CASE STUDY

How a HubSpot-Focused Revenue Operations Consultant Increased Revenue by 185%

Client Quote

“Clare has been an essential right hand to my firm. Her depth of knowledge and experience is hard to quantify, but in our time working together, I have found it impossible to stump her with a single problem related to technology, sales, marketing, automation, or revenue generation and optimization. All this is coupled with a white glove, client-oriented, trusted advisor personality. If you are lucky enough to get to work with Clare, you will understand exactly what I mean.”

— Joe. W.

Summary

I transformed a law firm’s fragmented, underused CRM and poorly converting websites by consolidating three CRMs into HubSpot, automating lead follow-up and onboarding, improving SEO, and integrating billing and legal case management data. These changes increased revenue by 185%, doubled organic traffic, quadrupled leads, improved attorney utilization by 53%, and reduced response times from 3.4 business days to minutes.

The Background

I was approached by a medium-sized law firm servicing B2B and B2C clients. The initial goal was simply to audit their HubSpot portal and do extensive data hygiene. Once I got under the hood, the most important problem was crystal clear. The CRM was deeply underutilized, and it was really hurting the business.

Digging in further, the sales team lacked clear processes. They worked out of a separate CRM that, while designed for law firms, failed to meet the demands of an effective sales operation. 

Plus, there was another, rogue CRM that had been implemented as part of a lock-in contract that further siloed the most viable leads. This disjointed CRM landscape meant that inbound leads were mostly getting ignored because they were spread across three silos. 

Additionally, web properties were driving enough traffic for the size of the business, but users simply weren’t converting, even though the primary site had been redesigned just a few months prior. In fact, using organic search data as an indicator, the overall conversion rate stood at a mere 0.29%.

Possibly just as alarming, the site redesign inherited significant issues that affected crawlability and created additional obstacles due to a lack of adherence to best practices.

The engagement turned into so much more, as I uncovered significant opportunities to optimize revenue streams, both through ever-critical quick wins and longer-term, sustainable strategic triumphs, like improving web properties, gaining revenue clarity to dramatically impact staff utilization and smoothing out the client onboarding process.

Quick Wins and Strategic Triumphs

The work ahead would be equal parts challenge and reward, but I rolled up my sleeves quickly and got right down to it.

While the engagement started as a HubSpot audit, it became clear quickly that the client needed more, and they needed it fast. So I pivoted to auditing their existing processes, both for fixable leaks and to drive the overall revenue operations (revops) strategy.

The very next set of priorities tackled quick wins: 

1. Improve on-site conversion rates for the primary web property without [another] costly rebuild

2. Consolidate three CRMs to direct 100% of lead flow straight to sales

3. Nurture the sales team into the unified HubSpot ecosystem, built for operational success 

4. Drop sales’ speed to contact from 3.4 business days to mere minutes

From there, I worked on longer-term strategic triumphs:

1. Audit and optimize the client’s primary web property to restore search engine friendliness and drive organic traffic

2. Rebuild the client’s secondary web property, both to improve conversion rates and bring it into the HubSpot ecosystem

3. Build a custom integration to increase utilization rates to well above industry standard by ensuring revenue data was flowing into HubSpot

4. Smooth out the client onboarding process with automation

The Quick Wins

QUICK WIN #1

Improve On-Site Conversion Rates for the Primary Web Property without [Another] Costly Rebuild

In auditing the client’s conversion process, three main issues were causing friction.

First, the site lacked a cohesive, global CTA. So getting in touch with the firm meant users had to figure out for themselves how to raise their hand - not a great way to start solving an often painful legal issue.

The Fix: Given the nature of the business, very few users were using the site’s search. I replaced that with a global CTA that points to the Contact Us page.

Second, the conversion process itself was unclear. The homepage, where the lion’s share of users land, was driving traffic toward service pages, not conversion pages. Moreover, the homepage and individual services pages were clunky and lacked a clear visual hierarchy.

The Fix: I began highlighting a “Get a Free Case Review” call-to-action (CTA) first and foremost and further reduced friction by making all on-page CTAs pop up in a modal, reducing navigational friction. I visually redefined the service page CTAs to a secondary structure.

Third, the forms were disjointed and requested much more data than was absolutely required, in some cases up to 15 fields! Playing devil’s advocate, people who have genuinely high intent in the legal space are likelier to fill out a long form. But in almost every case, it was clear that the extra fields were causing friction, and a lot of it.

