How Learners.ai helped MPN Capital Markets with HubSpot Sales Hub Onboarding, Custom HubSpot Integration, and Business Processes Redesign.
Overview
MPN Capital Markets is a Canadian full-service consulting firm that helps large companies take control of their energy expenses. With over 30 years of experience in the energy sector, the company works with publicly traded corporations, real estate investment trusts, and organizations in manufacturing, aerospace, and other sectors. MPN uses procurement methods to provide energy financing solutions to its clients. Strategies include hedging and using forward contracts on commodities.
The Objective
MPN's mandate to Learners.ai was to systemize and operationalize sales processes and pipelines based on how MPN does business. This foundation was important for MPN to scale the sales team and seize more opportunities. It involved hiring additional business development reps (BDRs) to generate more leads and penetrate other markets in North America. But the company still needed to invest in technologies that would streamline lead generation efforts and result in better sales outcomes. Before Learners.ai, each sales rep called leads out of Excel spreadsheets downloaded from ZoomInfo.
Challenges
MPN came to Learners with several business challenges that needed solving. The company wanted to:
- Quickly configure HubSpot Sales Hub according to best practices and internal requirements. That would help BDRs get up and running with HubSpot.
- Ensure BDRs receive the right training on how to use HubSpot Sales Hub.
- Decrease inefficiencies from manual tasks that take up resources from BDRs and streamline the data enrichment process.
- Build a custom and fully integrated contract management process to reduce sales cycles and increase productivity.
- Create a contract management process with user security permissions to segregate data among BDRs.
Solutions to These Challenges
1. HubSpot Sales Hub Configuration/Personalization
To scale rapidly, MPN needs to get its sales teams to follow well-defined processes and playbooks. The goal is to generate better quality leads, and lots of them. That helps BDRs close more deals (and bigger deals!) faster.
The first challenge for Learners was that MPN didn't have a customer relationship management (CRM) system to collect and analyze client information for lead generation. BDRs procured leads in Ontario and Quebec using tools such as ZoomInfo.
Learners configured HubSpot to meet MPN's unique requirements and automate specific processes for various sales roles. That involved learning about the company's sales processes and how BDRs complete day-to-day tasks to improve the customer experience and customer lifecycle. This integration included custom meeting types, meeting templates, and properties that triggered specific workflows to automate most of the admin work carried out by sales reps, freeing up more than 50% of their time.
MPN required additional operational enhancements for HubSpot that automated merging, distribution, signing, and contract generation.
Learners also configured ZoomInfo according to sales enablement best practices. This process included segregating companies between reps, applying lead scoring based on MPN’s Ideal Client Profile (ICP), and distributing leads equitably among BDRs.
2. HubSpot Sales Hub Training
Incorporating a CRM system into MPN's sales model was the easy part. However, the enterprise would need to train BDRs to use the software to ensure a strong foundation for growth. The CRM also had to be individually customized for each rep to boost productivity.
Learners recommended an accelerated HubSpot Sales Hub onboarding process customized to MPN's needs. The process met the immediate requirements of the business and simplified technical configuration and data migrations. Learners.ai’s Certified HubSpot Trainers also worked with MPN to ensure the smooth adoption of HubSpot without too much disruption to the business.
3. Custom and Fully Integrated Contract Management Process
Learners built a custom integration with a contract management solution embedded within HubSpot workflows using Operations Hub.
One of the requirements for custom integration was reading data from electricity and gas invoices and turning that data into PDF contracts. MPN required PDF contracts for different providers and provinces, which would require lots of people power and resources. Learners’ team of data scientists utilized AI-based PDF scraping tools to simplify this process and improve data quality automation. Then Learners used DocuSign to map properties into contract templates. BDRs now have a simple interface to upload invoices or simply forward emails received from customers. Voila! A deal gets created with all the right data, contracts get populated, and the sales rep simply reviews everything and sends it to the customer to sign.
PDF scraping is not 100% effective. However, Learners created manual entry points in pipelines to identify errors and validate processes, a time-sucking task that burdened sales reps.
Identifying errors can improve scripts over time. This is a trick Learners’ uses quite often to catch exemptions and improve automation over time through continuous learning (no pun intended).
5. User Security Permissions
Another challenge was that MPN doesn't allow BDRs to see each other's leads or deals. This allows for a competitive environment and incentivizes sales reps to prospect without any restrictions. However, the company's processes and technologies meant BDRs could view a deal once it moved on to an Account Executive (AE).
MPN wanted permissions enforced at the contact, company, and deal levels to segregate duties and protect data. Learners achieved this goal by applying several complex restrictions to processes. One of these restrictions was a creative workflow that alerted BDRs and their manager when a new BDR attempted to contact an existing prospect or customer.
Results
Learners.ai applied a holistic HubSpot RevOps approach to reduce operational complexities and sales reps' daily workloads by more than 50%. This approach allowed reps to go after more prospects:
“Just the sales enablement workflows and custom configurations alone contributed to us closing more deals, and sales team morale increased significantly,” said Philip Desrosiers, the Director of Operations at MPN.
MPN’s pipeline velocity also increased by more than 30% as average days continued to decline and deal sizes started growing.
According to Mr. Desorsiers:
"The most exciting part was that there was a dramatic shift in energy markets, and having the right CRM in place really allowed us to exploit those opportunities to the fullest.”
Learners.ai helped MPN have a record month within the first month!
The icing on the cake was automating contract generation, an arduous task that every sales rep despised. Although operational support was available, the technical details and complex terms of contract generation meant a lot of tedious hours for the sales team. All of that went away with a custom integration that automated the grunt work.
By this point, the sales team at MPN were not just experts at HubSpot but gave Learners.ai some great new ideas for workflows and reports. It was a great outcome for everyone and a fantastic learning opportunity.
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