How to drive alignment between Sales and Customer Success Teams

Client

X1 is the global leader in remote preservation and collection software. With more than 600,000 users in 20,000 different organizations globally, X1 solutions address our clients' and users' mission-critical needs every day.

X1 creates exceptional solutions for people and organizations that need to find information to become or stay compliant with industry and geographic regulations.

Challenge

X1 offers three different subscription-based product solutions to customers across the globe. With the continued growth of the customer subscription base, the volume of license data continued to increase. The license subscription data was running on different, independent systems which proved challenging.

The data output was extensive and varied, sometimes incomplete, and complicated to find when the sales or customer support teams needed it. A lot of time was spent looking for the data.

The internal process was tedious and time-consuming. The customer support, sales, and marketing teams had to jump between licensing servers, transaction servers, and a CRM to get all the required information per customer.

According to the Harvard Business Review, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. The disjointed systems stopped being a vanity issue and became one that had material consequences.

The process used to take several hours, resulting in increased pressure on the staff to meet the SLA of the license delivery time. It was a challenge to complete the process every time.

For example, sales would need to ask customer service for the license details if the customer license was about to expire. The customer service team would then have to look it up for them, collect the details per order, and respond.

Understanding the complications in the process, when X1 tried to give the sales access to the licensing system to validate, check, and execute, they struggled with adoption, and feedback was, "I'll just email or message the customer service team."

Beyond having a process-oriented solution, they needed the solution to be easy to use, adopt, and maintain.

Solution

Our solution was to build a single source of truth based on consumer behavior that would enrich and enable the sales and services team to do their best work.

The solution began by placing the customer at the center of the flywheel. We saw the website as an extension of the CRM and created a path so that the license key would be generated and delivered upon payment processing when a customer purchased or renewed a software license.

We fed HubSpot the license key information because HubSpot would then fire off, through automation, the contact timeline updates for the sales and customer service team to have.

This step ensured that the customer and the sales team were aligned. In addition, sales require the license information on the contact and company record to ensure any conversation would reflect the appropriate subscription.

To ensure that sales always have up-to-date information, we introduced a custom object named "Licenses."

We based our solution on the idea that when customers go to the website to purchase or renew the software, they instantly get the license key generated and delivered upon payment processing.

It was essential to get the license information in HubSpot to send it to the customer. Also, both the sales and service delivery teams need the license information on the contact or company record when having that sales conversation with the customer for renewal or any support issue.

Licenses

We created a license custom object in HubSpot. Each license record represents an X1 software license record issued to a customer.

The license record holds the start date, renewal date, license id, and password information.

License Record

Having a license custom object in HubSpot allows us to report on licensing and have license-based automation to restart renewal campaigns before the license expiry dates.

Having a License custom object in HubSpot allows us to report on licensing and have license-based automation to restart renewal campaigns before the license expiry dates.

Workflow

We also integrated HubSpot and Digital River via API so that we get notified whenever there is a new order in Digital River to do the following:

• Sync the Digital River order with HubSpot as a new deal
• Check customer contact that made the transaction and either creates a new contact or updates an existing contact in HubSpot.
• If the user adds a company as a billing contact for the Digital River order, then create or update company info in HubSpot.
• Associate the contact/company with the deal
• Add deal line-items (products and quantities)
• Generate license id and password from X1 licensing platform
• Add license data to Digital River orders
• Add license data to deal line items
• Create license record in HubSpot
• Associate the license record with Deal, Contact, and Company

And on a license renewal order in Digital River, to do the following:

• Sync the Digital River order with HubSpot as a new deal
• Check customer contact that made the transaction and either create a new contact in HubSpot or update an existing contact.
• If the user adds a company as a billing contact for the Digital River order, then create or update company info in HubSpot.
• Associate the contact/company with the deal
• Add deal line-items (products and quantities)
• Renew the existing license from the X1 licensing platform
• Add license data to Digital River orders
• Add license data to deal line items
• Update license renewal date in HubSpot
• Associate the license record with Deal, Contact, and Company

Results

The project's goal was to align sales, services, and the customer to create a streamlined online ordering and renewal process and increase retention, upsell, and cross-sell.

All the licensing data is in HubSpot, tied to the company, deal, and ticket record, providing a central location for sales and customer service to quickly and easily access the information.  

When we aligned the subscription object to the CRM and launched automation beyond the initial subscription, we reduced the time that the customer service and sales teams were spending looking for more information around the licensing details. 

Sales were able to work with up-to-date information rather than playing catch up, and the results have been positive. X1 has...

Moreover, sales and service alignment increased because both teams have what they need at their disposal. They feel more empowered now because they can use a single system for sales and customer services through Hubspot. It's a one-stop shop.

The solution allowed X1 to:

• Streamline operations
• Streamline our data for better reporting options
• Saved 12 hours of manual work every week
• Improved inter-team communication
• Improved support team morale