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Outsourced, an Australian-owned outsourcing provider, wanted to optimize its sales process to boost closed-won deals. While multiple business units had adopted HubSpot’s platform, Sales wasn’t using it to its full potential. Find out how Salted Stone redesigned Outsourced’s sales process and pipeline with Sales Hub, resulting in 15% more deals won. |
Outsourced is on a mission to change perceptions of offshore staffing. As a premium outsourcing provider, Outsourced acquires the best talent in the Philippines and retains 98% of staff long-term. Their professionals in IT, finance, customer service, and more help scale the world’s leading brands.
In 2023, the company experienced growing pains of its own. An influx of website inquiries had Sales struggling to manage large lead volumes and close deals. Outsourced suspected inefficiencies were to blame, and asked Salted Stone for an expert review of its Sales Hub usage.
Mike Marques, Salted Stone’s Strategic Account Manager who led the project, says the engagement was a natural extension of a long-term partnership with Outsourced: “By harnessing the power of Sales Hub and collaborating with the Operations team, we built a holistic user-centered solution to a complex challenge. This revamp of Outsourced’s sales process has significantly improved their productivity and bottom line.”
The challenge
Outsourced was adept at HubSpot for marketing and customer relationship management. But when it came to Sales Hub, they weren’t using it to its full potential.
Sales struggled to manage an overflowing pipeline of unqualified leads and inactive deals. Deals automatically generated in HubSpot whenever a lead submitted a website inquiry — which happened a lot — skipping the crucial qualification step. Not only was this difficult to handle, it prevented accurate sales reporting.
To make matters worse, Business Development (BD) reps unknowingly created duplicate deals because the necessary checks weren’t in place. A glut of forgotten deals went inactive or were lost. As Matthew Reed, HubSpot Solutions Lead at Salted Stone APAC, notes, “A haphazard way of working had been long ingrained in Outsourced’s sales operations.”
Outsourced turned to Salted Stone to resolve its sales inefficiencies. The goal? Achieve 20 or more closed-won deals per month. We crafted a sales optimization strategy through a series of discovery workshops that pinpointed challenges in the process, including:
- A high volume of unqualified leads and deals
- Lack of deal assignment based on region and rep capacity
- Duplication of deals associated with a company record
- Obsolete deal stages and numerous inactive deals
- Minimal follow-up, which affected close rates and revenue.
Our Solutions team then mapped a new process to prevent unqualified leads from entering the pipeline, and assign deals to the right rep at the right time. “Outsourced has a complex algorithm for lead routing based on region, reps, and whether the lead is a ‘VIP',” explains Reed, reflecting on the strategy.
“It was important the new process was automated where possible and dynamic enough to meet reps’ changing capacities. We worked with key stakeholders and iterated until we arrived at a polished solution that brought Outsourced up to best practice.”
Our solutions
Salted Stone designed and implemented a streamlined sales process that fully leveraged HubSpot Sales Hub. We took a two-pronged approach, optimizing lead qualification and deal management, to eliminate complexity and increase efficiency.
Here’s the revised sales process:
Automation would save teams time and minimize errors. The first step was deploying a custom lead qualification workflow triggered by submissions of the website inquiry forms. If a lead’s contact record says they are a former customer, a task notification is sent to the contact owner who then requalifies and creates the deal. All other leads are assigned for qualification based on reps’ region and capacity.
Once a new lead is qualified, a second deal assignment workflow triggers deal creation, including notifications to action unqualified contacts. Overall, the workflows greatly improved the quality of leads entering the pipeline.
We also removed the redundant “Gone Dark” stage containing deals technically lost, and implemented custom deal stages — Qualified with BD, Qualified with Client, Proposal Sent, and Contract Sent. This created a stringent deal management process that resolved the risk of duplication.
To reengage inactive opportunities, we set up sales templates for reps’ follow-up sequences. Smart content was essential — an opportunity may operate in one of 16 industries and identify as one of three target personas. Personalization reduces the effort taken to follow up.
Finally, Outsourced leadership required visibility on Sales’ response times to new leads. A “speed to lead” dashboard was implemented, tracking:
- time taken to respond to an initial inquiry
- time taken to complete an exploratory call
- time taken to follow up, as well as whether or not a deal was won.
Custom properties established the percentage of leads scheduling a meeting via the scheduling tool and the proportion that attended. These insights gave Operations a clearer view of sales performance, informing further process optimization.
The results
Salted Stone’s collaboration with Outsourced delivered a bespoke process easily adopted by Sales and loved by Operations. Monthly revenue increased as Sales qualified better leads and closed more deals.
“I recommend working with Salted Stone if you feel you are not leveraging HubSpot to its full potential.”
— Karl Mitmannsgruber, CIO at Outsourced
Outsourced CIO Karl Mitmannsgruber says there was a clear performance improvement thanks to the project: “Our revamped sales process using Sales Hub resulted in a 15% increase in deals won per month and our expectation is this will increase further. The ROI makes such an engagement a no-brainer, even more so considering our new-found ability to focus on core business.”
Sales wastes no time fussing over bad leads and lost opportunities, instead doubling down on closing deals. A smooth, easy-to-manage process, supported by HubSpot sales tools, has put the team on track for bolder revenue growth.
Together with Outsourced, Salted Stone continues to improve the company’s sales process and find new opportunities for growth with HubSpot.
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