Sandler is a sales training company with over 50 years of experience, founded with the vision to revolutionize the sales profession. With main branches in the UK, Canada, and the US and locations around the world, Sandler reaches companies and salespeople around the globe.
Sandler was created with this question in mind: If professionals such as doctors and lawyers receive years of training to gain skills and knowledge, why are salespeople (the main revenue drivers in a company) expected to achieve success after receiving only a week of training or less? Sandler seeks to close this training gap in sales by providing proven knowledge and tools to close deals and take companies to the next level.
The UK branch of Sandler is based on independently-operated franchises. This environment supports the inclusion of ambitious trainers by supporting their entrepreneurial spirit and allowing them to adjust training sessions to their teaching style. That said, this configuration made it difficult to maintain one standardized sales process, since each franchise modified the process for their own use, with some using individual HubSpot portals, and others using different methods to keep track of their sales process.
The goal of the project was to unify these diverse sales processes into one HubSpot portal with an easy-to-use Sales Process while maintaining the independence of each franchise.
Here at Digifianz, when we dive into a HubSpot Sales Hub implementation like Sandler’s, we take on more than just the technical HubSpot configuration. We actually spend the majority of time consulting on the fundamentals of the sales process, refining each piece carefully in order to reshape existing sales processes into optimized deal-closing machines that are designed to align perfectly with HubSpot Sales Hub tools.
This was one of the parts that Sandler’s CMO, Jeremy Thomson valued most:
“The way that you have [your sales process] in your mind is not the way it necessarily should work in the system — it’s a great exercise to find out what you could do differently [to] help your business”
- Jeremy Thomson
For this project with Sandler, we worked with our close UK partner agency, Whitehat SEO. An inbound marketing agency founded in 2011, Whitehat brings many years of experience to the table. Based in the West London area, they are also able to offer strong insights regarding the UK market and context.
Together we are able to create comprehensive strategies tailor-made to UK businesses – as was the case with the Sandler UK Sales Hub Enterprise implementation.
The main challenge was incorporating an easy-to-use and flexible, yet standardized sales process that could easily be adapted and expanded.
Seeing as how each franchise functions as an independent business, they needed to retain their autonomy in regard to the days and times on which they held their informational meetings. The implementation also needed to be open enough to allow for each franchise to decide their level of involvement with the tool.
While each franchise had different needs, the sales process needed to function equally well for each of the 24 applicable franchises that were involved in the initial implementation and be scalable enough to allow for the addition of new franchises or changes to existing franchises.
We also had to consider how we were going to prevent contacts from switching between franchises during the sales and marketing processes.
The sales process needed to ensure the correct assignment of contacts as well as the separation of resources based on the franchise, to ensure that contacts that initiated contact with a said franchise, completed the sales process, and became customers of that franchise.
It was also vital to incorporate Sandler's customer-first approach, by providing detailed registration notifications to contacts upon signup for informational meetings, along with personalized touch points throughout the sales process.
We received positive reviews from the central Sandler UK team and individual franchisees regarding the Sales Hub Implementation.
Franchisees are able to stay better organized, and spend more time focusing on the success of their clients and less time on managing their pipeline.
“We can see [that representatives] have gone through the entire process that has been built for them, [and] they have been able to focus on selling and training”
- Jeremy Thomson
The central Sandler UK team is able to maintain consistency across franchises and report on franchise performance far better than ever before.
“The big difference is that we now have results as a network … we have data that we never had before. You can see someone who has gone from prospect through the whole sales process… to the customer, [and] they have been onboarded. Everyone can see that and check in on that, and that’s been really useful”
- Jeremy Thomson
The sales process has also been user-friendly, with a simple end-user experience that franchisees benefit from, without having to worry about the technical details of the HubSpot implementation. The result has been a fantastic adoption rate: out of the 50 total users now added to the platform, over 90% had logged in over the past few days, with the majority having logged in over the past few hours.
Out of the 50 total users now added to the platform, over 90% had logged in over the past few days
Take a look at the full story with our interview with Jeremy:
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When implementing a new sales process in HubSpot or auditing a client’s existing sales process in HubSpot, we review every element and recommend changes through the following process:
This part of the project started with reviewing Sandler UK’s current sales process. This is an essential first step that allows us to condense pipeline stages into solid actionable stages that form the foundation for an effective and efficient sales process in HubSpot. Along the way, we discussed Sandler’s needs and pain points with their current process to identify the properties, automations, and other Sales Hub elements to keep in mind when planning out the sales process to be used in HubSpot.
We then took all of this information aside and reviewed it internally to create a full map of the Sales Process including: Pipeline Stages, Goals, Automations, Properties, Lead Status categorization, and Reporting.
Once the mapping was completed, we reviewed it with Sandler’s executive team, taking note of considerations to include, or questions to review.
We then revised these elements internally with our CRM implementation team, applying necessary adjustments to the sales process mapping, which was then reviewed once again with the Sandler UK team, and approved for implementation within HubSpot.
We then reflected all of the details of the sales process mapping within Sandler’s HubSpot portal, including:
While developing these resources, we kept Sandler’s needs front and center by creating a modular and scalable sales process that allowed franchisees to retain their autonomy.
In order to ensure that franchisees and their assets could be added or edited at any time, we needed to keep parts of the process modular, while also retaining an overall smooth and unified sales process needed for improved reporting and standardization.
During the first stage of the process, when contacts are scheduling informational meetings, the process is modular so each franchise can control its own:
This way we could keep the flexible scheduling of informational meetings for each franchise without compromising the standardization of the sales process itself.
From this stage onward, the sales process became unified, with many optional resources that could be used and customized by each franchise to help them guide opportunities through the sales process with personalized touch points along the way.
The tension between the need for a unified process and the correct segmentation of deals and contacts was an important balance reflected in the way we set up the sales process.
Workflows were used to control contact and deal assignment to the correct franchise and prevent other franchises from marketing or selling to individuals already in contact with a different franchise.
Forms were also configured to assign the franchise location, so that resulting contacts could be correctly allocated and they could receive confirmation emails with the correct information.
With careful planning, the HubSpot implementation was able to achieve a balance allowing for a consistent sales process, and the continued independence of each franchise.
Even though Sandler as a company is well-versed in HubSpot, some teams were not as familiar with the platform. For this reason, we included two key training sessions:
All team members were invited to these training sessions, and they were recorded for future reference so that members of current and future franchises could follow along as they start to use HubSpot.
While the addition and changes to franchises in HubSpot would be done by key leaders in the Sandler UK central team that have extensive experience in HubSpot, to ensure ease of use and continuity, we also made a full guide with video tutorials detailing the current setup, how it should be modified, and how to add additional franchises.
These training sessions and accompanying materials were key to the success of the project, as they helped to ensure the standardized and easy-to-use process that Sandler was looking for.
The Sandler Sales Hub implementation was not only a successful project but also a satisfying one in the way it transformed how the Sandler UK branch works and interacts with prospects.
We look forward to staying in touch with Jeremy to see how these improvements translate into medium and long-term effects for Sandler UK, with the potential of other projects in the future.
The Sandler HubSpot Sales implementation is one of the many successful HubSpot implementation projects that we have completed in collaboration with Whitehat SEO. If you are in search of a qualified partner for your HubSpot implementation, we would love to speak with you!