Shift Work Summit featured Logan Sands, VP of Technology of Sunderstorm as he highlights how his team needed to innovate to meet the needs of their rapidly expanding cannabis gummy brand. The team needed to address common challenges faced by field sales teams and their managers in tracking mileage, expenses, and productivity. By leveraging geofencing and route tracking with HyperTrack, the new system automates previously manual processes; unlocking productivity for sales teams and managers, while saving $20-$30K annually by eliminating redundant software subscriptions.
Watch the video and read the edited transcript below, following the highlights listed below.
Growing Pains in Sales Operations
The Solution - HubSpot and HyperTrack
Expanding to the Marketing Team
Fully Automated Geofences, Tracking, and Reporting for Sales Teams
Gaurav Deshpande: Welcome to the next session of Shift Work Summit. Welcome back!
Gaurav Deshpande: I'm your host, Gaurav Deshpande. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer at HyperTrack. I'm particularly excited about this session as it brings shift work validation into the core of the enterprise, which is your enterprise software.
Sunderstorm is the parent company of Kanha bites. A wonderful product, I can attest to that.
Gaurav Deshpande: With that introduction, let me hand it off to Logan Sands, VP of Technology at Sunderstorm. Take it away, Logan.
Logan Sands: Alrighty. Yeah, hey there, everybody. So,as he was saying, this session is accelerating field sales productivity with HubSpot connected location intelligence I am Logan Sands, the Vice President of technology over here at Sunderstorm, as he mentioned in his intro. Here we'll go ahead and get started with an introduction to kick things off. Then we'll kind of walk through some of the pain points we've seen through over the last couple of years the solutions that came up to those. And then in the next 10-15 min, I'll wrap everything up with a conclusion.
So starting off: Who is Sunderstorm? Sunderstorm is the parent brand of several cannabis brands. Our main brand is Kanha gummies. We are a leading gummy in the United States.
The last I heard we were number 3 cannabis gummy. In the United States. We also have a few other brands, including concentrates, and we do some distribution for some 3rd party brands as well.
We do all the manufacturing, distribution, sales, marketing, and everything. In between ourselves, this means that we do have a field sales team in each of the States that we operate in.
We sell to dispensaries which are our regulated retail partners in all the States that we operate in.
We currently operate in 4 States, including California, Nevada, Illinois, Massachusetts, and we most recently opened up in Thailand. We also have an agreement to launch products into Japan and some potential agreements elsewhere around the world, currently in the works.
So when I first started, we were actually only operating in California. That was 4 years ago. So as you can imagine, that growth over the last 4 years brings some pains.
One of these main areas where we're seeing these pains was within our sales team as well as our sales management, and there's a few key areas where this was the pain.
Growing Pains in Sales Operations
"So we really had no way to make sure that our reps were making it out into the field and visiting these stores that they said they were."
One of them was in our inefficient CRM. We launched Acumatica ERP back in January of 2021. It had some built-in CRM functionality. It was pretty basic, wasn't necessarily what we needed. You could basically just log engagements like text emails, etc, but nothing beyond that.
Also we have the inability to track our reps in real time. Like I said, our sales team is a field sales team. They need to be going out and getting to those dispensaries.
When we were operating in Southern California. It's fairly easy to manage your team. As a manager, you can get out into the field. You can spend time with your team on a pretty consistent basis. But as we began to launch these other States across the United States. And, you know, starting to look globally becomes a bit more difficult when you're in California trying to manage your team in Massachusetts and Illinois, and even if you make it out there, you can't manage your team back in California.
So we really had no way to make sure that our reps were making it out into the field and visiting these stores that they said they were.
And they were doing this in their own cars, which means they were obviously allowed to expense their mileage that they were driving on a daily basis. However, we had no way to verify this mileage just like we couldn't necessarily verify for getting out to the field. We couldn't necessarily verify the mileage that they were expensing.
Various reps are using various tools. Some of them were just logging it manually based on the odometer of their car. Some people are using Google Maps or other tools that they were finding.
