A short customer-spotlight transcript from INBOUND 2021 where Mike Hart (Global CIO of Avis and Young) and Dave Mattson (CEO of Sandler) discuss CRM platform choices, industry positioning, and adoption outcomes after switching to HubSpot. Mike reports moving from a Salesforce environment with low usage (23% of ~1,600 North America users) to achieving ~90% adoption within four months. Dave emphasizes the need for a flexible platform (HubSpot) to support a scaling company.
Questions this video answers
About 1,600 users.
23%.
Approximately 90% among the same 1,600 brokers.
Chapters
My name's Mike Hart. I'm the global CIO of Avis and Young. One of the challenges we were facing with our previous CRM was the fact that they didn't speak to one another. But a larger challenge was just the industry perception within commercial real estate of all of our competitors being on either Microsoft Dynamics or Salesforce and Avis. And Young is very much thought of as that challenger brand within the industry that we do things differently. We think about data, we think about technology, we think about how we go to market with our various products in a different fashion.
Hi, I'm Dave Mattson, CEO of Sandler. We consider ourselves a scaling company, which in my mind means that we're never satisfied with what we did last year. We're always competing against the, you know, the large mega organizations. So we've got to make sure that we're always looking for the smartest way to do things. We're always looking for where the puck is going to go to in our industry, which is constantly changing. But that's why we went with HubSpot, because they allowed us that flexibility as the industry changes. We didn't have to change platforms.
So if I look back four months before we rolled out the HubSpot instance, we had about 1600 users in North America, of which we only had 23% adoption, and that was of the existing Salesforce platform. When you have only 23% of your revenue producers using a CRM, it's ultimately a loss. It's ultimately something that is not adding value to the overall organization. In the last four months, we've actually already gotten it up to a 90% adoption rate amongst those 1600 brokers.
Nobody wakes up as a leader saying, today's the day that I've got to change a platform. But, you know, we were at a point where, as you start to look at all of our offices throughout the world, you needed a single view. And we had huge data gaps, actually, and we needed to expand. That CRM should be your best friend. It should be a silent sales manager. It should be a silent salesperson that's helping you, a coach on your shoulders, giving you the information that you need to run a business. And that's really what HubSpot allowed us to do by giving us the data so we could make those decisions. And we felt very confident. And, you know, we had that conviction that we were heading in the right direction, so that's really what it did for us.
