Redesign Sales Processes to Enhance Reporting | Elixir Solutions

Adifo is a software company acting in the niche industry of food and feed manufacturers. With a presence worldwide and a leader position in their sector, their sales processes rely on their sales managers and resellers to have a presence in every region of the world.

Context

They noticed that their sales managers were mostly focused on upselling products to current customers rather than hunting for new prospects. In order to scale up, they need to change this mindset and they contacted us to see how we could help them to encourage the hunting of new prospects.

First of all, we assessed the current situation to analyse the challenges they were facing and it quickly appeared that their sales department was facing 4 main challenges:

• No common CRM database
• Lack of standardized sales process
• Urgency: too long lead assignment process 
• No 360° view on customers (no access to tickets or marketing actions) 

It was then decided to implement HubSpot as a platform that would bring all the client-facing departments together to gather all the data in the same place and to gain in efficiency.

We decided to start with the sales team by defining a standardized sales process and by implementing a personalized basic set-up of HubSpot that would support them in this transition.

What we did

Data Management

Adifo’s database has been built for several years, and as many database it had many duplicates and inconsistencies.

We started with a data governance exercise to design best practice processes on how to handle commercial data. After this, we started with cleaning the data before uploading it into HubSpot. We then used the ETL procedure (extraction, transformation and loading): the extraction was done by Adifo, the transformation was done together to transform the fields and values to the correct HubSpot fields and Elixir loaded the information into HubSpot

Streamline sales process

The first step was to decide the deal stages that would compose the sales process and be used by all sales managers at Adifo. As the deal processes can take up to one year, this will help to keep an overview of all the processes going on and the need of follow-up of each of them. Besides, this will also help the sales director to have a quick overview on all the business going on.

Automate the lead handover

When you want to generate new business by hunting, it is crucial to have a close follow up on the leads coming in. Unfortunately, the marketing handover could be quite slow as a new lead could take up till 1 week to be transferred. It was then a priority to help the marketing team to deliver it more quickly. The amount of new leads was too low to justify a qualification by marketing . So it was decided to have an automatic lead assignment to the sales managers. This was done via an automatic assignment based on country and region.

Set up automations to gain in efficiency

Based on the sales process, it has also be decided to create some automation to make the sales managers’ life easier.

• Email templates to reach the contacts in different situation (after a first call, to follow up meetings or to follow up a quote)
• Reports templates to have a standardization of meeting reports
• The opportunity to create automated tasks created when sending out an email
• ….

Ensure a 360 view on the customers

As said earlier, it was important that the sales managers get access to all interactions of the contacts with Adifo, from the marketing to the service part.

The marketing team was already using HubSpot to send emails and by joining HubSpot the sales team is now able to see all the marketing content that the prospect have seen. Besides, they also have access to their website visits. On the other hand, marketing has access to the sales data, which allows them to have targeted campaigns based on it.

One of the biggest request was to have access to the tickets the customers logged in the last months. Adifo plans to move their ticket system from Freshdesk to HubSpot in the coming months but not everything can be done at the same time. So we offered the alternative to build a temporary integration of their Freshdesk platform with HubSpot to immediately give access to old tickets to the sales managers.

Improvements achieved

The sales department is now on a good track to start looking for new customers.

Improve the data governance and cleaning of the database: the implementation of a new CRM is always a good timing to improve the data governance processes and to clean the contact and customer database. They now have a clean database and can count on HubSpot to detect the duplicates in their system through a regular sanity check.

Gain in Urgency: The leads are now immediately transferred to the relevant sales manager who can directly contact them.

Gain in Efficiency: the standardization and automatization of different tasks allows the sales managers to have a clear view on their pipeline, to organise their day according to the tasks they have and to gain time by avoiding administration tasks.

Customer journey alignment: by having a 360 view on the customer, The sales managers can deliver the best content to them according to what content they have already seen. Besides they also know upfront if they logged a ticket and are then prepared to discuss it when entering in a conversation.

Better reporting: Before HubSpot, Adifo did not have a clear view on the sales pipelines as there was no standardized sales process. With a standardized process and all activities logged in HubSpot it is then much easier for the sales director to have an overview of the deals and activities of the team.

Next steps

Now that the sales team started to use the tool and to get comfortable with it, the next steps are to start with the roll-out to the agents worldwide. Then, we will improve the marketing processes and with the experience acquired in the first months we will also go further in the optimization and acceleration of the sales processes.

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