Transcription
Good. Ready. Good. Hi. How are you? I'm good. How are you, Alex? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you, Alex. I'm Carolyn. I'm a HubSpot executive.
Very nice to meet you. Yes. Thank you for taking the time to meet with me today. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I know we're scheduled for about 15 to 20 minutes. Is that the world for you?
That's perfect for me. All right. Wonderful. If you don't mind, may I set a timer just so we can stay on schedule? Absolutely. All right. Perfect. How's your day going today?
It's good. Nice weather. It is nice weather. It's that spring forward. It is. Oh, yeah. Can't wait. That means later later uh sunsets. Oh.
All right. Well, my goal today is to understand how Venue vault currently manages processes like sales pipeline and forecasting and whether to see HubSpot um is a right fit for your team. So, before the meeting, I did look into venue vault um buyers profile for a little bit. And from what I saw, it looks like that your team sells hospitality premium uh inventory for major events um such as sporting events and VIP tickets and so forth. And that in inventory tends to be timesensitive and perishable. And usually when companies deal with like perishable inventory, the challenges that we often hear is that there's difficulty with accurate forecasting revenue and ensuring that the sales reps are actively selling the right inventory before the opportunities expire. Does that sound something similar to what you guys are going through right now?
Absolutely. I think one of our major concerns as you just mentioned is the expiry of certain tickets and from a greater perspective the loss of revenue and that's something that's more of my major concern and really trying to find a system that can really implement our best strategies.
Absolutely. That's understandable. Well, out of curiosity, how is your team currently tracking deals across the sales pipeline?
So, we don't already have an actual system. We do have an internally built CRM model. Uh, regarding from how we are tracking deals, it's a lot of one-on-one with comage sales reps and then bosses with a lot of that being manual tracking whether it's within emails or spreadsheets. So, from a great perspective, it really gives us not a great visibility into seeing what our current sales reps are doing.
Got it. Everything is just manual. Mhm. That's correct. and your visibility is kind of um not as clear as you guys would like it. Absolutely.
All right. Got it. Well, from a leadership standpoint, um how are deals moving? Do your sales rep how do they get their information just through just spreadsheets or emails? Is anything um the sales managers do they have to coordinate one- on-one just to get certain information?
That's correct. So, a lot of it's through emails as well. So as I as I mentioned with a lot of direct conversation with managers and current sales reps, there's not really a system in place where a manager can check on what stages of the deal that the sales rep might be in, how how many deals they doing, how the deals are going. So we're more looking for a little bit of a system that gives us the opportunity to implement that into a great perspective.
Yeah. Absolutely. That's very understandable. I also see here in your buy buyer profile that your team has scaled to 75 remote sales reps. That's really impressive growth. And I'd like to ask, how do your sales reps log all of that activity? Um, is that all digital or it could be like via word of mouth or cold calling, phone calls?
Absolutely. So, a lot of it goes through into our spreadsheets as I mentioned earlier. Um, a lot of that's tracked how how they're doing in their own sales. Um, so definitely looking for a more of a greater system where it can be more easily accessible for tracking different reps. I know one of our concerns right now across from a rep representative perspective is that I have some reps that are contacting the same client. So clients being contacted multiple times. Uh, sales reps are just unable to track who has which client. Um, so definitely that's more of our credit concern as well. And I think that also goes back to my original way at least the loss of revenue as well.
Oh yeah, duplicate outreach and loss of revenue. Got it. Does it ever get difficult to see which sales reps are actively moving deals forward or which ones are just stalling?
Absolutely. I think more giving a better visibility into what our sales reps are actually doing is also a concern as well. I know our current model doesn't have the capabilities to do that and it's more so done on word of mouth or exact results.
Got it. Word of mouth. Where are you seeing inconsistencies in the forecasting accuracy?
Absolutely. I think there's a lot of inconsistencies on how we are tracking our different account reps um and our different sales opportunities. That includes these sales accounts, a lot more to do with client communication and really how our managers are already reaching out to their sales reps to see how they are actually doing.
So we do not have a system in place where we are able to actively see what our sales reps are doing.
Got it. Like the client stages whether it's in from uh getting the lead to the closing of the sale, you need more um forecasting accuracy on that. That's correct.
Got it. Okay. Okay. And when leadership needs to understand what's in the pipeline, how quickly can they get that information?
Not very quickly. There's definitely a process in place where we try our best to reach out to the sales reps to get a better understanding of how from their perspective, but we do not have a real system in place where manager can access what their sales reps are doing at any time.
Okay. So, it's basically it's a toss up. It can be anything from a snap of a finger to to something that's more delayed. That's correct.
Okay. So inconsistent with the the time frame. Yes. Usually when leadership doesn't have that clear visibility into the pipeline, um we often see a lot of challenges with that. So my question for you is does that make forecasting revenue more difficult for Venue Vault?
Absolutely. I think that goes a little bit more to our current system where we have a lot of tickets that are close to their expiry date. We don't really have an inventory system where we're able to track in correlation to their expiry and I think that leads to a lot of loss of revenue, a loss of potential revenue and that's definitely one of our major major concerns.
Got it. Which leads me to a perfect segue here. Uh since your inventory is tied to specific events, what happens when deals do stall and leadership isn't aware of that um when it's close to the event date? Do you guys um discount tickets when it's closer to the date to not have that loss of revenue?
Absolutely. I think from our perspective, it is definitely discounting tickets as well. Um, but that gives us a little bit of a struggle not really having a real inventory system where where we are able to give a little bit more oversight on the tickets that are close to the expiration date.
