Logistics Case Study

How Lead Coverage helped a national freight broker save over 300% year over year on marketing tech costs while increasing sales communication by 6000% and increasing closed-won accounts by 123%.

Problem

A national freight broker, with 12 locations and a sales team of 200 reps, wanted to make the move from using their Transportation Management System (TMS) as a prospecting tool to a sales focused Customer Relationship Management system (CRM). The team started doing research on what would work best for their company from an enterprise sales perspective. After some preliminary research, a major CRM platform gave them a quote of $3 million dollars for implementation and management for a year’s time. While the freight broker wanted a less expensive option, they also knew that they couldn’t settle for a CRM of lower quality. Enter team Lead Coverage: along with their expertise in lead generation and marketing, we are a HubSpot CRM platinum partner. Lead Coverage audited the sales team’s processes for prospecting systems and goals.

LEAD COVERAGE FOUND THREE KEY ITEMS THAT NEEDED TO BE SOLVED FOR THIS CLIENT WITH THE HELP OF A CRM:

They wanted a feature in their CRM that allowed only the leadership team and the managing sales rep on a prospecting call to view the conversation. Along with this feature, they wanted clearer visibility into who owned which lead.
The broker has many locations that are not proximity specific to the customers they managed and they wanted a round-robin lead assignment to be set up to randomly assign those leads out to different teams. Once assigned out they wanted to inject a competitive edge and give those teams 60 days to work those leads, get in touch with a decision-maker, and either get the RFP schedule or start working lanes with them — otherwise, the lead would be automatically forfeited.
The company works with two specific kinds of customers: enterprise and small to medium-sized businesses. The enterprise customer has a longer sales cycle that can last anywhere from 6 months to two years. Unlike enterprise, the small to medium-sized businesses are usually a one to one relationship and have a much shorter sales cycle, often less than two weeks. The tracking and reporting on these sales cycles need to fit the sales teams’ daily process.
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Solution

After analyzing the problems that needed to be solved, the Lead Coverage team initially found a 300% savings by implementing HubSpot into the freight broker’s daily sales operations as an alternative to the competing platform. The implementation timeline also provided cost savings. The Lead Coverage team was able to execute the CRM onboarding in full within three months while the competing platform proposed a timeline of six months.

TO SOLVE FOR THEIR KEY ISSUES THE TEAM TOOK SOME CREATIVE APPROACHES

Utilizing HubSpot Teams, branch-specific information, such as lead tracking and ownership, was kept undisclosed within each branch. Despite this change, senior leadership could still see progress on all prospects through uniquely built reports and could drill down on specific leads if necessary. Lead Coverage also reverse-engineered an external portal to share what leads were already owned internally to facilitate transparency throughout the company. This allowed further visibility on which leads were available to request. At the time of the project implementation, HubSpot had an early beta that sales teams were using to rotate leads. Lead Coverage was able to opt the client into the beta and began rotating leads between each of the branches. Specifically, a rotation for new leads from the website and for unassigned leads from our email campaigns.
The hardest problem to solve for this client was managing different sales cycles with their two types of customers. Initially, the Lead Coverage team implemented a solution using deal pipelines. Any lead that had a longer sales cycle (including an RFP or proposal) would be worked on a unique deal pipeline. There were multiple decision makers in these deals so the team set up separate deals per relationship. The quicker sales cycle would be worked on a single team pipeline. Reports were generated to show senior management deals per team on both the short and long sales cycle pipelines. Adoption of the longer-term sales cycle pipeline did not happen within the first six months of using HubSpot so the Lead Coverage team started to explore other options.
HubSpot is currently testing a new beta where custom objects can be added for enterprise-level customers. Using this beta, the Lead Coverage team implemented a new object that would work as a lead property for the longer sales cycle. This object has a monetary value assigned to it as well as activity tracking. It works as a hybrid between companies and deals. The reporting shows senior management; the decision maker and sales rep communication that is unique to the longer sales cycle.
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HubSpot ended up being a great fit for this client due to its ability to match its sales process as well as its savings of 300% year over year. The Lead Coverage team onboarded about 200 reps total and started reporting on their sales efforts to the senior management team. Prior to this relationship, senior management had no transparency in the prospecting process. The HubSpot implementation gave the senior management team line of sight on contracted deals set to close within the next 9 months. Management also has the ability to track the methods that their reps are using to close deals. By tracking the sales methodologies for their effectiveness, email communications from reps to leads have been streamlined and perfected. This standardization has allowed the broker to evolve from basic sales practices such as exclusively calling leads to include email communication tactics to close deals.

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