And so most of the time. It was probably an estimate, and probably inaccurate as well as it was coming in across various timeframes. Some reps were doing it on the pay periods, which were every 2 weeks. Some reps were waiting 6 months to expense their mileage. So you can imagine our finance team is not too happy getting thousands of dollars of expenses at inconsistent times.
And basically, all this leading into just siloed software. Our CRM wasn't talking to the software our marketing teams were using basically just making reporting very, very inefficient and nearly impossible.
And so with all this in mind, we looked into finding a solution as soon as we could.
The Solution - HubSpot and HyperTrack to Improve Field Sales Efficiency
"HyperTrack had a pre-built integration (with HubSpot) for us where we would be able to track all the information (visits and mileage). It was logging directly in HubSpot, and they were going to do that heavy lift for us as well as any addition, additional customizations, adjustments we may need."
And we started off by saying “hey, we need a CRM, that's gonna let us do what we need to do.”
We landed on Hubspot - I won't dive into too much as HubSpot is a well known, world-class CRM.
Basically, we just needed something that would allow us, allow our sales team to more closely manage their deal flows and other workflows as well as eventually work with other departments.
And so we landed on HubSpot. It has an open API. It's been allowed to communicate to all of our other software. And so once we had that decided.
We're like, okay. Now we have the CRM, we can track the workflows our reps are working through. How are we going to track and make sure that they are actually getting out to the field visiting our clients?
And that's when we found HyperTrack through the Hubspot app marketplace. One of the main reasons we landed on HyperTrack is that Hubspot was new to my team. We had no experience working with HubSpot, integrating with it.
On top of it, being new to our sales team and HyperTrack had that pre-built integration for us where we would be able to track all the information. It was logging directly in HubSpot, and they were going to do that heavy lift for us as well as any addition, additional customizations, adjustments we may need.
And then, finally, we stuck with Acumatica. Acumatica is still our ERP. It's the home base of our company, our company runs off of it. So all of our customer information was going to be held there.
And we were using Redshift and still are using Redshift to host all of our data from these various locations. And we have Tableau sitting on top of it, as well as using Python and various other methods to, you know, analyze the data on more advanced, on more advanced basis. That's not the day-to-day stuff in Hubspot. So like I was saying, one of the key features of all this is that it had to communicate.
They all had to communicate amongst each other. So, focusing on the Hubspot, HyperTrack, Acumatica integrations. Here everything starts in Acumatica.
We generate a new customer or new prospect that's immediately sent into the HyperTrack or HubSpot automatically sending the HyperTrack to generate that geofence rep is, you know, within the 250 meters, or whatever the parameter we set within HyperTrack, is they automatically log that visit, and that visit is sent into Hubspot, where it is logging, "hey? This rep was at this store. They made these number of visits this day," logging that all in real time, as well as at the end of the day, sending in total mileage.
And once that total mileage is within Hubspot, we are then grabbing that total mileage out of Hubspot at the end of each day and pulling it back into Acumatica. Kind of close the loop here and generate that expense receipt.
So really, there's no manual data entry beyond generating the new customers in Acumatica. Everything else is fully automated for our sales team, so that they're not logging any information manually, and also that all of our expenses are coming in on a consistent and accurate basis.
The HubSpot Dashboard Powered by HyperTrack
"We have the full ability now to track all of our reps activities within Hubspot, including mileage. As well as we have more accurate and consistent mileage reporting."
And, taking a closer look within HubSpot here, this is our field service dashboard that HyperTrack built for us directly within HubSpot, allowing our sales management to manage directly within Hubspot on a day-to-day basis. Obviously they have all their other deal flows that they're managing on top of this.
But this is the HyperTrack-specific dashboard they built for us, starting the top left here. We're able to see if our reps are actually spending time in these stores. They may be driving 200 miles, but how many minutes are they spending face-to-face in these stores with our customers.
And then working down to the left middle here. Just total mileage in a stack bar chart allows us to see, you know, basically our flow of mileage on a day-to-day basis. And then in the bottom left here our daily number of visits by user. Maybe they're driving 200 miles. But are they actually stopping at our clients?
It may just be a rep is trying to get out there to prove they're in the field. But now we have the ability to see if they're actually stopping and visiting our clients and prospecting new ones.
