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Better Equipped Marketing & Sales Teams Via HubSpot

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CREtelligent, a commercial real estate (CRE) due diligence software company based in Gold River, Calif., offers a cloud-based CRE due diligence platform. The firm provides environmental reports and services; valuation reports and services; property condition reports and services; zoning reports, ALTA land surveys, flood certificates, and other services.

In 2020 CREtelligent looked to expand its sales effort and sought to optimize the outreach of its marketing team and the funnel of leads to its sales team.

Initially, CREtelligent tracked sales leads for its RADIUS platform in ZOHO, a customer relationship management system (CRM). The firm needed to optimize ZOHO with custom workflows that would track a lead through its entire lifecycle. CREtelligent also wanted to integrate ZOHO with a marketing/email automation system and, after considering possible solutions, chose to move to HubSpot for both its marketing/email and CRM solutions.

Capitol Tech Solutions’ User Experience Team evaluated CREtelligent’s ZOHO workflows, dashboards, and data records/properties. The initial goal of the CTS team was to create a double track for ZOHO and HubSpot to interact back and forth as necessary. However, as the project progressed, our experts determined that migrating to HubSpot would provide CREtelligent with the best results, in line with the firm’s goal of improved lead scoring and tracking.

Project Start – Research & Discovery

The CTS Team assessed the specifics of the ZOHO CRM implementation to understand the desired marketing and sales process, generation of leads, and existing sales funnel configuration.

Our team quickly realized that ZOHO and the ZOHO CRM integration app could not meet the needs of CREtelligent without significant investment in custom workflows that would require consistent oversight and maintenance, which would drive up costs. We pivoted to full migration and implementation of HubSpot to keep the project costs within budget.

Additionally, we identified HubSpot outputs’ return on investment (ROI) reports provided greater detail and context.

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Project Phase 1: ZOHO Migration & HubSpot Implementation

The CTS Team began by replicating the new properties and deal pipeline to match what the CREtelligent sales team used in ZOHO.

We then deployed HubSpot’s developer tool to create two custom objects, “Orders from OT” and “Proposals from OT,” to track orders and proposals from RADIUS, integrating the firm’s custom tool Order Tracker.

CTS created a lead assignment workflow to assign a salesperson based on the industry, state/region, and lifecycle stage of a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). To determine if a lead was at the right point to transition to a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), we outlined a scoring system from 0 to 100 based on a user’s interaction with the CREtelligent website. Our goal was to enable automatic scoring without the intervention of a CREtelligent employee.

Our team worked with Trujay to test data migration from ZOHO to HubSpot, quality-checking contacts, companies, and deals to identify errors, which Trujay support staff helped to resolve.

While running test migrations, the CTS User Experience Team met with the CREtelligent sales and customer success teams for training and onboarding in HubSpot. CTS supplemented live training with more than 15 rewatchable training videos for future onboarding and review.

Once CREtelligent staff were confident in using HubSpot, we set a sunset date on ZOHO use and began a complete data migration.

The CTS User Experience Team continues to optimize CREtelligent’s HubSpot account, implementing new workflows, properties, filters, reports, etc., ensuring the success of their marketing and sales teams.

Project Phase 2: Implementation Of HubSpot Customer Success Features

With the success of the ZOHO migration and HubSpot implementation, CREtelligent wanted to leverage the CTS User Experience Team's expertise to optimize the agency's service pipeline. CREtelligent envisioned a method for processing support requests, and Frequently Asked Questions section, and a chatbot to assist users while navigating the firm's website.

Stage 1 - Support Requests

Previously, CREtelligent received support requests via email or from a customer support member, but these methods did not allow ticket tracking to identify common questions or concerns. The CTS User Experience Team identified that support tickets required automatic tracking and sorting based on criteria outlined by CREtelligent.

First, we integrated the primary support email and customer support member email inboxes into HubSpot's conversation inbox. Initially, HubSpot treated all emails from the connected inboxes as support tickets and currently does not allow users to sift through ticket and non-ticket emails. Our team's solution involved a multi-pronged approach.

Working with CREtelligent, we gathered email lists that produced junk or spam support emails and placed those email addresses into a "deny list" within HubSpot. We created a workflow to move certain email tickets to the junk pile based on specific criteria.

Using another workflow that evaluated specific keywords, "from" addresses, subject lines, etc., we enabled the automatic assignment of each ticket to correct customer support members' inboxes. As the support request arrived in the customer support member's inbox, the workflow simultaneously created a ticket and assigned it to that customer support member. If the primary support email receives a request, the workflow evaluates the sender and assigns a ticket to the client's designated customer support member.

Stage 2 - Knowledge Base

A feature of HubSpot is its Knowledge Base software that empowers customers to find the information they need, saving staff time in answering common queries.

The Knowledge Base is a customizable library that includes information about the client's product, service, or a topic. It incorporates reporting features allowing HubSpot users to measure the impact of pages to improve the Knowledge Base over time.

CREtelligent wanted to use the Knowledge Base tool to mitigate support ticket requests and provide additional information for their customers. With the help of the CTS User Experience Team, CREtelligent uploaded step-by-step documentation and answers into categories, sub-categories, and articles to build out the Knowledge Base, which allowed an interactive chatbot to draw from.

Stage 3 - Live Chat

To enhance CREtelligent's customer experience on the firm's website and its RADIUS platform, stakeholders wanted to leverage HubSpot's Live Chat widget. HubSpot designed the live chat tool to help companies qualify leads, book meetings, and provide answers to common customer support questions.

The CTS User Experience Team implemented a Knowledge Base lookup within the live chat with the additional option of contacting support if the user cannot find the answer to their question. Within RADIUS, live chat enables customers to reach out for help directly.

The HubSpot Live Chat also integrates with the CRM, providing CREtelligent with more significant information about how users interact with the chatbot. It allows them to streamline the experience and turn leads into sales.

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Conclusion

With the help of Capitol Tech Solutions, CREtelligent was able to adopt an integrated marketing/email automation and CRM platform that saves the company’s sales and marketing teams’ time.

What began as an optimization project evolved into an implementation and adoption project that leveraged the marketing, sales, and service hubs of HubSpot.

The CRM aided the commercial real estate firm to grow its business by over 300 percent in 2021, adding 4,000 new users to its RADIUS platform, according to a CREtelligent press release.

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