How We Helped Estis Scale Up With HubSpot Sales Enablement

CUSTOMER STORY

How We Helped Estis Scale Up With HubSpot Sales Enablement


There’s no doubt - building a thriving business off of hard work, strong relationships and a good reputation works. At a certain point, however, you might find yourself looking to accelerate the growth of the business.

To break past and find renewed growth, you’ll need to mature your sales team, establish a formal sales process and deploy technology for tracking, executing and optimizing your sales efforts more coherently. 


That’s the moment Estis had reached when they approached us ready to consider options such as HubSpot for taking that next step.


What would it take? A brand new customer relationship management and content management system (CRM & CMS) supported by sales enablement tools capable of facilitating end-to-end contract management.

Services Applied:


Hear from the client

We had ambitious growth plans, so we needed a way to capture and capitalize on every opportunity while remaining true to our strategic and financial objectives. We already had a strong track record in innovation and service delivery, and we needed to build a sales force to match that. We had never used a CRM system or had documented sales standards, and saw this as critical to accelerating our growth.”

— John Gatlin
President

Estis

ABOUT ESTIS


Hitting the gas to extract the fuel for growth

Estis is a leader in top-of-the-line artificial lift services in the form of gas lift. They are the pioneer in High-Pressure Gas Lift services (HPGL) – an innovative technology for maximizing production from unconventional oil and gas wells.

GOALS & CHALLENGES


Building data-driven sales infrastructure

With a strong brand - providing service to an expanding installed base of customers - Estis had achieved an impressive market foothold through sheer quality of delivery and relationships.

Key Goal: Now, having recently secured private equity backing, new, more refined sales gears needed to be found to take growth to the next level and reach clearly defined new milestones.


Without the right CRM infrastructure, their sales growth would be difficult to model and even harder to achieve. Their customer and prospect lists would be on paper - scattered and anecdotal at best - instead of in a shared database.


The core challenge Estis faced was the need to define and build new, standardized sales processes able to bring order, volume and conversion potential:

  • Effective CRM selection, implementation and strategy
  • Efficient contract creation and management process
  • Tracking of critical competitor information for ongoing evaluation
  • New, robust business reporting and data interpretation capabilities


These factors needed to come together to move the needle in the right direction for effective pipeline management, building detailed account plans, contract creation and storage, adding competitor tracking capabilities and improving customer demand tracking.

How could Estis triple their customer base with a new CRM and processes without standardized sales operations tracked and managed in practical, scalable, effective ways?

 

THE COST OF INACTION
What if Estis had continued with ‘business as usual’, instead of adding HubSpot CRM & CMS?

The Estis website already had a steady flow of unconverted traffic. Without replatforming to HubSpot CMS to capture and route sales leads to the appropriate regional sales manager - most of it was destined to remain just that… traffic.

There would be little standardization among the sales team for pipeline management, forecasting, contract creation & negotiation - nor would there be a common language or rules of engagement for the sales organization. It would be impossible to judge customer demand, therefore hampering growth potential.


Without the tailored HubSpot implementation and onboarding from Bayard Bradford, Estis’ sales team would have experienced a longer ramp-up time to full adoption of an effective sales process.

 

PROJECT OUTLINE
How did Bayard Bradford approach the project engagement with Estis?


Before eventually working directly with Estis’ sales team - to implement HubSpot Sales Hub Professional - a little groundwork was first required for proving the value of what would come next.

Phase 1: Implementing HubSpot Sales Hub Professional

Following the initial groundwork to prove value, Bayard Bradford worked closely with Estis’ sales team to implement HubSpot Sales Hub Professional, deployed in 4 weeks during which we conducted:

  • Sound, robust technical setup and customization
  • Careful and detailed data import & cleanup

Phase 2: Imparting day-to-day autonomy

Following the HubSpot program, it was important that we deploy learning and enablement through a carefully planned user training and adoption program.

Ultimately, Bayard Bradford wanted to equip the Estis team with the practical knowledge for day-to-day HubSpot ownership, independence and deal development that would help maximize utilization and ROI.


ADDITIONAL WORK 1
SEO rankability and Business Intelligence (BI) reporting improvements


The Estis website had been designed for tablet device browsing. While elegant, it lacked the kind of content management system (CMS) functionality that would allow for stronger SEO optimization.

