Digitalizing Commercial Processes | Elixir Solutions

Mabtech is a Swedish biotech company that was founded in 1986 by three scientists from Stockholm University. More specifically, Mabtech develops and produces a wide range of monoclonal antibodies to cytokines, immunoglobulins and apolipoproteins for in vitro applications in life science research. Mabtech is globally active and works with its own sales team as well as distributors.

Challenges

Since a few years, Mabtech has been scaling up fast, achieving growth rates of 30% yearly. This demanded from the organization to re-think their previous commercial approach and increase the focus on sales. To continue their high growth rate, Mabtech was required to digitize the sales processes. This would allow them to:

• Bring more structure and efficiency to the sales process
• Generate and close more opportunities
• Take more informed, data-based decisions

This customer case provides more detail as to how Mabtech has faced its challenges, together with Elixir.

Why Mabtech chose HubSpot and Elixir

Mabtech chose HubSpot as its new CRM because of the user friendliness as well as the powerful sales features it offers, which was needed to bring more efficiency into the sales approach.

Next to looking for a new CRM system, Mabtech also needed a supplier that could give advice which makes sense from a business perspective, based on best practices learned from similar projects and companies. 

Additionally, Mabtech was already using an ERP-system, Microsoft Business Central, for their key sales and financial activities. It was very important that HubSpot CRM would be integrated with MS Business Central in order to align the processes and maintain high data quality. As an experienced HubSpot-integrations partner, Elixir was the go-to party to support Mabtech in these critical parts of their digitization exercise.

Solution

As with every new implementation project, Elixir first performed a strategic assessment in order to discuss Mabtech’s priorities and needs on both a functional and technical level. Therefore, multiple stakeholders from management, sales, marketing and IT were interviewed. This helped to map out the strategic aspirations and potential implementation challenges as well as the existing IT landscape. As a result, an implementation approach and roadmap was presented, in order to start our project in a structured and well-founded way.

Bring more structure and efficiency to the sales process

For Mabtech to keep growing, they needed a scalable way of reproducing their earlier successes. But one of the issues was the fact that sales processes were rather poorly structured and important customer information was spread over different places. This made it hard to identify bottlenecks in the process and work in a more efficient way. Therefore, Elixir assisted Mabtech in:

• Mapping out the lead management and sales processes, and suggesting improvements. This led to a shared understanding across the teams of the processes to follow, without making the system too rigid.
• Adding more automation to the processes. For example, new leads are automatically assigned to a sales rep based on their country. Or automated reminders are sent to reps for following-up on almost expiring proposals.
• Centralizing customers, contacts  and opportunity data along with past conversations such as emails and calls in one place. This makes it easier and faster for sales reps to find back important information.

Generate and close more opportunities

Another objective for Mabtech was to increase the number of opportunities in the pipeline and consequently close more. Previously, the sales team had been mainly focused on processing incoming requests. Although this stays an important source for new opportunities, Mabtech also wanted to start prospecting and do outbound reach-outs to good quality leads.

Using HubSpot, the sales team now had the right toolset to do so, because of the many data tracking possibilities. Sales reps could now see which website pages were viewed, which emails were opened, which documents were viewed, etc by their contacts. This definitely helped to identify leads with high engagement and reach out in a personalized way based on their interest.

Next to that, they now had a good overview on their pipeline. Thanks to HubSpot’s handy deal Kanban Board, the team was able to better see which opportunities needed to be followed-up.

Take more informed, data-based decisions

Mabtech was having difficulties with data quality and gathering data in one place. The lack of data resulted in decisions being made based on gut feeling rather than on data analysis.

To face this challenge, Elixir supported Mabtech in:

• Integrating HubSpot CRM with their existing ERP, MS Business Central, in order to avoid important data being shattered over different systems.
• Defining data governance rules. To prevent data pollution, we decided that the ERP-system would remain the data master, and changes should sync to HubSpot. This was key for the connection with the finance processes, for example. Additionally, when new customers and contacts needed to be created in the ERP, back office should first validate these and check for duplicates and data correctness.
• Setting up reports and dashboards so as to combine and visualize data on e.g leads, customers and opportunities. This helps Mabtech to find patterns and determine which processes or strategies need to be further improved or which reps need more guidance, for example.

Results 

When implementing new tools and processes, it is crucial that the organization’s employees are fully on board. Therefore, together with Mabtech we decided to appoint some key users within the commercial teams who were also involved in re-defining the approaches and discussing the system configuration. They were co-responsible for getting buy-in from their team members and were trained first so as to then apply a train-the-trainer principle. It also helped that the Mabtech sales teams were very enthusiastic about their new tools.

Consequently, Mabtech was able to implement their new CRM system and set-up a solution which the users were able to work with and quickly reap the rewards.   

The collaboration with Elixir has helped Mabtech to solve their challenges by:

• Giving sales reps access to state-of-the-art CRM and sales tools
• Redefining and aligning commercial processes
• Centralizing customer and opportunity data to gain transparency and data quality