Multi-National Line Specialty Insurance Provider

How we modernized sales and marketing with HubSpot to amplify pipeline visibility across multiple product lines and geographical regions.

Introduction

The client is a multinational specialty insurance company founded in 1978. They specialize in admitted and excess and surplus lines insurance products, warranty solutions, motor club services, vehicle service contracts, and premium financing. They have acquired multiple operators in their market as a way to diversify their offerings and achieve significant growth.

Client Challenges – Pinpointing Sales Inflection Points, Growing Into Modern Methods

• Limited Sales Visibility: Sales operations lacked clear reporting, hindering progress tracking and performance evaluation.
• Sales Management: Sales leaders were still using large spreadsheets to manage deals and deal owners, requiring significant usage of everyone’s time on nearly constant phone calls and meetings.
• Inconsistent HubSpot Adoption: Uneven usage across departments limited the platform's potential. Marketing had yet to go-to-market and remained focused on pure operational issues.
• Poor Data Quality: Inaccurate and unreliable data led to ineffective marketing campaigns and sales strategies.
• Data Disorganization: Issues with contact and company associations, ownership, and lifecycles created operational inefficiencies.
• Data Duplication: Thousands of duplicate records inflated databases and skewed analytics.
• Unmanaged Practices: Salespeople had not been taught to use HubSpot’s Sales Hub features in their work, creating silos, misaligned efforts, redundant tasks, and more.
• Suboptimal ROI: Despite significant investment and interest in HubSpot, the client saw limited returns.

Project Goals – Evolving Into a New Mode

• Data Cleansing and Organization: Establish a clean, reliable database for contacts, companies, and deals. Ensure integrations were delivering parallel data that would not undo cleansing efforts.
• Automated Pipeline Management: Create a seamless, data-driven sales pipeline with automated notifications and reporting. All spreadsheet activities were migrated into HubSpot’s pipeline and automation features.
• Comprehensive User Training: Achieve 100% HubSpot adoption among sales users through targeted training sessions. Eliminated offline tools and methods.
• Advanced Reporting: Develop detailed reports for actionable insights into sales, specifically to know when a deal had reached a designated stage. This stage indicated the odds of winning the deal were confident enough to factor them into revenue forecasts. Not all deals could pass underwriting standards; hence, the need to wait until all approvals were obtained to add a deal’s value to the pipeline.
• Single Source of Truth: Transform HubSpot into the central hub for Sales and Marketing data, ensuring accuracy and responsiveness.

Our Approach – Orderly Implementation

The client had not completed their platform implementation due to prior team members leaving before the work was completed. We restarted the process to see them through to completion.

• Data Audit and Enrichment: Thoroughly audit and enrich contact, company, and deal data for accuracy.
• Data Deduplication: Eliminate duplicate records to ensure data integrity and accurate analysis.
• Collaboration with Leadership: Engage sales and marketing leadership to align data organization with business needs. Implement iterative enhancements along the way as leadership recognized additional needs such as additional reports or further report refinements.
• Data Hygiene Practices: Establish processes for ongoing data maintenance and cleanliness.
• Lifecycle Stage Framework: Implement a structured system to track customer journey progress in tandem with sales’ processes.
• Automated Workflows: Develop workflows to automate deal management tasks and notifications.
• Sales Dashboards: Create large, real-time dashboards for performance monitoring and analysis.
• Weekly Reporting: Automate weekly reports to facilitate 1:1 meetings and performance tracking.
• Personalized Training: Conduct live training sessions with all pertinent users.

Results – Tangible Transformation

• Accurate Pipeline: By cleansing and organizing all contact, company, and deal data, an accurate sales pipeline was constructed. This provided real-time visibility into pipeline growth and deal closures. This included structuring pipeline reporting to reflect only applicable deal stages, thereby not inflating the pipeline and revenue forecast.
• Effective Sales Team Management: Clean data enabled real-time monitoring of each salesperson's weekly and quarterly goal progress for activities and revenue. Leadership and direct sales managers could track performance effectively.
• Real-time Progress Monitoring: The dashboards provided sales and marketing leadership with a real-time view of progress across various aspects of the sales operations. This included monitoring progress across customers, products line, global offices, sales teams, and individual salespeople. Management can filter data from a variety of approaches for analysis.
• Data-Driven Insights: The dashboards allowed leadership to see how pipelines were growing and how deals were closing without needing to export data into BI tools or spreadsheets. This immediate access to key metrics enabled them to quickly assess the health of the sales process.
• Improved Decision-Making: With real-time visibility, leadership could make more informed decisions and take timely actions to address any issues or capitalize on opportunities.
• Better Prospecting: Salespeople could rely on the accurate data to research their territories, map out market plans, and more quickly source new deals from existing customers.
• Targeted Marketing: Marketing could reliably build segmented lists for go-to-market campaigns and tradeshows. This allowed for precise targeting of specific customers and prospects at the individual product line level, enabling upsell opportunities and sustained engagement based on purchasing history and website activity. Tracking of tradeshow-generated leads was engineered to grant credit to show teams for their contributions to the pipeline.

Conclusion – Close Collaboration Leads to a New World

The power of data-driven strategies and strong partnerships is evident in this case study. Through addressing challenges and implementing strategic solutions, the client experienced substantial gains in sales and marketing effectiveness. This partnership reflects our commitment to achieving tangible results and supporting our clients' long-term success.