Enhancing lead generation, nurturing, and cooperation with marketing automation

Kiilto is a multinational organization that develops, manufactures, and sells chemical industry solutions. The company serves a broad set of customers across four business areas – construction, adhesives and fireproofing, professional hygiene, and consumer cleanliness and hygiene.

Key objectives

Columbia Road's work with the company focused on the first three of these areas. With individual country organisations all using their own marketing platforms, Kiilto was struggling with a complex and disconnected technology architecture, customer data distributed across multiple platforms, and the lack of a unified way of working at a global level.

This disconnect extended to the divide between sales and marketing, which were still working in a traditional way as separate entities. Following a significant refresh of the customer relationship management (CRM) process in the sales function, it was clear to Kiilto that the same kind of renewal was needed in marketing.

The company was keen to unify its sales and marketing efforts, break down silos, and improve the visibility of its customer data with a modern, digital, data-driven approach. They also wanted to take their first steps on the road to marketing automation to help them develop solid lead nurturing, lead generation, and client loyalty processes.

Developing their ways of working in this way will enable them to transition away from a more traditional approach to sales and marketing. Instead of relying heavily on account management and event activities to drive business, in the future, they want to be able to measure the impact of their marketing efforts better and leverage their customer data in new and smarter ways for more targeted communications.

With these goals in mind, Kiilto reached out to Columbia Road to help them develop modern, data-driven capabilities that would lay the foundations for a uniform way of working across its various business units and country frontlines and enable seamless cooperation between its sales and marketing functions.

Our approach

We collaborated with key stakeholders from Kiilto on a pre-study project to map out the sales and marketing setup and gain a clear understanding of what the organisation needed from the perspective of digital sales and marketing. The project, which was completed in autumn 2021, identified two potential tools that offered what the company needed, and Kiilto decided that HubSpot was the best match for their needs.

We also helped the team at Kiilto to map out the customer journeys across their different business areas to build a clearer understanding of their customer base and to help them better segment it so that their marketing activities could be more highly targeted.

In spring 2022, we began the technical implementation of HubSpot on a company level across multiple market areas, business units, and brands. We also integrated HubSpot with Kiilto's Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM tool and migrated customer data over to the new platform. The implementation process took around six months and was piloted first in the Nordic countries before being rolled out globally.

Although working across multiple markets and business units made for a somewhat challenging project, the cooperation went very smoothly. Columbia Road and the Kiilto team wanted to look beyond the implementation of HubSpot, keeping the development of the processes at the forefront of all the work. The goal was to establish a solid foundation for progress by introducing new technological capabilities, setting up the needed tools, and identifying and implementing the first use cases. In this way, the project was all about learning by doing, with the team getting its hands dirty with concrete actions like segmented campaigns, marketing automation, and lead generation and nurturing activities.

Our work included:

• Technical implementation of HubSpot and onboarding training for all marketing teams
• Unifying ways of working across markets and business units Helping the Kiilto team develop a growth mindset and a data-driven approach to marketing
• Implementing shared tools and technologies to enable more fluent cooperation between marketing and sales
• Unlocking the potential of Kiilto's existing lead generation/nurturing opportunities
• Taking the first steps towards more precise contact segmentation to enable more targeted marketing efforts

Impact

With HubSpot implemented on a company-wide level, Kiilto now has a way to streamline and unify its marketing processes and ways of working. The business has also been able to initiate its first marketing use cases, including newsletters and lead generation and nurturing activities targeted at specific customer groups.

This approach is already paying dividends in the form of marketing automation efforts that will prove valuable in terms of generating leads and sales as well as helping Kiilto to develop a better overall customer experience.

On a higher level, the project has helped Kiilto to shift its mindset away from ‘manual' one-to-one marketing towards a more holistic approach that takes the entire customer journey into account – from lead acquisition and nurturing to activation and after-sales care. With more fluent coordination between sales and marketing and better measurability of marketing key performance indicators, Kiilto is well placed to take its next steps on its data-driven digital sales and marketing journey.