Background
Client: Bratney
Industry: Commercial Process Engineering and Construction/Industrial Machinery and Equipment
Company Size: 128 Employees
Location: Urbandale, IA
Bratney Companies, based in Urbandale, Iowa, is a third-generation family-owned engineering and construction firm that specializes in designing, building, and servicing seed, grain, and food processing facilities. The company provides end-to-end solutions including facility design, custom equipment integration, and ongoing support. Bratney is recognized for its innovative technology partnerships, focus on quality and efficiency, and long-standing relationships within the agricultural and food industries.
The Challenge
Bratney's antiquated marketing and sales processes created disjointed, duplicate, and inaccurate data. Their 26-person sales team includes in-office sales leaders, project managers, and traveling territory managers who work in the field throughout the U.S. and internationally. Each team member kept records in various locations; personal email accounts, spreadsheets, and even on scraps of paper. This disorganized system led to miscommunications, forgotten tasks, and very little insight for leadership.
There were no analytics to track whether managers were reaching out to their assigned contacts, properly nurturing their leads, or accurately forecasting revenue from deals. Bratney's leadership had to trust each manager's word about their process and only saw results in closed-won deals. Lead nurturing was difficult to monitor, and pipeline management was non-existent. The little data their previous CRM system held contained many errors and duplications, so it was causing more problems than it was solving.
The lack of organization and data continuity was a complex problem that affected all aspects of Bratney: from the marketing, sales, and service teams being unable to set and track key performance indicators, to the accounting team sending invoices to incorrect or improperly formatted addresses. Bratney started to recognize that aligning their systems and data was a vital step to keep pace with modern organizations, properly coach their teams, accurately forecast revenue, and make confident, data driven decisions to guide the future of their business.
The Solution
To remedy the lack of visibility and continuity among their teams, Bratney added HubSpot to their tech stack and partnered with Blue Frog for implementation and ongoing strategic growth services. The first step in the HubSpot implementation was to gather data from Bratney's varied sources, including their previous CRM, Excel sheets, and email contact lists. We complied the data, imported it to HubSpot, and then cleansed and normalized it using the strategic data alignment tools in HubSpot's Operations Hub.
Once the data was entered and converted to a usable state, Blue Frog worked with Bratney's leadership team to create custom dashboards to monitor rep activities, marketing conversion rates, pipeline forecasting, and more. This gave the leadership team the ability to monitor reps and gain important insight into how leads progressed through their pipeline, empowering them to more intelligently shape future initiatives.
“The business intelligence from new forecasts and automated dashboards has been a tremendous tool for our leadership team to make decisions with quickly."Mike Giles | Bratney Production Manager
In addition to working with the leadership team, Blue Frog conducted in-depth training sessions with Bratney's sales team. Because Bratney's previous CRM relationship was ending, it was imperative for leadership to have their sales team ready to complete all day-to-day activities in HubSpot within a month of first setting eyes on the platform. Hands-on training with their newly built, streamlined process enabled the reps to be fully integrated and working within the HubSpot platform in a matter of weeks.
Bratney's ongoing relationship with Blue Frog continued to transform the company's processes from beginning to end:
- We implemented automated lead nurturing and scoring to provide territory managers contact prioritization, letting them know which leads are warm.
- We established advanced lead routing, so form submissions are delivered to the proper reps without a manual touch. This lets reps improve their form fill-to-contact times and deliver a better prospect experience.
- We assist leadership in building cohesion across business groups to ensure data continuity and integrity.
"They have helped us identify and stay in front of high value leads. The campaigns we've developed have accelerated our reps' initial conversations with new prospects and eliminated much of the cold calling we previously engaged in, freeing our reps up to focus more time on closing opportunities deeper in our pipeline."
Mike Giles | Bratney Production Manager
By pairing our implementation expertise with HubSpot's full suite of products, Blue Frog revolutionized Bratney's processes, allowing the company to bring its marketing, sales, and customer service processes together into one seamless experience for customers.
