With over 100 global offices, Reed wanted to make its marketing automation more effective. It needed to generate more leads and co-ordinate more efficiently with the sales team. Marketing Director, UK and EMEA, Reed, James Adams, explains how the recruitment company chose HubSpot to help it harness email automation and workflows to optimise lead generation and sales alignment. It worked so well that in one year, the company has generated a seven-figure revenue attributable to its marketing efforts.
Reed is a global recruitment company on a mission to improve lives through work. With over 1,800 employees and 100 offices in the UK, Europe, the USA, the Middle East and Asia, it connects job seekers and employers with the right partnerships for the next step in their journey.
Its teams provide a broad range of services, with programmes co-ordinated across 20 specialist sectors. Understandably, managing and routing lead information efficiently is crucial to Reed’s growth.
After scaling successfully for more than 60 years using manual systems, a new generation of employees recognised exciting possibilities to harness automated processes.
Marketing Director, UK and EMEA, James Adams had used HubSpot for marketing automation at other companies. He advocated for Reed to adopt a similar solution.
He said: “It was an opportunity. I knew how powerful HubSpot could be for empowering the marketing team, helping us generate more leads and co-ordinate more effectively with sales. If we could bring in a tool like that, it would make a big difference.”
No visibility on lead data
Traditionally, Reed had used its website and other marketing channels to advertise phone numbers for its local offices. That meant customer service reps had to take down info from callers and pass it on manually to a relevant consultant.
The process resulted in a slow time-to-service delivery, and it meant that Adams and his colleagues had no data to guide their marketing efforts.
Adams said: “We had limited visibility on inbound lead generation. We couldn’t track where leads were coming from and had no quick way to get leads into the hands of our salespeople. It was a major gap, and it limited the ROI we could get from marketing activities.”
Choosing HubSpot
The team at Reed recognised the benefits an automated marketing system would bring and began a search for the best tool. They considered three or four solutions.
Adams said: “It came down to HubSpot for a couple of reasons. One, their onboarding and account management support are second to none. Second, the platform is built around users. It’s very user-friendly and brings a full stack of marketing tools that none of the other providers could compete with.”
Reed purchased Marketing Hub, Sales Hub and Service Hub to align its teams and optimise its marketing operations.
Faster time-to-service
Upon implementation, Reed immediately started using HubSpot to engage prospects and leads more efficiently.
“We started out using Marketing Hub for email campaigns to nurture our leadership audience and tracking leads coming in through the website and our paid advertising efforts,” Adams explained.
With landing pages and contact forms capturing lead information, the marketing team was able to quickly pass qualified leads to the sales team, significantly reducing lag time.
Adams added: “That piece has been transformative. We can now get leads to the right salespeople very quickly. In our industry, that’s extremely important. We find that a percentage of leads will send their requirements to a few recruitment companies, so being first to get back to them is key.”
Nurturing leads with workflows
Adams and his team are leveraging a large number of workflows that make their work faster and more effective. They went from manually emailing individual leads to sending automated sequences based on engagement.
Adams said: “Prior to getting HubSpot, we were using very basic tools, and our email marketing was not as slick or as smart as it could be. Now, we connect with our audience regularly via monthly newsletters, and we run smart workflows and trigger-based emails.”
With thought leadership workflows, it sends relevant automated emails to leads who engage with their content – whether that’s downloading the latest salary guide, signing up to a webinar or collecting any other gated content on their websites.
Those quick and personalised responses are just one way that HubSpot helped Reed connect with their many different customer personas and improve their online experience.
“We’re engaging prospects and customers in a lot of ways across the buyer journey, and seeing a great response to those added-value touchpoints,” Adams added.
Data-driven optimisation
Being able to track lead generation and engagement across every digital channel has driven major wins for the marketing team.
One year after Reed started using HubSpot, it had more than 7,000 leads come through the website. The data has been used to optimise efforts in Pay-Per-Click ads and SEO.
The insights are helping Adams and his team focus their marketing efforts in the right areas.
Adams said: “HubSpot has brought us beautiful insights. We can see what types of content a lead has downloaded, and either pass that information to sales or use it to plan more marketing activities they’ll be interested in. We’re creating better workflows and emails and doing things we simply couldn’t do before.”
Boosting the sales team
HubSpot’s amalgamation, analysis and reporting on lead data has helped the marketing team collaborate more productively with sales.
The sales team is now more aware of marketing activities and sharing back information that drives high-converting content. Meanwhile, the marketing team can now align their campaigns with sales goals.
“Having sales and marketing working in the same environment has been a game-changer. They can see what their leads are doing and ask us to send them a certain email or workflow. We’ve seen great results from that,” Adams added.
That inter-team collaboration was made possible by a custom integration to Reed’s internal CRM.
Integrating Reed’s CRM
With hundreds of thousands of contact records in its proprietary CRM, true partnership between marketing and sales relied on a tight integration with HubSpot.
“The integration with our CRM allowed us to get real-time customer data into Sales Hub, and vice versa. It let us pass leads on to sales instantly, and enriched our marketing insights with data from existing customers,” Adams said.
HubSpot empowers marketers
From onboarding through on-going learning, Adams said his team’s relationship with HubSpot has made them better marketers.
“Onboarding was pretty seamless. With our onboarding manager, plus the learning and development resources within the platform, we were able to get up and running and make very quick wins,” he said.
His team frequently comes to him with new campaign ideas they got from tutorials within the HubSpot knowledge base.
“It keeps us thinking about where we’d like to be in a year’s time with the tools. We’ve got some exciting things coming up, and that’s because of the support we get from our account management and the wider Hubspot ecosystem,” he added.
Seven-figure net income in one year
With the improved efficiency and insights it has derived from HubSpot, Reed attributed seven figures of income to their marketing efforts in just 12 months.
“Since last year, we’ve launched our new website and generated over 7,000 marketing qualified leads. Roughly 25% of those leads converted to purchase, generating well over seven figures’ worth of net income,” Adams said.
Adams and his team can now execute more effective marketing activities with outstanding efficiency. Campaign set-up is now 96% faster.
“We can see that our efforts are working. About 24% of our website visitors complete a contact form, and our B2B newsletter is growing by over 1,000 subscribers each month. We’re very happy,” he said.
With seamless integration to their proprietary CRM, user-friendly workflows, and cross-functional visibility, Reed is able to empower sales teams from 20 industry specialties spread out over 180 offices around the globe.
“We’re co-ordinating efficiently across the entire Reed Group, and it’s all down to HubSpot’s powerful lead management process. It’s made a massive difference for us,” Adams concluded.