Marketing, sales, and CRM software built to help your business grow.
Creative Bus Sales
Upgrading the Largest National Bus Dealer to a Modern Sales Platform
2016
Technologies
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Background
Creative Bus Sales (CBS) is the largest bus dealer in the United States with 22 offices from coast to coast. Their dealerships sell every type of bus imaginable, from small school buses to massive touring buses, and everything in between. They have a large sales team spread out across the nation, broken up by region, that were managing their leads in 2 ancient CRM solutions. Meanwhile, their marketing team had been using Hubspot’s Enterprise Marketing platform to manage their blog, landing pages, and social media posts. Due to the success of Hubspot’s marketing tools, CBS was interested in moving their sales team to Hubspot’s Sales platform so that their marketing and sales teams could be connected and work off of the same lead list. CBS needed the help of a Hubspot partner to analyze and provide recommendations on their marketing efforts, import lead records from their two existing CRMs, configure Hubspot’s sales platform for their large team, and train their 130+ person sales team on the new software.
Challenge
Right after we started the project, CBS acquired their biggest competitor, the second largest bus retailer in the US. Merging CRM records from your largest competitor is no small task. Figuring out how to deduplicate shared leads while merging together customer purchase histories and sellers notes requires a lot of careful planning and creative solutions. Additionally, working with a management team that was using different software, aligning their expectations, and customizing the new platform for their needs, required a true Hubspot expert. Finally, training a team of 130+ sales members across 8 different offices with different backgrounds and experience levels to use a new software solution is never an easy task.
Result
We worked closely with the Creative Bus Sales managers as well as with our contacts at Hubspot to successfully merge and clean three massive CRM databases, while also configuring the Hubspot Sales platform for the specific needs of their large sales team. We retrained 130+ administrators, managers, and sales members scattered across the nation, and created a workflow to track all of their leads, prospects, deals, and sales. We created customized dashboards so sales members could track leads, and managers could have a clear view of the sales pipeline and visibility into their team’s successes and failures. We did research and analysis of their existing customer journeys and provided feedback to strengthen their predictive lead scoring. We automated many aspects of their lead funnel, including creating a workflow to identify sales qualified leads from their marketing efforts. Creative Bus Sales now has a single connected solution for sales and marketing that automates many mundane tasks, and empowers their teams to work together to ensure company success.With this upgradein technology and organization, Creative Bus Sales is sure to remain the leader in their field for years to come.
Merging Databases
We imported, merged, and deduplicated the customer records from three different CRM systems. This involved identifying what information was most important from each database and ensuring that the records merged together without losing data from any one system. Once the records were cleaned, Hubspot had to be configured to display the most relevant information prominently for the sales team.
Comprehensive Training
One of the most important deliverables of this project was the onboarding and training of CBS’ massive sales team to ensure they not only understood, but also would actually use the new Hubspot software. We created comprehensive training documents, and ran a multitude of training webinars to ensure every team member was comfortable with and excited about using the new software. We started the training at a high level with several “all staff” webinars for the 130+ team, then we ran several team training sessionsfor each office/region, and finally we connected with individual sales managers and team members to resolve specific issues and questions.
Configuring Permissions
Hubspot’s Sales platform initially did not have the amount of segmentation between user roles that the CBS team required, so we had to be very creative in configuring the reports and analytics that each role was able to access. We also created custom views and reports to allow managers to track their individual team’s activities and KPIs.
Optimizing Workflows
After a thorough audit of Creative Bus Sales Hubspot Marketing platform, we spent hours creating new workflows and optimizing existing workflows to automate the process of identifying a qualified sales lead and assigning them to the proper sales team member in the correct region and industry.
Lead Scoring
We optimized and expanded upon the basic lead scoring that CBS already had in place in order to better identify potential customers in the marketing funnel and qualify them as sales-ready leads. We then created custom workflows to assign the lead to the proper sales team member.
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Customized
Dashboards
We created customized dashboards for each sales team member to show their active leads, goals, performance, and action items for the day. We also created customized dashboards for each region / sales team manager to track their team’s performance. And we created administrative dashboards for the VPs and C level employees to monitor the status of the sales pipeline and forecasted revenue based on existing deals.
Developing
Customer Personas
After extensive marketing research and customer surveys, we developed multiple customer personas for Creative Bus Sales to identify the different customer archetypes, journeys, and common questions each has during the different steps of the buying process. These personas were added to Hubspot and workflows were created to categorize leads based on customer type.
Ongoing
Support
With Hubspot constantly updating their feature set and adapting to the needs of their customers, Creative Bus Sales required constant support and continued optimization of the platform. We provided on demand support to answer questions or develop new workflows or reports as needed for the company.
