KBK Communications
Healthcare Marketing
KBK Communications is a global digital sales and marketing agency working with manufacturers, distributors, and service providers in a variety of industries including the healthcare space. The company created a corporate mandate of making its sales and marketing teams more efficient and impactful by giving each team its own sales CRM and Marketing Hub environment, with tools specific to the functional area of the team members to help improve overall team productivity and results to the business.
By having two separate teams (sales and marketing) using the same CRM system for different purposes, KBK faced the potentially debilitating prospect of system downtime, as a result of cluttered system and hygiene issues; and worse still, potential security breaches related to multiple teams requiring continuous access and modifications to the same system and data.
In addition to this, the marketing team found it difficult to use Salesforce for marketing-specific functions. The new objective was intentionally aimed at allowing each team to function more independently and efficiently, on platforms that aligned to their daily operations.
The pressing issue was how to do this while maintaining the integrity of the data within each system, and ensuring that each was synched up on a real-time basis, without creating further issues for the business.
MethodData’s solution to this challenge was to migrate KBK’s marketing team to HubSpot Marketing Hub, where the team would execute its campaigns and have access to purpose-built marketing functionalities that it currently does not have access to in Salesforce CRM.
To maintain collaboration between the two teams, an integration sync between Salesforce and HubSpot was also created to enable the marketing team and sales team to still collaborate in achieving a singular source of truth, and trustworthy data on which to make critical decisions, in pursuit of KBK’s business goals.
MethodData was uniquely qualified to take on the challenge because of its core competence in the planning, implementation, and integration of solutions between SaaS and IaaS platforms. Additionally, MethodData has extensive experience in developing HubSpot integrations from different platforms including Salesforce and other sales and marketing platforms.
Where Method Data’s expertise was most needed was that existing out-of-the-box integration provided by HubSpot (which integrates data unidirectionally from HubSpot to Salesforce) did not meet KBK’s complex requirements of:
1. Setting custom triggers/events
2. Extensible to custom objects and custom fields
3. Logical processing
4. Converting data types
This meant that a custom integration would have to be performed to meet these requirements and address KBK’s business needs.
This solution has resulted in a faster end-to-end process for generating leads and executing sales. The solution has also enhanced KBK’s customer experience through more rapid response times and, consequently, speedier connection of members to negotiated supplier contracts.
Based on the work that MethodData undertook, KBK’s president had the following to say:
“MethodData was recently recommended to us and we’ve engaged them as our technical consultant on a small project. They far exceeded our requirements on the initial project and we now use them for all our complex technical needs in a challenging industry.
MethodData is particularly skilled at finding reliable solutions for brittle legacy systems, where other consultants have failed due to their constrained skill sets.
They do all our front-end designs, data architecture, analytics, product builds, and complex integrations. What we offer to our clients is greatly enhanced by the wonderful MethodData team.”
Jan Beery, President of KBK Communications
The solution has helped in automating a number of processes that would otherwise have occurred manually by KBK’s Marketing team, and inevitably run into a series of erroneous data swamps. Examples of these processes include:
KBK now runs a slick commercial operation that allows the sales and marketing teams to leverage the fullest functional characteristics of their most favored tools, to optimize their day to day activity. The company facilitates seamless interaction and collaboration between teams, despite using discrete and competitive platforms, and multiple data ingestion points, thanks to AWS.
