Plungie

Sink or Swim Sales Automation with Plungie

Single-Hub Sales Award
2022 Impact Awards
Product Excellence
Plungie Logo
Solution
Sales Automation
Project Location
Brisbane, Australia
Project Goals

In the Summer of 2021, James Murphy - Head of Sales at Plungie Australia, recognised that the business was drifting into the deep end - not from shortcomings, but from how rapidly they were scaling. Quickly becoming one of the most sought-after pool solution innovators in the country, pools were practically selling themselves.

 

Understanding this, Neighbourhood strategised a lean and streamlined sales and marketing process, decked head-to-toe with sophisticated automation, to enable their team to spend more time scaling the brand and develop more internal processes to help customers bask in the glory of their plunge-pool sooner. 

Tools Used
HubSpot logo Miro

Their wants

01

To reduce the time spent on admin tasks by instating automations

02

Greater visibility on the progress of deals in their sales pipeline

03

A holistic view of their sales team's monthly progress and tracking toward KPI's

Their needs

01

A HubSpot partner that understood their needs inside and out to be able to go above and beyond the initial scope

02

An automated order fulfilment process that delivered the right message to the right customer, at the right time

03

Custom calculated properties to help track their sales team's KPIs

Identifying the problem

In our initial audit, we quickly identified a disparity between what was being sold, vs. the tools the team were selling with. In other words, the poor set-up of HubSpot didn’t reflect the high calibre of the product or the talented people who sold it. James agreed and knew that in order to scale effectively, an overhaul of their internal infrastructure was their best bet.

In beginning our rebuild, we found that on the off-chance people were being sent emails, those who were receiving them, were doing so at the wrong stage of their user journey. Also adding to the team's frustrations, we learnt that they were setting manual reminders to follow up on deposits and balances, had little to no project management to keep on top of their daily to-do list and important tasks were falling through the cracks. Their lack of confidence in the system meant that as much as they’d have liked to nurture new customers, set up automatic reminders and manage their deal pipeline, they didn’t feel that they had the capacity.

This cross-road Plungie found themselves on was their chance to sink or swim… (Spoilers! James and Geordie found their floaties n’ flippers.)

Scope of works

HubSpot Onboarding & Support

HubSpot CRM set-up/onboarding

Sales & CRM

Customer journey mapping

Sales pipeline strategy & build

Deal & ticket pipeline automation

Automating communication in deal stages

The Plan

  • Rebuilding from the ground up
  • Simplicity is key
  • Mapping the journey x Miro

Rebuilding from the ground up

  • Neighbourhood carried out several in-person workshops to strip back their existing order fulfilment process and discover the granular steps involved from becoming a lead to pool delivery - both for customers and internal teams.

Simplicity is key

  • Plungies pooling solution is a competitively simple way to get your pool in days, not months. This simplicity was needed for their team as much as the customer.

Mapping the journey x Miro

  • Together in workshops, we mapped out a sophisticated sales journey within Miro that detailed Active Enquiry to Quote Accepted, followed by Sales Order Issued to Balance Paid & Dispatched.
  • Developing what was previously a convoluted process into a uniform journey tailored with ticketing and automation brought about never-before-seen consistency. From communication cadence to automated notifications on deposit progress, customers had greater visibility on their pool progress without significant manual intervention.
Plungie Miro GIF

The Strategy

  • Payment scheduling x HubSpot
  • Understanding customer payments with custom properties
  • Deal pipeline x ticket pipeline
  • Streamlining the process

Payment scheduling x HubSpot

  • Automated communication and payment scheduling was set up in HubSpot to commence from from the customer's preferred pool installation date.
  • This date acted as the pillar when establishing automated email reminders, supporting payment cadence as final balances are due 30 days prior to the delivery date, prompting customers to stay informed and up-to-date on payments.
  • Rather than spending more time on processing an order, automation now moves deals between stages automatically based on deposits made, balances overdue or paid.
  • Due to demand, if invoices aren't paid on time, customers can lose their spot in queue, re-allocating their desired dispatch date. This automated communication was a necessity to support Plungie scaling - saving admin time whilst supporting lead conversions.

Understanding customer payments with custom properties

  • Neighbourhood created a HubSpot property to calculate 30% of the total deal amount for the deposit. 
  • When an invoice is paid, Plungies account team fill out the "Deposit Paid Amount" property: if the amount matches the "Deposit Required Amount" property, it automatically moves the deal into Deposit Paid. This was built to help cover people who'd like to make payment in multiple transactions.
  • A calculated property was created to calculate GST, subtracting this and freight costs, offering granular financial reporting for Plungie's internal KPIs.

Deal pipeline x ticket pipeline

  • Neighbourhood amalgamated deal and ticket pipelines to help manage quotes from freight partners, and the sending of pool equipment - the process being:

    1. Once a customer has paid their deposit and requires equipment, a ticket is automatically generated in a holding stage in the equipment pipeline.

    2. Once their balance is paid, and the delivery date is less than 30 days from now, the ticket automatically changes stage and notifies the team to request the equipment and confirm the shipping from their suppliers. Ensuring email communications don't get mixed

Streamlining the process

  • Once a customers balance is fully paid, the rest of the process is managed in tickets to track seperate supplier purchase orders.
  • This gives Plungie a clear schedule to work through each day, refining a previously convoluted process.
  • Once the team input the freight costs into the ticket and move the ticket to the relevant stage, it automatically copies relevant properties to the deal and moves the deal to the along to save double handling.

The Results

49%

Increase in Opportunity Conversion Rate

400%

Increase in Lead to Customer Rate

Plungie now have a streamlined sales process and automated juggernaut that works with the sales team, rather than against them. The seamless flow between the marketing, sales and customer service stages - created with intuitive automation and logical deal staging - has improved the lead-to-customer conversion rate by 400%.

The Plungie team no longer need to worry about missed sales opportunities or lost deposits. The rigidity of the sales pipeline now provides customers with a more consistent, exciting experience, while empowering the Plungie team with more chances to convert - proven by a 49% increase of the Opportunity Conversion Rate. 

The Impact

"We engaged Neighbourhood to help us with a significant renovation and continued custom build out of our HubSpot Professional Growth suite, including solutions across CRM, Sales, Marketing, Service and CMS Hubs and the thousands of features these enable! As a rapidly growing start-up -to scale-up evolving business, with teams and operations in Australia and USA, having effective and scaleable systems that enable the business and its people to thrive in these conditions has been integral to our success here at Plungie."

James Murphy - Head of Sales
Plungie

Conclusion

In James' words, Plungie measures its success with Neighbourhood and HubSpot through how many 'Wow' moments are produced - there are quite a few and counting. An ever-evolving project that now ensues the development of Plungie scaling to the U.S., our partnership has been a rewarding one and we look forward to see our Neighbours at Plungie expand YOY.

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