Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, but with team members throughout the United States, Pivot Group, is a customer experience and marketing agency that has a simple formula for success: hire talented people who care and focus on servicing clients rather than making money off clients. They take pride in the fact that most of their first clients are still clients and believe there is no better indicator of value than having a low client turnover. They are Broadband’s leading marketing and CX agency and enjoy collaborating with people doing meaningful work in the communities they serve.
Forecast is a smart solution that brings together all the data you need to optimize operations and impact the bottom line. Forecast centralizes work management, resource management, and financials into one easy-to-use platform, enabling you to run, track, and manage your company’s work with total visibility and insights driven by powerful AI. Through easy-to-use reports, Forecast sheds light on what’s really going on at the core of your business. With integrated AI alerts, you know about potential problems before they happen, helping drive more accurate predictions and ideal outcomes.
Pivot uses Forecast’s integration with HubSpot to create a seamless process that works for their entire team. Why did Pivot need a new solution? Because they were feeling the pain of navigating multiple tools and platforms.
Efficient communication is crucial for an agency to run smoothly. Jacqueline Enos Gore, Sales Support Manager, has to keep her sales team connected to the rest of the Pivot organization while working in different platforms.
“Life before Forecast really was siloed. The business development team and the project teams were disconnected. We used two different platforms and it served individual needs, but it didn’t really integrate in a useful way between the sales team and the ultimate team that was delivering that work.”
“We’re using Forecast as a tool for communicating with project teams, so I assign business development tasks and to-dos for our project managers and our subject matter experts. Forecast allows me to gather the info that the sales team needs to accurately scope as well as sell our services and then easily turn what we anticipated as our scope, those estimated costs, into a live project.”
The integration of HubSpot and Forecast aligns Pivot’s sales department and project delivery teams by allowing them to turn HubSpot Deals into Forecast Projects. This increased visibility lets them see the big picture of their project pipeline and processes.
Sandee Buysse, Director of Marketing Operations, appreciates the comprehensive insights, and being able to have access to both the standard reports and the advanced analytics Forecast provides. “I think that’s my favorite part. Being able to provide the team data to help make decisions on what needs to happen.” Before Forecast, we found it “very difficult to get real time reporting that could provide us project status or financial health.”
The integration keeps Forecast updated automatically, providing Jacqueline with a communication solution she could implement without having to navigate or train her team, on a new platform. “I use the integration between Forecast and HubSpot to accomplish three main priorities: I use it to generate new projects within Forecast, straight from HubSpot. I’m very comfortable in HubSpot. That’s where I spent most of my time, and I love being able to not even leave HubSpot…So when a new lead is being worked, and we need an estimate, it's a simple selection in HubSpot of the appropriate template, which automatically generates a project in Forecast.”
It’s as easy as that. If you love HubSpot you can work within it and still get the AI-driven insights that come from Forecast. Plus, it’s a real timesaver to have the entire team working within an integrated set of systems.
“We probably save about 30 minutes to an hour of work on each custom project because the project team can look at that estimate in Forecast and make adjustments. A lot of times, they don't need to make adjustments if it's a pretty standard or typical project. Plus, they don't have to search for an email message or Slack thread for the details.” said Jacqueline.
“They can also move an expected project’s start date, the timeline, and date, and it will show up in HubSpot for me and for the sales team, rather than us trying to follow up to get that info from them.”
Deals in HubSpot are created as Projects in Forecast. As the Deal moves through each state in HubSpot, the status is updated in Forecast.
Combining two platforms that work together unifies Pivot across departments. According to Jacqueline, “I kind of think of Forecast as a bridge between the island that is our biz dev sales team and the mainland which is the majority of the Pivot team members who are producing deliverables and providing those services to our clients.”
Sandee agrees, “The other benefit is just using one system to move work through the entire organization with all of these shared resources. That’s been hugely beneficial. Everyone’s using the same system; we speak the same language.”
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