HealthMetrics is a cloud enterprise platform for companies to manage their employees’ healthcare benefits holistically. Through the ability to automate healthcare management processes in a scalable manner, they are able to offer their clients more control over their workflows, real-time administrative capabilities, and data analytics for planning (cost and operational) purposes.
In 2017, cognisant of their rapid growth trajectory, the company sought out a Customer Relations Management (CRM) solution which would facilitate their operations while scaling and growing with the company. This led them to working with HubSpot.
SMEhorizon speaks with Terri Chan, Group VP of Growth, HealthMetrics on Healthmetric’s successful adoption of HubSpot as a CRM solution, how it has facilitated their operations, and how they have overcome the challenges of implementation to pave the way for future expansion.
What were the primary pain points that led HealthMetrics to adopt HubSpot’s CRM platform?
Before adopting HubSpot, we had a fragmented view of customers and prospects across different functions. This led to inefficiencies in the following areas: lead generation, leads nurturing through insights into customer behaviour, and new customer onboarding.
Some of our key challenges included incomplete visibility across customer journeys and profiles, information and handover gaps between internal teams leading to slow follow ups with prospective customers and losing opportunities in gaining insights into customer preferences to adapt our sales approach. We were also pursuing leads that were misaligned with our key target audience profiles. Our processes were generally manual. Human input was necessary to analyse data from multiple sources and issue actionable instructions which in turn was slowing down workflows.
All in all, our revenue was not scaling in line with sales due to inefficiencies in the customer onboarding process, leading to lengthy timelines in activation and unnecessary complexity.
We needed a CRM platform that could serve as a unified data source and help us automate processes to free up sales and marketing teams time so they can focus on strategies to improve conversion rates across the customer journey and deliver a seamless customer experience.
How did your journey with Hubspot begin?
We joined HubSpot under the HubSpot for Startups programme in 2017 because we knew we were scaling fast and had an exciting growth trajectory ahead of us. We wanted a solution that could scale and grow with us. At Healthmetrics, marketing is a growth function. Our marketing teams are responsible for optimising the entire customer journey. They help to ensure prospects transition from one lifecycle stage to the next, down the sales funnel seamlessly.
The primary users of HubSpot were our sales and marketing teams, who needed a platform that was intuitive to learn and use. After much evaluation, HubSpot provided great value without compromising our ability to fulfill business requirements. We also needed a platform capable of automatically integrating both marketing and sales data to give an always-on picture of customer journeys to all teams in real time.
In the post-pandemic reality, we observed several trends within the industry and among our prospective clients which increased demand for our services. Some of these include a heightened interest in centralised cloud solutions for better management of healthcare administrative matters, growing demand for data-driven insights to better understand employees’ healthcare needs, as well as enhanced flexibility to develop self-insured programmes to optimise both cost and operational efficiencies.
Adopting HubSpot enabled us to align services in line with these trends and meet the growing demand for healthcare management platforms.
How has HubSpot’s CRM has enabled HealthMetrics to optimise sales and marketing efforts?
The HubSpot CRM serves as a single source of truth for HealthMetrics. The platform collects data across our omnichannel sources, providing a single view of information related to customers and leads, collectively enhancing sales and marketing efforts. Unifying this data ensured that relevant teams were equipped with the latest insights into these profiles, facilitating more effective engagement by closing visibility gaps.
All in all, unified data helped us improve our processes and decision-making capabilities, which ultimately led to a tremendous increase in marketing leads by 34 times, as well as decreased the cost of customer acquisition by 40% within a year of implementation.
The unified data also enabled the development and launch of our account based marketing programmes which facilitated engagement with organisations that best aligned with their ideal customer profile (ICP).
We were also able to automate key processes such as identifying leads that indicate a strong level of purchase intent and automatically alert the sales team to follow-up, in turn accelerating conversion timelines. Now that we were able to engage customers that fit our ICP with automated engagement, our teams had the time and resources to focus on effectively engaging larger sized companies.
These efficiencies led to a 500% increase in revenue, as well as an increase of our average order value (AOV) through better customer engagement.
What were the key technical challenges HealthMetrics encountered during the initial phases of using HubSpot’s platform? How were these challenges addressed to ensure a smooth implementation?
- Learning Curve: HealthMetrics had not used a proper CRM system in the past, which meant there was a learning curve involved in understanding the ins and outs of HubSpot. To address this challenge, we invested time and resources in training and onboarding sessions. We used HubSpot’s educational resources, such as tutorials and documentation, to get up to speed quickly.
Our customer success manager was also instrumental in helping us address our challenges & pointed us to resources that succinctly provided answers to what we were trying to develop at that time. - Gaining Buy-In from Sales Teams: Convincing the sales teams to embrace the CRM system and understand how it could automate administrative tasks, provide valuable insights, and simplify reporting was a significant challenge.
To address this, we developed use cases to help the sales teams understand how some of their struggles prior to using a CRM can be addressed by Hubspot. We also used Hubspot’s data to demonstrate how marketing qualified lead (MQL) & sales qualified lead (SQL) improved over time which ultimately improved their sales closure rates. - Implementing Customer Journey: HealthMetrics had a customer journey designed but lacked experience in implementing it within HubSpot. To overcome this challenge, we sought guidance from our customer success manager.
Our CSM provided valuable insights, pointed us to relevant resources, and even demonstrated how other companies had successfully implemented similar workflows. This personalized support and guidance were crucial in navigating the technical aspects of HubSpot. - Ads Module Integration: Digital marketing & advertising is integral in our marketing strategy. In the past, we had to use native ad platforms to create ad audiences, which could be time-consuming and less efficient. However, HubSpot introduced the ads module, which addressed this challenge by enabling us to sync segmented audiences and providing detailed reports directly within Hubspot.
This integration streamlined our advertising efforts, allowing for better optimization based on data-driven insights.
What technologies or innovations does HealthMetrics plan to adopt in the future?
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning: We recognize the transformative potential of AI and machine learning in the healthcare, insurance and HR management domains.
We plan to leverage AI to analyze healthcare data, identify trends, medical fraud and provide predictive insights that can help companies make informed decisions about their employee healthcare & optimise cost-containment strategies. - Enhanced Mobile Experience with Generative AI: We recognize that mobile accessibility is paramount, especially in Southeast Asia, where mobile adoption is widespread. Currently our platform is built on Progressive Web App (PWA) technology which is built to be responsible, adapting to various screen sizes and orientations.
Aside from this, we have integrated an omni-channel communication platform and are planning to implement a WhatsApp Chatbot with natural language processing capabilities to further improve customer experience and automate operational processes in a more intuitive manner. - Collaborative Tools: In an increasingly regional, remote and collaborative work environment, we plan to integrate collaborative tools and communication platforms to streamline interactions internally.
