Transforming Revenue Operations and CRM | Financial Services

A leading financial services firm was facing significant operational inefficiencies and customer dissatisfaction. Despite using HubSpot as their CRM, the system was underutilised, misaligned with their sales and marketing efforts, and lacked the necessary processes to drive growth. They were struggling with poor data management, miscommunication between teams, and a significant drop in customer satisfaction. With increasing complaints on review platforms, they were looking for a way to turn things around.

The Problem

The financial services firm had a powerful tool in HubSpot, but it wasn’t being used effectively. Several problems were making it difficult to get results:

Underperforming CRM System: HubSpot was misconfigured, and the data inside it was messy and unstructured. Teams were struggling to manage leads, track sales, and understand customer needs effectively.

Poor Customer Experience: Customers were frustrated with slow response times, lack of communication, and difficulties accessing their accounts. Online reviews highlighted issues with customer service, transparency, and delays solving issues.

Disconnected Teams: Internal teams were working in silos, leading to inefficiencies in communication and operations. The lack of alignment meant the business couldn’t get a clear view of customer interactions or track leads effectively.

This combination of poor internal systems and negative customer sentiment created a huge roadblock to growth and profitability.

Approach & Implementation

Recognising the need for a strategic overhaul, they turned to us, who’re specialists in transforming CRM systems and aligning them with business operations. We had a clear understanding of what needed to be done to get things back on track, and our approach would not only optimise the CRM but also address the internal misalignments and improve the customer experience.

Before diving into the implementation, our team undertook a thorough audit of the company’s current CRM setup, sales processes, and customer experience. This audit served as the foundation for the entire strategy, providing a clear picture of where the company was - and more importantly - where it needed to go.

Audit of CRM Configuration and Data Management: The audit involved reviewing the current state of the HubSpot CRM, including how data was being captured, organised, and used by different teams. This revealed significant gaps in data structure and management, with customer profiles being incomplete, leads not being tracked effectively, and lifecycle stages not being properly defined.

Review of Sales and Lead Management: The team conducted a deep dive into the sales processes, identifying inefficiencies in how leads were entered, tracked, and converted. A major issue was the lack of a clear lead management and sales pipeline, which made it difficult to understand the status of leads or know which ones needed immediate attention. The audit identified this as a key area for improvement.

Customer Sentiment Analysis: Another crucial element of the audit was the analysis of online reviews. The team used a bespoke AI and machine learning system to classify sentiment, identify recurring themes, and highlight the most pressing customer pain points. This AI-driven analysis identified issues such as poor communication, delays in responses, and dissatisfaction with customer service, giving the team valuable insights into customer frustrations.

Internal Alignment and Communication: The audit also reviewed how teams were using the CRM and collaborating with each other. It became clear that internal communication was lacking, and teams weren’t aligned on how to manage and use customer data, which resulted in missed opportunities and inefficiencies.

This audit was critical—it not only identified the pain points but also highlighted the opportunities for improvement that would drive the business forward.

With the audit in hand, the consultancy team set about designing a comprehensive solution to optimise the CRM system, improve customer experience, and realign internal processes.

Once the audit was complete, the team got to work reconfiguring the CRM and operations, which included:

Designing a new revenue operations process: The first step was to design a new revenue operations process which would enable leads to be tracked and managed effectively. This included new lifecycle stages, lead and customer status and sales pipelines. In addition this, data structures were created to ensure visibility into lead sources to enable better attribution. This step was crucial to getting the most from the CRM system.

Reconfiguring the CRM for Better Performance: The next step was to optimise HubSpot to better align with the new business processes. This meant cleaning up the data, improving the CRM configuration, and building out the clearer lead management and sales pipelines for sales and customer lifecycle stages. Automated lead routing and communication was introduced to streamline processes, more effective data management practices were put in place, as well as custom email templates and landing pages.

Training Teams & Aligning Processes: With a new CRM configuration and clear revenue operations and data management protocols in place, the next step was ensuring the teams could use the system to its full potential. Employees across sales and marketing were trained on the new CRM workflows, and playbooks were created to guide sales and marketing teams on how to best leverage HubSpot’s capabilities.

Outcomes

New Revenue Operations framework: The team had a new framework in place to support with lead and customer management, sales pipeline, commercial tracking and a unified way of working.

Operational Efficiency: The sales pipeline was restructured, and automated workflows reduced manual tasks, freeing up teams to focus on more strategic activities. Lead management became more streamlined, and sales performance improved as a result.

A functioning CRM system: For the first time in 18 months, the platform had a foundational framework that could support the teams and CRM’s development. Within weeks, employees had adopted the new CRM system, and data accuracy and lead management improved significantly.

Roadmap for future development: Internal teams had a roadmap for future development opportunities including customer experience improvements through the customer review and sentiment analysis work, data management and process development.