Blackline Safety Completes Business Unit Implementation for European Sales Team in a Centralized CRM

Introduction

Why they partnered with Kuno

For many years, Kuno had been a trusted partner of Blackline Safety, a wireless location technology company, for marketing services. Part of those services included getting the North American sales team onboarded to HubSpot. While this team operated like a well-oiled machine, most of the European sales team continued to manage their sales pipeline with spreadsheets — and they were hesitant to change course. The North American team approached Kuno with the goal of moving the European team to HubSpot, while being careful not to disrupt the North American side of the business.

Expectations of partnership

Blackline brought Kuno into the sales process to demo and sell HubSpot business units and sales seats. This would facilitate partitioning needed in HubSpot to keep data separate between the two divisions.

Benefits Kuno offered

With a deep understanding of HubSpot, Kuno developed a strategy that allowed the North American and European sales teams to work from a centralized CRM without data intermingling. While saving the cost of an additional HubSpot enterprise portal, the European team had access to training and support to use HubSpot to its full potential.

The Challenge

With the North American sales team already working in HubSpot, it was positive in the sense of having a foundation to build from. But it also created difficulty: out of GDPR concerns, Europe couldn’t see North American deals, contacts or companies — and vice versa. That made proper partitioning a critical piece of the HubSpot puzzle.

The European sales team was resistant to the idea of trading in their old way of managing sales processes with a new system. Blackline needed to prioritize sales enablement training so their European sales team could see the value in the HubSpot platform and readily adopt it.

The Strategy

HubSpot as a solution

When it came to selling HubSpot as a solution, Kuno focused on HubSpot’s CRM and business units. With HubSpot business units, companies can manage multiple brands from the convenience of one HubSpot portal. For Blackline, this meant that they could bring together their North American and European sales teams in one CRM. Achieving this outcome would require the use of permissions and custom properties.

The process began with a discovery period where the Kuno team learned about and mapped out the European sales team’s current business practices. Since most of the sales process was conducted in spreadsheets, the project started from the ground-up. Some of the initial steps were creating task queues to track sales initiatives, automating touchpoints with clients, automating deal movement based on data points, and enabling reporting to monitor accounts and pipeline success.

HubSpot Implementation

A strategic roadmap

While all HubSpot implementations require familiarity with an organization’s structure, the nature of this project made it even more so the case. The use of HubSpot business units, coupled with complex permission sets and teams, required a complete view of the organizational structure that included North American and European offices. We gave key stakeholders a strategic roadmap that helped ensure buy-in and met with them on a weekly basis to discuss the implementation, progress and needs.

Kuno took a pilot approach to the rollout of the HubSpot CRM, sales tools and business units. We first worked with a small group of power users with previous CRM experience, implementing HubSpot and training them on the software. We empowered the pilot group to request changes and ask questions to ensure the platform was configured in an optimal way before rolling it out to the rest of the team. The pilot group also became advocates for change, helping to curb resistance and encourage adoption of HubSpot across the sales team of 70+.

The Results

With a centralized HubSpot CRM versus two enterprise portals, the client saved an extra $76,800 a year

By approaching the solution through business units, Kuno saved the client from needing two HubSpot enterprise portals. A centralized CRM allowed for better tracking capabilities and also saved the client an additional $76,800 a year.

Because of Kuno’s robust training program, a once reluctant sales team felt comfortable moving to HubSpot and stopped using spreadsheets. From logging daily activities to creating new deals and contact/company records, the European sales team of 70+ has taken full advantage of using HubSpot to streamline their sales processes and efforts.