The Fix: I audited forms for consistency, narrowed down to absolutely necessary fields and added logic to both distinguish B2B from B2C leads and route them to the right sales rep.

The Result: Usually, the most objective way to look at site-wide conversion rate is by looking at organic traffic. Within that segment, conversion rate increased by 719.39%, from 0.31% to 2.51%.

QUICK WIN #2

Consolidate Three CRMs to Direct 100% of Lead Flow Straight to Sales

One of the biggest and most immediate obstacles faced had to do with having multiple CRMs.  

At the time, the sales team was primarily using a CRM built for law firms, not operational efficiency and data transparency. A few features of that CRM were useful in transitioning new cases to attorneys, but the buck stopped there. Moreover, the sales team lacked the formal training and processes needed to be effective.

In parallel, my client had been also working with a well-known vendor in the legal space who drives leads with proprietary lock-in. So they were essentially stuck in a system where a third-party built and managed an entire site on their in-house platform. 

My client had no access to make their own changes to the site, and leads were also flowing into that vendor’s proprietary CRM which the client didn’t own and had very limited access to. 

When a business is intentionally siloed from freely accessing assets it pays a vendor for, this is referred to as a “walled garden.” It can be very challenging - if not impossible - to get out of.

On top of those two CRMs, there was also HubSpot. The primary site was built on HubSpot’s CMS, and only digital leads were collected there. Outside of that, the platform was used entirely for high-volume, low-return activities, not as the operational powerhouse it’s built to be.

The Fix: The inflexible legal CRM attached to the legal case management system (LCMS) was carefully decommissioned, the data was migrated into HubSpot and processes were developed to support that transition. I also trained the sales staff to use HubSpot. This was no small task given the platform they came from. 

Then there was the problem of the vendor locked-in CRM that operated entirely in a walled garden. For context, the sales team didn’t even have user accounts on that platform. I knew this was going to be a touchy problem to solve.

Obviously, the vendor denied my request for API access into their whitelabeled CRM. Most people would see this is a roadblock and quit right there. I saw it as an opportunity to find a different way to shine.

The vendor was sending email notifications every time a new lead came in… BINGO!

I leveraged Zapier’s invaluable Email Parser app to shuttle those leads right on into HubSpot! I worked with my client to set up specific rules in Outlook to forward the lead notifications to Zapier’s email servers for parsing. 

To keep things neat and defined, I created a Zapier inbox for each lead source - phone, email and chat. Since the vendor’s email notifications were otherwise the same, we could easily use Zapier to scrape the relevant data and get precious leads into HubSpot in real-time. 

All at once, those leads from the two extra CRMs began flowing into HubSpot and getting the same automated sales outreach, drastically improving speed to contact immediately, at scale.

The Result: My client gained measurable cost efficiencies in two main ways. First, in sunsetting the CRM attached to the LCMS, that saved about $5,100 per month.

The second efficiency was found in simply getting a lot more bang for their buck out of the $6,000 per month they were paying the lock-in vendor for highly viable leads that weren’t getting sales outreach.

QUICK WIN #3

Nurture the Sales Team into the Unified HubSpot Ecosystem, Built for Operational Success

Prior to consolidating all three CRMs, I interviewed the sales team and relevant stakeholders to understand what was - and wasn’t - working with the existing CRM and sales strategy. 

While the team was fairly knowledgeable about the legal space, it turns out there were no formal processes to get deals over the finish line. And, frankly, there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for evolving that.

Change management isn’t easy. There was resistance at first about moving the sales team into HubSpot. But we would overcome that fear together.

The Fix: In conducting stakeholder interviews, I learned that the most useful feature of the legal CRM was the lead intake feature that automatically alerted the legal team about new clients.

I reworked the native integration between the LCMS and HubSpot to solve this problem where a new case got created in the LCMS every time a meeting was booked in HubSpot. The LCMS would in turn create a corresponding deal in HubSpot.

The native integration couldn’t do very much else, and syncing any meaningful part of the sales process, like lead intake forms, was simply not possible.

So I rebuilt intake forms in HubSpot using Playbooks and built a custom integration in parallel. Moving forward, Playbooks would sync to the LCMS as case notes via a middleware integration with Make.com.

In addition to solving the technical challenges with onboarding the sales team into HubSpot, I developed deal management processes, custom reporting, dashboards, sequences, and automations that smoothed rough edges and reduced workload. 

