For Dennis K. Burke (DKB), a leading fuel and lubricant distributor, managing its digital presence was a constant source of frustration and expense. The company struggled with a costly and cumbersome website, a sales team hampered by an inefficient CRM, and a critical lack of data to guide its marketing strategy. By implementing the HubSpot CRM platform, DKB not only solved these foundational challenges but also executed a strategic pivot to an inside sales model that proved essential for business continuity.
Before HubSpot, DKB’s marketing and sales operations were siloed and inefficient. Marketing Manager Kelly Burke faced significant hurdles with the company's website, which was relaunched in 2010.
“I had to pay this web developer guy a zillion dollars a month, and then wait for him to get content up,” says Kelly. “It was a lot of money and aggravation.”
This dependency meant the marketing team couldn't be agile. More importantly, they were operating without analytics, making it impossible to know which content was actually driving leads. “I focused our content on the commercial and wholesale sides of our business because I figured those people were more likely to visit our website,” Kelly admits. “But I had no data to back it up.”
Meanwhile, the sales team faced its own platform crisis. Their CRM was designed for finance, inundating sales representatives with irrelevant information. “Our reps were bogged down in minutiae,” Kelly explains. “Their CRM was built for finance people, so our reps were drowning in irrelevant information.”
The platform was slow, difficult to use, and failed to provide basic deal status information. As a result, the sales team abandoned it in favor of spreadsheets, which they would then send to Kelly for manual entry. “It was a nightmare,” she recalls. “I’d have to manually log all the data, which was time-consuming and not very fun.”
Determined to avoid a repeat of the past, Kelly collaborated with a HubSpot Solutions Partner to implement HubSpot Marketing Hub Enterprise for the next website relaunch. The experience was transformative.
“It was easy peasy,” says Kelly. “It only took a couple of weeks instead of the months and months it took last time.”
The intuitive interface empowered Kelly to take control of DKB’s digital presence. “We’re able to update content on the fly, change things, integrate blogs, and all that stuff without outside support,” she notes.
Following the success in the marketing department, DKB adopted Sales Hub Professional to unify its commercial operations on the HubSpot CRM platform.
With a consolidated and user-friendly platform, DKB began seeing immediate and significant results across the business.
1. Data-Driven Content Strategy With access to robust analytics for the first time, Kelly discovered a major strategic blind spot. “When we looked at our analytics, we saw a lot of traffic and interest in the lubricant side of the business,” she says. “We changed our strategy to create more content for that audience.” This data-driven shift led directly to increased website traffic and higher conversion rates.
2. A Seamless Pivot to Inside Sales The efficiency gains from HubSpot enabled DKB to build out an inside sales team focused on pre-qualifying leads. This saved the field sales team valuable time and resources. The pivot proved critical when the COVID-19 pandemic made in-person sales calls nearly impossible.
“We went live with Sales Hub before everything shut down,” Kelly states. “Our teams were already accustomed to using it, so pivoting to remote selling wasn’t a big deal.”
3. High Sales Adoption and Management Savings The sales team, once resistant to their old CRM, quickly embraced Sales Hub. “Sales Hub is so intuitive to use, it didn’t take long for our reps to learn it,” says Kelly. “It’s a lot like using Google.” Field reps could now log notes and manage deals from the road, eliminating cumbersome paperwork.
Sales managers also benefited significantly, using HubSpot dashboards to get a real-time pulse on team activity. They estimate saving five hours per week on reviewing rep activity, freeing them up for more strategic tasks.
4. Consolidated Social Media Management Marketing Hub’s consolidated social media inbox streamlined engagement, allowing Kelly to monitor conversations, respond to inquiries, and gather content insights from a single location.
By replacing its fragmented and difficult systems with the HubSpot CRM platform, Dennis K. Burke transformed its marketing and sales operations. The company now runs on a data-driven marketing strategy, has successfully pivoted to a more efficient inside sales model, and has empowered its teams with tools they actually want to use.
For Kelly, the greatest benefit is the platform’s accessibility. “Having a consolidated marketing and sales platform you don’t need a Ph.D. to use is huge,” she says. “You don’t need to know UX design. You don’t need to get certified in Google Analytics. You don’t need a major in marketing because HubSpot makes it all so easy.”