The Problem
When you’re one of the fastest-growing solar panel installation companies in the second-largest solar energy state, you need to be able to squeeze every ounce of potential from your contact list to stay competitive.
But for Kyle Ritland, Vice President of Marketing for Sun Valley Solar Solutions in Chandler, Arizona, there was one big hurdle between the company and residential sales growth: Their legacy CRM couldn’t handle inbound marketing.
“I brought HubSpot with me, but I inherited Microsoft Dynamics,” said Ritland wryly, “and Microsoft doesn’t do anything like HubSpot.”
Referral business is huge for Sun Valley Solar Solutions, so the gulf between Dynamics and HubSpot was a big problem for them. While the company’s revenue is split about 50-50 between residential and commercial sales, the overwhelming volume of its work is residential – in fact, with fully one- third of all new business coming from customer referrals, about 80 percent of its marketing effort was devoted to residential customers. Utilizing their data efficiently to keep customers up to speed on the opportunities to go solar was imperative.
“When you work in a service industry, you have to make sure your happy customers stay happy in order to get their friends and family to become happy customers, too,” said Ritland.
The numerous tools the company had been using to execute their multichannel marketing efforts didn’t talk with one another. So Sun Valley wanted a single user interface that could bring all inbound, outbound and social media marketing efforts together under one roof.
There’s a reason I would go to somebody like Daniel and his team, because I don’t want to know more than [I need to]. Lynton allows me to do my marketing job without having to know ‘what’s under the hood’ of the integration software. And with Lynton's responsive technical support, there’s no need for Sun Valley to do its own troubleshooting.
— Kyle Ritland, Vice President of Marketing, Sun Valley Solar Solutions
Sun Valley turned to HubSpot and immediately sought an integration between HubSpot and Dynamics so they could autopipette residential leads into their HubSpot CRM, improve the visibility into their lead source effectiveness, and better align the marketing messages they sent out to contacts based on where they were in the sales funnel.
“I am very big on technology getting out of my way and letting me do my job,” Ritland said. “All things being equal, I’d prefer to have fewer tools than more. Unfortunately, Microsoft doesn’t have anything like HubSpot, so I went to a third party in order to make our CRM and marketing platform talk to each other.”
Sun Valley’s CRM support team led Ritland to Lynton, which was able to provide the solutions the company needed – and some others they didn’t even know they needed.
The Solution
With around 50,000 total contacts in HubSpot, Sun Valley fell right at the median size of Lynton clients, said founder Daniel Lynton. But what made them unique was the project data they needed to access in order to effectively leverage their customer records.
“We added a source campaign field, which is common for any CRM integration,” said Lynton, “but we also added additional data points for their projects: Segmentation, residential versus commercial, sending info from there into HubSpot so they can contact customers.”
By syncing that data, Lynton improved the performance of Sun Valley’s integration because the company could now get data syncs that weren’t possible before, particularly by adding Opportunities and Projects to HubSpot.
“We had them up and running in about a month,” Lynton added.
Now Sun Valley has visibility into their CRM that allows them to do proper lifecycle mapping for more effectively targeted messaging via automation tools based on where people are in the sales funnel. It also integrates social media into the marketing effort and provides analytics.
One of the things I looked for when I came to Daniel and his team was the ability to have somebody on the other end of the phone who would jump on my problem. I think we have a really good dynamic in that way, and I appreciate that about them.
“I know just enough [about field mapping] to be dangerous,” Ritland noted.
“One of the things I looked for when I came to Daniel and his team was the ability to have somebody on the other end of the phone who would jump on my problem,” said Ritland. “I think we have a good dynamic in that way, and I appreciate that about them.”
With the integration, Sun Valley is getting better metrics around what is and isn’t working in their digital marketing efforts targeting residential customers. And they have the results to show how much the integration has improved their results.
We’ve seen an incremental increase in sales of 19 percent year-over-year from 2015 to 2016
