Expanding Its Customer Base From Two Languages to Three
When Rock Content acquired ScribbleLive in 2019, it extended its market presence from Brazil and Mexico to North America — and, in the process, significantly increased the complexity of its sales, marketing, and customer service processes.
This acquisition expanded its product line and grew its customer base to include three languages: Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
João Dobbin, Manager of Business Enablement at Rock Content, and his teams had to figure out how to scale and integrate the sales, marketing, and service processes of the two companies.
At the time of acquisition, ScribbleLive was using Marketo, Drift, and Salesforce, and it wasn’t going well.
“The Salesforce instance wasn’t well organized,” says João. “ScribbleLive had been buying other companies and merging Salesforce instances, which was causing issues.”
Adding to the urgency, ScribbleLive’s contract with Salesforce was up for renewal soon, so João had to decide how to proceed.
As it happens, Rock Content had moved to HubSpot about five years prior because of its own earlier struggles to manage its sales, marketing, and service processes.
Rock Content had been using Intercom for customer messaging and Strikedeck for customer success — along with other proprietary platforms and manual processes. This resulted in information silos and many inefficiencies.
Rock Content moved to HubSpot, starting with Marketing Hub and Sales Hub, and eventually adding Service Hub. When it did, it realized the benefits of having everything on one platform — such as data-driven sales forecasting and greater productivity — and João wanted the same for the newly acquired company.
Thus, it didn’t take long for him to decide to integrate both companies on HubSpot.
A 360-Degree View of Customers with HubSpot
By moving the newly acquired company onto HubSpot, all sales, marketing, and service teams have a 360-degree view of customers and leads.
“If it’s not in HubSpot, it didn’t happen,” says João. “It’s our one source of truth, so everything needs to go in there.”
HubSpot also has the power and flexibility to support sales, marketing, and service in three languages for five different products.
Some of the ways Rock Content is using the HubSpot CRM platform are:
Sales Forecasting
Rock Content sales managers are using the Sales Hub forecasting tool to track progress towards sales goals, basing forecasts on the likelihood of deals closing, not just the deal stage.
Rafael Faria, Director of Upmarket Sales for Rock Content, loves the sales forecasting tool because it allows him to have more fruitful conversations with the VP of Sales.
“I can give my bosses forecasts that are backed by actual data,” says Rafael. “I’m no longer estimating and compiling everything into a separate spreadsheet. Everything’s laid out in the HubSpot dashboard.”
Sales coaching
Sales managers are also using Sales Hub to coach sales reps by providing feedback and sharing best practices to positively impact Rock Content’s bottom line.
Rafael describes his process:
“I sit with my sales reps every week and go through their dashboards. We look at how many opportunities are open, how many contacts they called, and if they were able to start conversations. We compare their results to the previous week and month, and identify areas they need to work on.”
If sales reps are falling short of quotas, the trend can be identified early and addressed immediately, without waiting until end-of-month reporting.
Custom Reporting
When Rock Content initially started with the HubSpot CRM platform, they struggled with its reporting tool. The HubSpot product team moved quickly to address the situation and gave Rock Content early access to HubSpot’s new custom report builder tool.
“The difference between the old and new reporting tool is night and day,” says João. “People who were the most vocal about the limits of the old tool became the biggest supporters of the new one. It allows us to build more complex reports that reference company, deal and revenue data all in one place without leaving HubSpot."
Data Insights to Drive Business Decisions
Sales, marketing, and customer service are all benefiting from the data insights they’re getting from the new custom reporting tool, and they can do it all without the help of a data analyst.
For example, the service team compiles data about how customers are using Rock Content’s products, which is influencing decision making across multiple departments, including product development, engineering, marketing and sales.
Managing Marketing Channels
Having a base of customers who speak different languages is particularly challenging for the Rock Content marketing team. To make matters even more complex, some customers interact with Rock Content in multiple languages.
The Rock Content marketing team is using properties and exclusion lists to keep it all straight.
Marina Cordeiro, Manager of Demand Generation, explains:
“When we acquired ScribbleLive, we went from two languages to three, and we worried about that. But Marketing Hub has the tools and features we need to send the right information to the right person in the right language at the right time.”
João elaborates further:
“We can segment customers to make sure they get emails and customer support in the appropriate language and context. Most of our support agents speak at least two languages, which keeps our staffing lean while serving customers worldwide. Our agents can easily continue conversations started by other agents, tagging customers appropriately.”
HubSpot’s workflow tool is also pivotal in enabling Rock Content’s complex lead routing process, which takes multiple factors into account to direct leads to the right sales people, such as language, geography, size of the company and title.
Web Traffic Analytics
Marina’s team generates a lot of marketing content, from ebooks to webinars to templates and even a magazine, to keep sales pipelines full.
They use web traffic analytics and attribution reporting to see which assets are driving performance.
“I check the HubSpot dashboard first thing every morning to see our numbers,” says Marina. “How many people are visiting our blog? How many have downloaded this ebook? Where is our traffic coming from? Everything I want to know is right there.”
Marina’s team is also using attribution reporting to understand the customer journey and measure which channels and assets are creating sales opportunities and driving conversions and take the guesswork out of their inbound marketing efforts.
Customer Relationship Management and Support
Given the complexity of serving customers in multiple languages, customizability of the HubSpot CRM platform has also been essential to the success of the customer service team.
Bruna Martins, Global Manager of Customer Support at Rock Content, explains:
“Most customer service platforms only support one team and one product, and you have to fit into their little box. With Service Hub, we can combine workflows and properties to do anything we want.”
Having service, sales and marketing on one platform is also essential for delivering high levels of customer service.
“We can provide faster and better support because we can see everything that’s going on with the customer,” says Bruna. “We know the context of the relationship before prioritizing and replying to tickets—and it keeps our efforts in alignment with the sales and marketing teams.”
Customer Service Rep Productivity
Service Hub automation and self-service features are facilitating greater productivity for the customer service team, allowing Rock Content to scale customer support without having to expand its team at the same rate.
“Everything HubSpot has to offer is making us more productive because we can connect, integrate and automate a lot of different features,” says Bruna.
650% Increase in Recurring Revenue
With HubSpot's help, Rock Content increased its annual recurring revenue by an astonishing 650% and grew its team by 525% over the last five years.
It also increased its leads by 78% over two years.
HubSpot not only supported Rock Content through its acquisition of ScribbleLive, it remains at the forefront of Rock Content’s customer acquisition, retention, and service delivery programs.
“With everything integrated into one system, we have visibility into leads, sales forecasting, customer onboarding, customer satisfaction per product, and more,” says João. “We have a lot of data points that we simply didn’t have before, and the HubSpot CRM platform makes it all possible.”
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