Okay. Just so you can keep that revenue going. Huh. Got it. And if your team had real time visibility into the entire sales pipeline, how would that help your team improve decision making?
Absolutely. I think that gives us a little bit more insight between from our perspective communication with managers and sales reps. I think it also leads to sales reps not reaching out to the same clients, being able to see which accounts are being used, what accounts we have, and getting a little bit of a broader perspective of our client base as a company.
So, real time visibility is something that you guys are really in need of. Got it. If reporting were automated, how would your sales managers use the recovered time that was lost due to all the manual reporting?
Absolutely. And I think that leads more onto our current system right now where I do have a lot of sales reps that are a little bit more abdominant of moving to a different system and really trying to correlate their loss of operations, the loss of potential operations trying to implement the new system. And I wanted to get a little bit more from your perspective how HubSpot's able to help with us and really give us a great
Okay. So, you're trying to see if it um transitioning to HubSpot would be uh easy implementation. Absolutely.
Okay. Perfect. I'm glad that you mentioned that cuz I actually have a visual here where this is directly from HubSpot's uh web page. Ease of imple implementation is rather easy. Um, it's anything from like uploading a CSV file. You can transfer everything in Venue Vault and just basically just upload that CSV file and all of the client information and the account will be uploaded into there. Or what you can do is um there's various tools that you can use that it's kind of like you know how with like a iPhone to Android you can just like use an app or whatnot. So basically you can either use the thousands of tools that HubSpot already has to implement um that change um and have like like a smooth integration and a data migration. But the most easiest that we have seen is just import all of the data from Venue Vault into a CSV file and just upload everything on there. So, um, there might be a little bit of a learning curve obviously because if your 75 reps are used to using your internally built CRM system, um, and then going into something new, obviously there's a little bit of a learning curve there. But I think your sales reps will be very happy that everything is integrated into one central system, so it's readily available. they don't have to access their spreadsheets or emails or even call another sales rep and say, "Hey, did you did you reach out to this person or whatnot?" So, it it's fairly quickly just the the ease of uh implementation in terms of transitioning from venue vault internal CRM into HubSpot.
No, I appreciate that. I think that's giving a little bit more of a better insight into what some of my sales reps can really expect, especially from the transition period as well. Yeah.
I know a little bit more about price concerns. Yes. Regarding our current system and what this new system potentially could be. You have better insight of what an overview that could be like?
Yes, I do. In fact, you know, I know some of our um clients, they can be a little bit reluctant because they're like, "Oh, it's $100 a month per user. So, that's 7500 uh 75 a month for every all 75 sales reps for you guys. And then that's $90,000 a year, right?" Well, we actually have a testimonial, another visual here for you in terms of a ROI. So, there's a case study here. It's a 2030 builder case study and it's actually has been shown to increase performance stats such as ROI. So, they have actually seen a return on investment of 80% and a 50% sales efficiency. So, it's kind of down to you make that initial investment at first, right, for HubSpot. And then once you make that initial investment just in terms of like the time that you save from manually reporting all of those reports um into getting saving time for everything being automated, uh you you get the ROI back from that. So, I think that's pretty significant numbers from a 80% ROI. So, in the long run, you end up getting that money back. So, it is a wise investment.
Absolutely. I appreciate the insight. Absolutely. I actually have a little bit more info with regarding that cuz I know p you know when we're dealing with money that's obviously like a super super big deal. So, um we want to make sure that our clients are happy once they stay with us and we don't want them going to one of our competitors Salesforce. So um with regards to that um not only will you see the 80% ROI and the 50% increase in efficiency but you do um avoid any loss revenue from as you said the lost inventory from the perishable tickets. So if you do um you can see all the deal deal stages into the pipeline because it's more visible. So you can actually see from um how the states deal stage is going from the beginning to the end or the negotiation stage and you can see the dates. So that's really informative especially let's say I don't know the MLB finals or something playoffs. So you want to sell those tickets as fast as possible. You don't want to like lose money on that.
Absolutely. No, I appreciate that insight as well. Yeah. Now moving from a going forward perspective, I'm really revolutionized a little bit more into what this potential could be and excited to learn a little bit more. How can we be in contact to get I guess next steps from our perspective to get a little bit more insight into what the HubSpot sales hub really is?
Yeah. So, I just want to clarify your question in terms of next steps like um how to go from your internal system to uh going into HubSpot or checking it out like going through a walk and whatnot.
That's correct. More of a I guess product demo we can expect and before we merely make the decision.
Absolutely. Like a deeper dive into Yeah. Well, the beauty of HubSpot is we do have a trial. So although there is a 12 month commitment, there is a 2e trial. So you guys can actually check that out. I can schedule an interview if you would be interested, Alex, and we can do a deeper dive into that before you guys actually do uh commit to that 12 months cuz of course a year is a commitment.
Absolutely. I really appreciate that. Okay, sounds good. How does Wednesday at 2:15 sound?
Perfect. Okay, wonderful, Alex. Well, thank you. But thank you for making time to talking with me today and I'll see you next Wednesday.
I appreciate your next Wednesday. Thank you Wednesday. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. All right. All right. All right. Well done. That was great. Thank you. Same with you. Yeah, that was great. You did well. Absolutely. I don't have a sales background, so No, but it really looked like you were working at the company. It was great. Thank you. Great. Great insight. You uh you you answer questions beautifully, by the way. You're just spot on. I appreciate it. Yeah. All right. We're in the door. Are you done for today? Yeah. Lovely. Yes. How long do you It's kind of nice being as well.