The Client
Nonprofits make the world go round. But who helps the nonprofits? Those are entities like our client. They’re a professional services firm focused on serving nonprofits, and they were ready to expand. Except their tech was not. Their foundation had long been accounting, CFO consulting services, and HR projects for these nonprofits, but they were starting to feel the growth pains in all the tasks switching it took to do their daily work. And how could they help anyone else before helping themselves?
The marketing director was the one to feel the weight of most of the responsibilities. She worked with a consultant for planning, an outside agency for ads and content, and reported to a CMO who expected results. The sales team was well-settled within Salesforce, but marketing had a painful contrast in their disconnect.
The biggest challenge was that without any data, how could the director of marketing show results to the CMO? There was nothing tying campaigns together, and reporting was scattered at best. It wasn't unheard of that prospects were handed off without nurturing, and no one had a clear picture of what was working.
For an ambitious team looking to expand their services, this was a major thorn in their side. They knew they could do better. But how? First, they would have to see exactly what was going wrong.
The Problem
The more the team looked, the more problems they saw. In fact, the gaps showed up everywhere. Newsletters went out from Constant Contact, but the metrics were basic at best.
The team used Wix for the website and Constant Contact for newsletters, relying on Zapier to push form submissions into Salesforce. But then, the marketing director would have to check manually to ensure that leads were actually being followed up with.
Reporting required juggling between platforms, and what the marketing director could show the CMO was descriptive at best, never predictive or actionable. With data that was coming from so many different sources, there was no way to really understand what was working and what wasn't.
The most important piece was the company’s biggest ongoing investment. Events. Trade shows and conferences generated contacts, and the team knew it well. Yet no structured follow-up ensured those names turned into conversations. Despite getting good contacts and knowing that these led to deals, there was no way to prove it when they needed data. And long-term, this was bound to generate a lot of frustration within the company.
This collection of small problems added up to something that was stopping them from advancing at all. Despite how much leadership pushed for growth, they couldn't even establish a baseline to grow from.
Everyone knew they needed more than another tool. They needed a system that made campaigns cohesive, created rules for qualification, and gave them the ability to measure outcomes with confidence.
Their problems started pointing them in the direction of HubSpot to address some of their biggest problems. And to use it right, they were going to need help.
The Solution
ClearPivot began by mapping every step of the customer journey. Each individual person on their team might have thought that they knew their processes, but once our Solutions Architect got them all in a room to map out the customer journey together, it was clear that there were many points of unknown misalignment. ClearPivot's customer journey mapping with them helped them come to unified definitions of lifecycle stages, triggers, decision points, and what to do when. It also gave them the ability to see and pin down exactly what their prospects were experiencing and where they need to fix the broken spots and friction points.
After that, ClearPivot built out a full Salesforce integration to their new HubSpot portal, to bring all their existing contacts, accounts, and opportunities into it. This allowed full funnel visibility between the marketing and sales teams. ClearPivot then built out their email subscription types and segments for their email marketing. This gave them their first opportunity to structure outreach more targeted and systematically instead of relying on one-size-fits-all blasts.
Next came campaign infrastructure. ClearPivot guided them through creating their landing pages and building forms with smart routing logic and automated follow-ups. Prospects who reported budgets under their target range were filtered out immediately, while qualified leads were shown a meeting link with no delay.
HubSpot’s new multi-step form tool was still in beta, and ClearPivot helped them test it early. Since the tool didn’t yet block free email domains, custom logic was added to detect addresses from Gmail, Yahoo, and similar providers, redirecting those submissions until HubSpot released the feature natively.
With a stable revenue operations base finally established, for the first time, the client’s team could finally get into digital advertising. Their Google and LinkedIn accounts were connected directly to HubSpot so they could track campaigns from click to conversion. ClearPivot also helped build out dashboards that consolidated results across ads, social channels, and email, replacing hours of manual data pulls.
Six months in, the company decided to add in HubSpot Sales Hub. ClearPivot worked with the sales team to build target lists and create prospecting sequences, complete with email templates, MS Teams-integrated calendar links, and dashboards showing enrollments, replies, meetings booked, and daily sends.
The marketing and sales teams could now work from a single connected system.
The Results
The client now had the structure themselves that they helped provide to their clients. Campaigns and attribution that once required juggling across three different tools could now be built end-to-end inside HubSpot. Landing pages, forms, ads, emails, and follow-ups all lived in one place with dashboards pulling results together. And to the relief of the marketing director, she could show full campaign-to-revenue performance clearly to the CMO without scrambling to compile data.
After the sales team their outreach activities to HubSpot with ClearPivot, they also enjoyed the same benefits that the marketing team had. And now, the two teams enjoyed the end-to-end data that connected all their efforts. The sales team wasted less time with unqualified clients, and the good ones were delivered to them without delay. Calendar links reduced back-and-forth scheduling, and MS Teams integration kept everything visible.
Leadership wasn’t left out of the game either. The CMO could finally see which campaigns produced leads, how those leads were qualified and why, and what happened after handoff to sales. The fragmented picture they once had was replaced with a full integrated view of marketing and sales activity. And the teams were now knowledgeable enough to manage HubSpot on their own.
ClearPivot gave this client much more than just a working infrastructure. They gave the team the skills to keep learning and growing on their own. They had a foundation they could build on, a structure they could defend, and the clarity they needed to move forward with confidence. And their clients would enjoy a seamless sales experience with the team that could help their clients more effectively make the world a better place.