I also created new training materials to ensure that change management and adoption went as smoothly as possible and held an eye toward empathy. 

Knowing that HubSpot is significantly more robust, I trained and mentored in stages. Once the sales team had gotten good at one stage, we trained and mentored again to get to the next stage. 

While there was a temporary tradeoff in data quality as new skills were being learned, this strategy made the team feel much more supported and engaged in the transition than simply taking a top-down approach and drawing proverbial lines in the sand.

The Result: Since the real goal here was to significantly drop speed to contact, additional results are in the section below.

QUICK WIN #4

Drop Sales’ Speed to Contact from 3.4 Business Days to Mere Minutes

With the CRMs consolidated, I could now focus on improving speed to contact from one, unified platform. As I mentioned earlier, leads weren’t getting followed up with consistently. 

The relatively few that actually got a phone call or an email from the sales team were waiting 3.4 business days, on average, not including weekends. That’s a long time to sit around when your world is potentially on fire due to an unforeseen legal issue.

The Fix: Admittedly, automation made this an incredibly easy fix. The first step was to begin redirecting new leads to a meeting link to book meetings in real-time. I implemented logic to select an individual meeting link based on keywords in the lead’s message.

In addition to redirecting leads to a relevant meeting link, I also added a two-part email automation that handles lead assignment (which I later added SMS to, as well). 

The first email acknowledges the new lead and invites them to go right to the rep’s meeting link while promising to follow up soon with more info. The second part includes differentiators about the firm and again invites leads to book a meeting.

The Result: The overall results of condensing three CRMs, scaling HubSpot adoption and dropping speed to contact were enormous. Getting speed to contact down to minutes resulted in the average number of monthly meetings increasing by 1,516%!

Next, the real proof in the pudding came with such a huge increase in leads and meetings, that my client now had the luxury of becoming more selective about what cases to take on and what to refer out. I increased their closed / won deals by 390%

The other “story behind the story” is that the sales team’s sluggishness to adopt new methods quickly went away when their generous, new bonuses started rolling in.

The Strategic Triumphs

Once the initial improvements were made to generate more revenue quickly, I began solving bigger, even more challenging problems. While this isn’t an exhaustive story by any means, here are just a few of the ways I helped my client increase revenue by 185%.

STRATEGIC TRIUMPH #1

Audit and Optimize the Client’s Primary Web Property to Restore Search Engine Friendliness and Drive Organic Traffic

Because the firm had 19 practice areas, the primary site was quite large for a company of my client’s size, at a little under 800 pages. It simply wasn’t practical to “fix everything” but there was certainly a need to move some big boulder

In addition to working on optimizing conversion rates on-page, I conducted a deeper infrastructure SEO audit to guide the process of resolving technical debt that had accumulated over years of innocent mismanagement. 

The Fix: I started by resolving all 404’s and tackling over 5,000 broken internal links. I wrote new redirects, rewrote some existing redirects to be more targeted and fixed redirect chains - and even loops - that were eating into precious crawl budget.

From there, I optimized select on-page content on the highest-value pages that fundamentally lacked a primary keyword strategy. Then I made some changes to the way the site served CSS and JavaScript, along with implementing Google Tag Manager, to get a quick boost to site speed.

While these enhancements remained relatively conservative, the results were impressive. With the enhanced crawlability, organic traffic increased by 104.13% period-over-period.

STRATEGIC TRIUMPH #2

Rebuild the Client’s Secondary Web Property, Both to Improve Conversion Rates and Bring it into the HubSpot Ecosystem

One of the stronger currents my client was swimming against was the vendor lock-in described above. I’d solved for the walled garden CRM issue by parsing that vendor’s email notifications and funneling leads into HubSpot, but they were still operating a site over which we had no meaningful control. 

As a practice, I don’t hard-sell my clients. And I don’t move in and take everything over as quickly as I can, either. Instead, my approach is to respectfully ask for what I need to move the biggest obstacles first.

This is how I build trust over time. 

Naturally, I identified the vendor lock-in issue to my client early on to raise awareness, and then I waited. Sure enough, one day, I got a call asking if I could reproduce the lock-in vendor’s work. 

They wanted to fire the lock-in vendor by the end of the month. No problem for me; I rolled up my sleeves again and got right to work. 

The Fix: While I borrowed liberally from the existing site design to save time, I customized a new template with some visual enhancements to improve conversion.

