How Lake One Transformed Global Manufacturer’s Sales and Marketing Operations

The Challenge

Lake One partnered with Polywater® to implement sales and marketing technology that automated and simplified the manufacturer’s complex and manual sales processes.

Polywater Corporation is a global, specialty chemical manufacturer serving the electrical and communications industries. Customers use Polywater’s products to find better ways to overcome specific, field-based infrastructure challenges. Polywater sells through distributors and resellers.

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• Erik Freyser President & COO, Polywater

Polywater, like many manufacturers, lagged in adopting a digital approach to sales and marketing operations. Most of its business development occurred through in-person meetings. Its sales process was long and complex, and marketing was further complicated by a labyrinth of global territories and relationships with reps and distributors. Lacking a modern CRM, the company’s inside sales team manually managed prospect and customer data. Polywater didn’t have the technology needed to run an effective and measurable marketing program or align its sales and marketing efforts.

Polywater first hired Lake One to guide and support the manufacturer through its migration from its outdated, on-premise CRM system. In addition to the technology migration, Polywater also needed a better way to manage the leads it generated through its proprietary software, Pull-Planner™. The pull-planner helps Polywater’s product users compute complex calculations needed to plan cable pulling projects. Updating who had downloaded the software, what version, and the software key, was a manual process that fell to the inside sales team.

Once the COVID-19 pandemic struck, it halted all of Polywater’s in-person business development and only accelerated the manufacturer’s demand for digital transformation.

The Solution

As the CRM migration and adoption were ongoing, COVID-19 hit, halting global sales visits for Polywater. Lake One quickly developed a plan to integrate digital tools and simplify Polywater’s complicated and traditional sales and marketing ecosystem.

Cleaned data in legacy CRM and migrated to HubSpot CRM Platform. Polywater’s legacy CRM required many manual work hours to support it, making it unreliable for real-time data. Moving the manufacturer from its on-premise CRM to HubSpot required us to work with Polywater to migrate a significant amount of customer data and segment contacts correctly based on industry, market, geographic location, and product interest. With the HubSpot CRM, Polywater’s sales and marketing teams now have access to a centralized, real-time database that enables more effective prospecting and marketing.

Integrated Polywater’s Pull-Planner software download with HubSpot’s API. Polywater can now easily maintain a historical record of download and upgrade properties in the HubSpot CRM that inside sales often refers back to when communicating with prospects and customers to support the software.

Simplified lead routing with ZIP code integration and over 100 workflows. Lake One automated Polywater’s manual lead entry process with over 100 HubSpot workflows, routing contacts to the right salesperson based on industry, region, and several other variables. We also integrated a ZIP code API so forms would auto-populate location by ZIP code, further automating complex U.S.-based territory mapping. The workflows keep Polywater’s CRM up-to-date and enable timely follow-up.

Enabled the sales team to use marketing automation and assets for targeted outreach. Lake One also educated Polywater’s sales teams on using content and marketing assets to personalize their outreach to targeted contacts or accounts. This account-based marketing approach helped Polywater better leverage content from its content marketing program, which launched in 2019. Curating and offering prospects tailored content created a more personalized experience.

Vidyard and HubSpot enabled virtual demos in place of face to face sales

Integrated Vidyard with HubSpot to enable sales reps to connect with prospects face-to-face amid the COVID-19 pandemic. When COVID-19 stopped global travel, Lake One implemented Vidyard, a personalized video platform. We integrated Vidyard with Polywater’s HubSpot CRM to empower the sales team to replicate their face-to-face meetings using one-to-one sales videos. Vidyard also gives the team useful viewing data to inform future outreach.

• Amy Helke Inside Sales, American Polywater

The Results

Improved team efficiency and accelerated sales response

Polywater’s sales team is now more responsive and productive thanks to its modern sales and marketing technology. Lake One’s partnership with Polywater has:

Improved lead response time by simplifying lead routing with non-native integrations to HubSpot of both proprietary software and ZIP code APIs.

Saved Polywater dozens of hours of manual work it used to spend classifying and routing leads by creating over 100 sophisticated HubSpot workflows with integrated Zip code lookup.

Increased sales response rate with the integration of videos from Vidyard in sales and marketing emails, and website.

Increased key sales activities, including meetings and prospect replies, by 28% with an easy-to-use, integrated CRM platform.

Polywater now has a modern platform to drive its sales programs forward in a post-COVID digital era. Lake One will continue to provide strategy and training to help Polywater’s sales team further maximize new tools, including HubSpot and Vidyard. Expanding on Polywater’s early successes with Lake One will empower the manufacturer to help even more companies build and maintain reliable electrical and communications systems.

• Amy Helke Inside Sales, American Polywater