Frustrated by manual and laborious tasks that partitioned sales and marketing

Eilakaisla’s Sales and Marketing department had been using HubSpot's marketing automation tool in addition to Microsoft Dynamics 365 as their sales and customer relationship management system, but the two systems were not connected. They utilized their website to collect sales leads which were then transferred to the CRM system for sales to process.

With this setup they found it difficult to gauge how effective their marketing campaigns had been due to customer leads not being directly available in HubSpot and their CRM system not having any available information on where a lead’s source or campaign was. In order to create newsletters and mailing lists they needed to manually compile an address list from their CRM system, bring this into an Excel spreadsheet and from there, export the spreadsheet to a separate newsletter software they were utilizing. As anyone can see, this was a frustrating and laborious manual task for any professional.

Automating sales and marketing processes through integration

Eilakaisla made the decision to streamline their cooperation between sales and marketing through integration. The intention for this integration was to automate previous processes and manual tasks such as importing of information gathered from the website's order and contact forms directly as leads for sales to process without all the manual steps. By doing this, Marketing would then be able to discover their campaigns’ return on investment (ROI), so they could analyse the effectiveness and target their marketing investments better.

Additionally, they wanted their customer contact information from their CRM system to use with HubSpot’s email marketing as a means to replace their older, separate, newsletter software. Their intention was to be able to achieve personalized messaging that would be targeted to each individuals personal profile. One requirement for the integration was that Eilakaisla sales needed to be able to track their contacts’ activities (e.g. guide downloads, blog readership, viewed pages, etc.) in order to carry out sales that were as closely oriented to each specific customer's needs as possible.

ONEiO was chosen as the integration tool and Sales Communications Oy was chosen as the partner

It was clear that in order streamline their operation and to automate the process, an integration between HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics was needed. Erika Ehrnrooth, Eilakaisla CEO, who served as their sales and marketing director at the time, found herself in a situation where she needed to find a suitable partner to carry out the integration.

She took to social media and posed the following open question on LinkedIn: “Is there anyone with experience on integrating HubSpot and Dynamics?”.

Her question received answers right away, and Jani Aaltonen from Sales Communications Oy was among the first. They started a dialog, and the experience and expertise at Sales Communications was convincing. These discussions further led to the discover of ONEiO, which was Jani’s recommendation for the implementation of the integration. 

“After the initial meeting, I let out a sigh of relief: we had found the partners that understood our needs and could assure us that we can achieve our goal!” says Ehrnrooth

At the initial meeting, ONEiO Cloud Oy’s Juha Berghäll explained ONEiO's solution in a manner that was easy to understand for Erika. Compared to ONEiO’s turnkey solution, other options seemed technically heavy, difficult to manage, and required specific platform expertise in both implementation and maintenance. 

Additionally, ONEiO could be used to integrate other processes, platforms and software. “We have often stepped in to ‘save’ a customer when they have not found a suitable or workable solution, or they have not wanted to invest as much or more in one as they did with the proper applications.

This is especially so when we consider that customers with software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions value subscription models and simple pricing. ONEiO’s existing connections for Dynamics and HubSpot were perfectly suited for the needs at Eilakaisla, which meant that it was easy to promise them a workable solution that would not require a long and labour-intensive IT project”, says Berghäll.

Carrying out the integration

Sales Communications’ highly skilled consultants were responsible for implementing the HubSpot↔Dynamics integration. The technical side of the integration was implemented in one day, which meant the integration project was then free to use most of its time on the value-generating parts, i.e. defining the use cases and processes and creating the databases and framework in both HubSpot and Dynamics.  

The project began with a specification phase, in which the processes to be automated were chosen and a basis was created for future development and the creation of new components. The whole process was automated and then used as a blueprint for the integration.

After the specification phase, a Sales Communications’ integration expert, a ONEiO specialist and Eilakaisla’s IT personnel carried out the required measures for integrating Dynamics and HubSpot. At this stage, Dynamics was not yet on ONEiO’s list of applications, but as was found in this project, adding new systems and applications to ONEiO was a very agile process, which meant it was possible to work on the integration logic sooner.

Next, Sales Communications’ integration expert built the required integration rules and configured the transferrable data fields in ONEiO’s integration platform interface.

“ONEiO’s team of experts was there to provide background support at every turn in using the service, if ever we needed their help”, says Joni Laukkonen, integration specialist at Sales Communications.

The result: More efficient cooperation between sales and marketing, and a transparent marketing ROI. Not to mention improved work satisfaction.

Thanks to the integration, previous manual tasks (such as processing separate mailing lists and blocklists) have been eliminated, and many phases have been automated and sped up. Information is now shared between the systems in real time, and HubSpot can generate CRM leads for sales through forms and scoring. 

“Eilakaisla sales personnel can see their contacts’ activities in HubSpot (such as webinar registrations, guide downloads, website views) and they are able to offer more focused and tailored, useful messaging to the customer contacts. It is now also easy to see if our marketing campaigns have had the desired effect, and to see their ROI”,, says the current marketing manager for Eilakaisla, Tanja Tiitta.

“We at Eilakaisla have been very happy to see better efficiency, to have manual tasks automated, and for the closer cooperation between the sales and marketing teams”, says Ehrnrooth. “In the end, such an integration is all about people working together”.