With more than 100 global offices, Reed wanted to make its marketing automation more effective. It needed to generate more leads and coordinate more efficiently with the sales team. James Adams, UK and EMEA Marketing Director at Reed, explains how the recruiting firm chose HubSpot to help leverage email automation and workflows to optimize lead generation and sales alignment. It worked so well that, within a year, the company generated seven-figure revenue attributable to its marketing efforts.
"We can now send leads to the right salespeople very quickly. In our industry, that's extremely important."
James Adams, Director of Marketing, UK and EMEA, Reed
Reed is a global recruitment company with a mission to improve lives through work. With more than 1,800 employees and 100 offices in the UK, Europe, the US, the Middle East and Asia, it connects job seekers and employers with the right partnership for the next step in their journey.
Its teams provide a wide range of services, with coordinated programs in 20 specialized sectors. Managing and targeting lead information efficiently is crucial to Reed's growth.
After successfully scaling for more than 60 years using manual systems, a new generation of employees recognized the exciting possibilities of leveraging automated processes.
UK and EMEA Marketing Director James Adams had used HubSpot for marketing automation at other companies. He advocated that Reed adopt a similar solution.
He said, "It was an opportunity. I knew how powerful HubSpot could be to empower the marketing team, help us generate more leads and coordinate more effectively with sales. If we could incorporate a tool like that, it would make a huge difference."
No visibility on lead data
Traditionally, Reed used its website and other marketing channels to advertise phone numbers for its local offices. That meant that customer service representatives had to take information from callers and manually pass it on to a relevant consultant.
The process resulted in slow service delivery and meant that Adams and his colleagues had no data to guide their marketing efforts.
Adams said, "We had limited visibility into inbound lead generation. We couldn't track where the leads were coming from and we didn't have a quick way to get the leads into the hands of our salespeople. It was a major gap and limited the ROI we could get from marketing activities."
Choosing HubSpot
The team at Reed recognized the benefits that an automated marketing system would bring and began the search for the best tool. They considered three or four solutions.
Adams said, "It came down to HubSpot for a couple of reasons. First, their onboarding and account management support are second to none. Second, the platform is built around users. It's very easy to use and offers a full range of marketing tools that none of the other providers could compete with."
Reed acquired Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub to align its teams and optimize its marketing operations.
Faster service time
Upon implementation, Reed immediately began using HubSpot to interact more efficiently with prospects and leads.
"We started using Marketing Hub for email campaigns to nurture our lead audience and track leads that were coming through the website and our paid advertising efforts," Adams explained.
With landing pages and contact forms capturing lead information, the marketing team was able to quickly pass qualified leads to the sales team, significantly reducing lead time.
Adams added, "That part has been transformational. We can now send leads to the right salespeople very quickly. In our industry, that's extremely important. We found that a percentage of leads will send their requirements to some recruiters, so being the first to respond to them is key."
Lead nurturing with workflows
Adams and his team are leveraging a host of workflows that make their work faster and more effective. They went from manually sending emails to individual leads to sending automated sequences based on engagement.
Adams said, "Before we got HubSpot, we were using very basic tools, and our email marketing wasn't as polished or smart as it could be. Now, we regularly connect with our audience through monthly newsletters and run smart workflows and trigger-based emails.
With thought leadership workflows, send relevant automated emails to leads that interact with your content, whether it's downloading the latest salary guide, registering for a webinar, or gathering any other protected content on your websites.
Those quick, personalized responses are just one way HubSpot helped Reed connect with its many different customer profiles and improve their online experience.
"We're interacting with prospects and customers in many ways throughout the buyer's journey, and we're seeing a great response to those value-added touch points," Adams added.
Data-driven optimization
Being able to track lead generation and engagement in each digital channel has generated great successes for the marketing team.
A year after Reed started using HubSpot, there were more than 7,000 leads through the website. The data has been used to optimize efforts in pay-per-click ads and SEO.
The insights are helping Adams and his team focus their marketing efforts in the right areas.
Adams said, "HubSpot has given us beautiful insights. We can see what kind of content a lead has downloaded and either pass that information on to sales or use it to plan more marketing activities that interest them. We're creating better workflows and emails and doing things we simply couldn't do before."
Boosting the sales team
HubSpot's lead data amalgamation, analysis and reporting has helped the marketing team collaborate more productively with sales. The sales team is now more aware of marketing activities and shares information that drives high-converting content. Meanwhile, the marketing team can now align their campaigns with sales goals.
"Having sales and marketing working in the same environment has been a game changer. They can see what their leads are doing and ask us to send them a certain email or workflow. We've seen great results with that," Adams added.
This cross-departmental collaboration was made possible through a customized integration with Reed's internal CRM.
Reed CRM Integration
With hundreds of thousands of contact records in their proprietary CRM, the true partnership between marketing and sales depended on a tight integration with HubSpot.
"The integration with our CRM allowed us to get real-time customer data into Sales Hub, and vice versa. It allowed us to pass leads to sales instantly and enrich our marketing insights with existing customer data," Adams said.
HubSpot empowers marketers
From onboarding to continuous learning, Adams said his team's relationship with HubSpot has made them better marketers.
"Onboarding was pretty seamless. With our onboarding manager, plus the learning and development resources within the platform. We were able to get started quickly and have very quick successes," he said.
Your team often presents you with new campaign ideas that they gleaned from tutorials within the HubSpot knowledge base.
"It keeps us thinking about where we'd like to be in a year with the tools. We have exciting things ahead of us, and that's because of the support we get from our account management and the broader HubSpot ecosystem," he added.
Seven-figure revenues in one year
With the improved efficiency and insights derived from HubSpot, Reed attributed seven figures in revenue to his marketing efforts in just 12 months. "Since last year, we launched our new website and generated over 7,000 qualified marketing leads. Approximately 25% of those leads converted to purchase, generating net revenue in excess of seven figures," Adams said.
Adams and his team can now execute more effective marketing activities with outstanding efficiency. Campaign setup is now one 96% faster.
"We can see that our efforts are working. About 24% of our website visitors complete a contact form, and our B2B newsletter is growing by more than 1,000 subscribers each month. We are very pleased," he said.
With seamless integration with its proprietary CRM, easy-to-use workflows and cross-functional visibility, Reed can empower sales teams in 20 industry specialties spread across 180 offices worldwide.
"We're coordinating efficiently across Reed Group, and it's all because of HubSpot's powerful lead management process. It has made a huge difference for us," Adams concluded.
Source: https://magazine.intelligentcxo.com/mag/0910621001677499977/p44
