gate itself looks like it’s been in place longer than any big-name brands.

And that’s because it has. Revival Beds have been handcrafting bespoke, high-quality beds and furniture for decades. They’re made in a time-honoured way and built to last a lifetime. An ethos which feels as though it’s from a different era.

Unfortunately, so was the company’s sales process.

Tried and tested production techniques but coupled with old fashioned sales processes.

The way the sales team worked had always been good enough.

People wanted a quality bed so they reached out to a quality provider. In a way, thanks to being such a superior product, the sales team just had to sell the fact it was worth the investment.

It was good, honest, old fashioned selling that converted people into loyal customers. If you could get them to the showroom, you were set.

The team was selling a relationship, offering a reliable and dependable experience. Then a would-be customer would just need to decide whether it was in their budget or not.

It was a simple process and the team were great at it. Close it or move on.

Each person in the sales team knew where their own leads were at and were rightfully trusted to get the job done. But as a business, there were many more insights that could be gained than if a lead was open or closed.

“There was no evidence, data or feedback to suggest whether whatever we were doing was the right thing,” said Adrian Leary, Marketing Manager at Revival Beds, “From a marketing and sales point of view, it was an absolute nightmare.”

Why were deals lost? How many were likely to close in the next quarter? And if we knew how many were likely to close how could we forecast the ordering of materials more efficiently?

Also, if Salesperson X was suddenly off ill, what needed sorting in their pipeline so that customers weren’t lost?

It was very much an offline process too. Literally.

It was all managed by pen and paper, totally reliant on each respective salesperson’s own notes and thoughts, then manually inputted into an ultra-basic CRM.

But for Adrian Leary, the old way of working just wasn’t enough.

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The techniques remain timeless but the tools always get better.

In the workshop, the principles of putting together such beautiful furniture has always remained the same. But with the advent of new tools and machinery, the ways in which things are crafted has been refined and improved over the years. Be it new hand tools or CAD machinery.

With the installation of HubSpot in 2019, Revival Beds was enhancing its marketing efforts. In order to handle the inevitable increase in leads, the whole sales side was being fully digitised and modernised too.

The solution was to fully utilise the Sales Hub in order to get the most benefit out of using HubSpot Marketing.

Firstly, workshops were held with the team to teach the inbound sales fundamentals. Something we’ve become very aware of over the years is that when employing a full-flywheel approach, it’s vital to get the sales teams thinking the inbound way.

What was great was that Revival Beds were starting from such a historic place that a new approach could be easily implemented on top of what they were already doing well.

It was more about setting the Sales Hub up to direct the team more efficiently and then simply showing them how to use it.

Our message was simple, according to Dan Thomas, Revival Bed’s Inbound Strategist at Digital 22. 

He said: “Let HubSpot talk to people who are researching for ideas and then we can set it up so that you only need to contact people who are ready to be spoken to. Better yet, they’ll be getting in touch with you.”

What the team can see in HubSpot is now fully granular and completely live data. The deal stages we’ve created are designed to be super-insightful for the sales team and the wider business alike.

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They can be more strategic with who they contact and when. As well as being less hands-on than before as automation does a lot of the pre-sales legwork.

This combination of marketing automation and deal stage insights has resulted in an astonishing 75% time efficiency improvement for the team.

At a business-level, this sales pipeline data has given a deeper insight into future resource requirements. Previously, the best the business could hope for was one-month projections, but now they can see well into the future thanks to a fully mapped and tracked buyer’s journey of between three to six months.

“Under the old system I knew we’d had say 400 leads, but I didn’t know anything else,” said Adrian Leary. But, with HubSpot, Adrian and his team can now see how many brochures have been requested, how many product samples, which products people are interested in and more.

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This helps with the management of new and existing production staff, as well as the ordering of the raw materials. This latter point being huge financial benefit as it allows for cost efficiencies in securing what’s a normally volatile and expensive outlay.

Another added benefit of having more sureties on raw material ordering is the ability to reduce waste. Key for a company which puts sustainability at the top of its list of priorities.

Back in the sales office, their Sales Hub offers highly-granulated insights for the first time in the company’s 25+ year history.

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Now, unlike ever before, trends can be analysed at a product by product level and sales can be attributed completely accurately. This has an impact on individual staff members who now benefit from a truly accurate commission structure.

“The [customer] data is automatically going into a system,” explains Adrian, “the workflows are all in place, the [sales team] tasks are all being created. From a sales team point of view, it’s saving 75% of our time. Which means we can start concentrating on and looking at the leads with higher engagement scores... We can spend more time on the leads which need more attention.”

Something that crops up in our own sales conversations is a fear that HubSpot will replace sales team members. What’s interesting about this story is that the Marketing and Sales Hub roll-out has been such a success that it’s creating a new sales role in order to maximise the benefits in 2020 and beyond.

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