Then I painstakingly cleaned and migrated the old HTML into new pages; a process that couldn’t - and many times shouldn’t - be fully automated. This was a time to look for efficiencies, not shortcuts. 

I also streamlined the directory structure and wrote redirects where needed, in addition to keeping an eye on site speed as I rebuilt.

The Results: Immediately, lead volume increased significantly and nearly quadrupled over time, benefitting from the methodical migration:

STRATEGIC TRIUMPH #3

Build a Custom Integration to Increase Utilization Rates to Well Above Industry Standard by Ensuring Revenue Data was Flowing into HubSpot

When I began working with this client, one of the first things I noticed was that there was virtually no revenue data in HubSpot. The little data that was available was wildly inaccurate due to poor data quality and strict limitations on the native integration between HubSpot and the LCMS, which originated all billing.

In addition to missing and misleading revenue figures, I knew from stakeholder interviews that attorney utilization was lagging. Plus, the pattern was evident in the bigger picture data. And it needed a big boost.

There was a big opportunity to accomplish two things at once:

1. Shine a light on a true revenue number

2. Introduce meaningful utilization reporting to increase accountability

Completing the two objectives was no small undertaking. On the revenue side, the legality of how law firms must bill, migrating billing to HubSpot wasn’t possible, Plus, the lack of native billing integration between the LCMS and HubSpot meant that a custom solution had to be built from the ground up.

What’s more, the LCMS does a good enough job of describing billable time but leaves out many valuable details that could help optimize utilization rates and contribute to the bottom line. 

The Fix: Developing and harmonizing three new custom objects, I built a billing and entry tracking app from the ground up that updated HubSpot from the LCMS via Make.com. While this could theoretically be accomplished with webhooks in HubSpot, there were limitations on the LCMS side that made a direct connection impossible. 

The great news is that I discovered a ton of useful data buried in the LCMS’ API and coupled it with HubSpot’s robust reporting engines to bring clarity to areas like:

• Billed time (including revenue realization)

• Unbilled time

• Rounded utilization (because law firms are allowed to round up on billing)

• Actual utilization (meaning how much time an employee really spent on a task)

• Hard Expenses

• Soft expenses

• Credits issues

• Contingency fees collected

From there, I built a series of calculated properties to tell the story behind exactly what constituted revenue, utilization and expenses. A final calculation was written to the HubSpot deal amount in real-time via in-platform automations, and voila: we could clearly see and improve utilization rates to begin impacting an actual hourly rate on each case. And we could look at that data at scale, firmwide.

The Result: By implementing AI-powered time-tracking and keeping a closer eye on the wheel, utilization rates grew by a weighted average of 53.36% and rose 26.74% above the industry standard rate of 38%.

STRATEGIC TRIUMPH #4

Smooth Out the Client Onboarding Process with Automation

Once I’d broadly improved overall revenue efficiency, I smoothed the edges on the onboarding process, too. Now that we could understand exactly when bills were paid, understanding the moment when new client contracts were signed would help us lower the response time to new clients much more effectively, too.

The Fix: I added an integration for PandaDoc to handle signed contracts, also known as engagement letters, a document no legal matter moves forward without. Once the letter was signed and the first bill was paid, I automated a warm-handoff email from the newly assigned attorney handling the case prompting the new client to schedule their first meeting.

And, as a bonus, I built a custom automation to upload each newly signed engagement letter to the relevant case in the LCMS, a major compliance step that was almost always overlooked prior.

The Result: I reduced attorney speed to contact from an average of 2.7 days to mere minutes. 

Summing It Up

Nearly tripling revenue didn’t happen overnight. But it did happen by making strategic iterations to existing processes and technologies, analyzing and optimizing the leaky marketing handoff to sales, harmonizing numerous disparate systems to bring data clarity, and empathically training and mentoring  teams to simply care more about revenue and data hygiene.

Moreover, the client had amassed more than a decade of technical debt and challenging employee behaviors. Together, those deep-seated issues made deciding what to fix and what to let go of immensely challenging.

The success of this engagement correlates strongly with my ability to hone in on what I know brings measurable dollars in the door by focusing on how to improve technology, processes and people, in the broadest strokes possible. 

As a revops consultant, you don’t go into every new client’s world knowing what to expect. You go in knowing that you’ll be humbled by getting to know them and working together to zero in on the right solutions to their problems.

If that sounds like a fit to you, let’s talk today.