Realigning the Wheels

A parts, service, and towing company’s mission to coordinate their tech stack.

Industry

Transportation

Service

HubSpot

Workflows

Sales Enablement

What happens when three sibling organizations in the trucking and transportation industry struggle to align their marketing, sales, service, and operation efforts?

A four-lane traffic jam.

Such was the case for Blaine Brothers, Inc., a parts, service, and towing company based in the heart of the Midwest. Blaine Brothers and their other organizations, Hydraulic Specialty Inc., North American Trailer, and TRUCKALINE, offer complimentary services for their industry through hydraulic, trailer, and alignment divisions. Each branch is powerful on its own, but with a bit of coordination and a new robust platform, their holistic services now help transport companies achieve more with fewer moving parts.

The challenge

Blaine Brothers faced a situation many B2B companies face — they could provide a variety of services but lacked an organized and efficient method for doing it. Their tech stack featured seven different platforms used to interact with customers and store information:

Karmak
Magneto
WordPress
Klaviyo
Elite Extra
Zultys
sales-i

Utilizing seven different platforms was tedious and cumbersome, often straining their team’s capacity and leaving many sales and service opportunities to fall through the cracks. They needed a single CRM platform or “source of truth” to help them align their marketing, sales, service, and operations efforts with their unique ability to provide high-demand trucking services.

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The solution

After conducting a tech stack audit of all the systems used, the need for a single, consolidated hub for customer relationship management was clear. The Vye team took meticulous measures to audit and document how existing data would be transferred and/or mapped to HubSpot and used to achieve sales and marketing goals while enhancing the overall end-user experience.

We developed an integration plan for data transfer and wrote a custom API script to assist with the transfer on a bi-hourly basis. The custom API script allows Blaine’s data to flow automatically from their Karmak system into HubSpot without the need to reformat or manually sort duplicate entries. The script can also help remedy bad data files through self-healing by replacing incorrect data files with good ones.

From there, we set up infrastructure in HubSpot to improve their sales and marketing processes with functionalities, such as:

Leveraging business units inside one HubSpot portal where tactics are organized by each branch of the business.
Creating 27 automated pipeline workflows that route incoming leads, orders, and re-engage prospects within their respective service group or offering.
Assigning a lead status to categorize where a prospect is in the sales funnel and track outstanding service tickets.
Mapping over 10,000 products from their online store to help break down their biggest sales opportunities, deal stages, and pipelines.
Updating email templates, creating 42 segmented lists, and adding 70 custom forms across business units to further engage contacts and prospects.
Creating dashboards for Blaine’s inside and outside sales teams to track orders, activity, and reporting insights.

The results

Blaine Brothers and its sibling organizations now have a streamlined system to analyze data efficiently, allowing them to market to new customers and segment and nurture leads. To dig into the details a little more…

Increased Average Order Value - Amount in company currency increased by an average of +53.78% year over year since 2022.
Increased Average Deal Amount by Rep - Average amount in company currency increased by an average of +18.44% year over year since 2022.
Increase in Revenue - Increased overall revenue of +35.14% from 2022 through 2023 with projections to come just under their revenue goals in 2024.
Cost Savings - $48,000 - $61,200 saved annually by eliminating Klaviyo and sales-i.
Integrated Systems - Data flowing bidirectionally from Magento, Karmak, and HubSpot.
HubSpot as the Core System - New customer creation across systems starts at HubSpot solidifying it as a core technology and easing attribution reporting.

The future

With the help of HubSpot, we intend to leverage the power of Blaine Brothers’ Marketing and Sales Hubs to implement more robust reporting, continue to streamline internal processes, and make data-driven decisions around when and how to market to incoming and existing leads. The advantage of organized data is a game changer for Blaine Brothers and will help them better serve their customers for years to come.

“We’ve been able to take some existing processes that weren’t mapped out great, like our customer setup process that touches multiple departments, and automate and integrate them into one platform.”

— Wendy Sorquist, Director of Marketing

The impact

Going from a siloed management system with multiple platforms to an integrated, all-in-one platform allowed Blaine Brothers to refresh their sales processes. Their previous infrastructure was tedious, messy, and unmotivating. But now, Blaine and its sibling organizations’ sales teams are logging calls, tracking leads, and working toward specific touch point goals instead of shooting in the dark.

They can assess where contacts are falling off in the pipeline and re-nurture them.
Form leads can be triaged into top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel cohorts for relevant marketing campaigns.
They’re able to understand more about customer shopping patterns based on parts categories, purchase amounts, and behavior.

“Our ability to provide customers with what they need every single time is really an aspect of HubSpot, and maybe isn’t possible without it.”

— Gerard Garramone, Director of Purchasing

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