To address this, Bayard Bradford helped Estis replatform the website into HubSpot where opportunities could be more efficiently managed, saving time and money.

  • Now, the Estis website can be scanned by search engines and be modified without the need to rely on a contract web developer.

  • We also provided guidance to Estis’ team on how to accurately construct reports that could include equipment data that was managed by and sourced from their operations team - and modeled inside of their BI dashboard. 

In doing so, Estis gained new strategic insights on their business by utilizing the best available deal data in a way that the sales team and company leadership could digest.

“Bayard Bradford’s support enabled us to increase our pipeline, while better tracking current and potential customers and building out forecasts that modeled how many units we needed to build to meet our forecasted demand.”

— Steve Schwin

VP Sales and Marketing

Estis

ADDITIONAL WORK 2
Factoring for ownership, independence and ROI


What Estis still lacked was deeper CRM expertise and business intelligence reporting capability. To solve this, we created a system easy enough to use that their new sales team could quickly become adept at leveraging.


Via a mentoring and training program, we were able to hand the sales operations over for the longer term, bypassing the need for over-reliance and investment in outside assistance.

The upshot? Accessible business intelligence with minimal support required from third parties.


OUTCOMES & SUCCESS INDICATORS


How did the Estis sales team respond to HubSpot Sales Hub Professional?


Both Estis and Bayard Bradford were encouraged to see full HubSpot adoption across the entire sales team - from early stage lead engagement, right through to pipeline and contract management.

Through the term of the engagement, Estis tripled their customer base while building out a high-performing sales organization.


After an initial ramp-up in user adoption, the sales team began providing feedback to further tighten the screws on the system that they were quickly establishing as a key component to future sales and business success.

 

More data-driven

From day-one post implementation, Estis’ sales team made conscious use of the CRM on their desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. Whether at home, on the road, or in the field, the sales team always had their customer intelligence at their fingertips. 

Efficiency boost

Almost immediately, Estis’ sales team saw notable efficiency boosts that included:

  • Auto-logging of emails through the newly added Outlook extension
  • Greater usability of more-organized sales pipeline views
  • A single intuitive database housing all customer details 

The sales team participated in weekly standard pipeline reviews around new CRM documented insights to share detailed competitive intelligence and pipeline progress.

 

I started participating in routine weekly pipeline reviews with management, reviewing documented deals and making plans to win them at the rates I wanted to win.

— Ryan Reynolds

Regional Sales Manager

Estis

 

New customer acquisitions


To optimize lead conversion performance, Bayard Bradford set up a process to distribute leads that were captured via the contact forms on the new website to the assigned regional sales team, leading to several new customer acquisitions.

FURTHER OUTCOMES


Refining raw data into business intelligence 

Once user adoption and data cleaning were achieved, Estis requested a connection to their business intelligence dashboard for creating forecasts for the sales & executive teams.

We built reports in PowerBI using HubSpot data based on feedback from the customer that allowed the sales team to make smarter decisions.

Over time, Estis transformed their raw data into meaningful reports, helping the executive team better manage business growth and achievement of top level objectives.

 


THE VERDICT FROM Estis


How does Estis rate their experience with Bayard Bradford?

Following the success of our initial engagement, Estis transitioned to managing their own day-to-day sales operations in HubSpot with only limited ongoing support from Bayard Bradford.

“The Bayard Bradford team has provided great support for us. Always available with the right answers, our experience with them has been fantastic.

Their high level of expertise, which they readily shared with us, always maintained an eye towards what’s next. We were able to develop our own process and success metrics, and Bayard Bradford applied their experience and knowledge to help us continue to optimize our sales results. Throughout, the knowledge of how to best utilize HubSpot has been instrumental to our success.”


— Steve Schwin

VP Sales and Marketing

Estis

 

ONGOING PARTNERSHIP


What’s next for Bayard Bradford and Estis?

Estis exceeded their growth goals and set their sights even higher for the years ahead.

The focus of our work has shifted to helping Estis evolve their business intelligence reporting. 
We also periodically introduce emerging technologies and solutions to their real world business challenges. 

 

Update 7/3/2023: Estis has announced the formation of Flowco, Inc. as a result of the merging of three companies: Estis Compression, Flowco Production Solutions, and Flogistix. Read the full press release here.

 

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