And then the right-hand side. Here. We just kind of like to view this as our health dashboard for HyperTrack. It shows us how many inactive users there are on a day-to-day basis. You know, if this number grows above a certain amount, we can send out a reminder in our slack channels to basically remind people, hey, activate your HyperTrack today, one to make sure that you're logging your visits and 2 to make sure that you get your mileage expenses created.
And then we have tracking health outage reasons moving to the right there and then on the bottom. We have just employee-specific data about outages and some other more nuanced distance total drive times, etc.
And so that was basically it. We have the full ability now to track all of our reps activities within Hubspot, including mileage. As well as we have more accurate and consistent mileage reporting.
Expanding to Marketing Team
“So now anytime a field marketing rep is visiting a store that will also be sent to the same HubSpot dashboard and company information that is being used by the sales team, so that our sales team can know when the marketing team is out there supporting them.”
And after we found that success. We realized that we may be able to move this over to our field marketing team as well. Our field marketing team. Just to give you an idea is going into the stores, setting, setting up displays, making sure our customers are properly stocked when our reps aren't getting out there as well as running Demos. So we have 2 teams. We have our field sales team and our field marketing.
We had solved the field sales team issue. And now we realize, hey, this may work for our field marketing team as well.
They were using a software called Repsly. It's basically a pretty basic CRM. But we eliminated that and immediately switched them into HyperTrack to track their mileage and their visits.
So now anytime a field marketing rep is visiting a store that will also be sent to the same HubSpot dashboard and company information that is being used by the sales team, so that our sales team can know when the marketing team is out there supporting them.
And we're currently wrapping up, building the workflows in Hubspot for the remainder of what they were doing reps, including their forms. Right? So if a field marketing team member is out in the field and they're filling out information about a customer. And one of these forms we've generated. It's going directly into the company profiles our sales team can see within Hubspot kind of what the field marketing team seeing out there that maybe they may have missed, or they haven't been to that store in a certain amount of time, and they can review the store on a more closely without having to get out there themselves.
As well as building that marketing schedules into the calendars of Hubspot, so that our sales team can see when they're getting support and demos out at their stores so that they can better support the stores. Maybe they want to stop out for that demo. Or maybe they say, “hey, my marketing teams got this one. I can spend my time elsewhere.”
Basically all this just to eliminate the silos between our marketing and our sales team. Marketing and sales obviously need to work hand in hand and by getting them both into the HyperTrack-HubSpot atmosphere, it's basically made everything extremely easy.
And wrapping things up here just to cover it all, we ended up integrating HubSpot and HyperTrack with Redshift and our existing Acumatica ERP to streamline field sales and marketing management even though our initial goal was to only streamline sales, we were able to transition it into our marketing team as well.
Fully Automated Geofences, Tracking, and Reporting for Sales Teams
We solved the challenges related to mileage tracking, business tracking, and expense reporting, allowing sales, sales reps, and management to focus on selling rather than manual audits and reporting time by the managers, making sure that their team was actually doing their job. And now they can spend more time working with their team closely and helping them build those relationships.
We fully automated the process for geofencing, HyperTrack route tracking, and expense reporting to ensure that our field reps only need to start and track each day. There's no manual entry. There's no manual logging. It's all exact tracking through HyperTrack. There's less admin work and more time spent face-to-face with our clients and prospecting new business.
And through all this we achieved unified visibility and management, transforming our field team productivity all around, not only with our sales team, but also with our marketing and taking down those silos between the different software.
And with that that is basically all I have. I believe we have some time for questions here.
Q&A led by Gaurav Despande, CMO
Gaurav Deshpande: Thank you, Logan. There are multiple questions here in the chat.
Gaurav Deshpande: First question, how much was the savings for the field sales and marketing team with the deployment? Did you guys measure that or have an estimate for it?
Logan Sands: Yeah. So it's relatively new for us. We wrapped this all in 6 months, and have been going for about 2 to 4 months. But just off of the software we were able to eliminate with this. We're probably looking at 20 to $30,000 annually.
Gaurav Deshpande: Wow! That's an amazing amount of saving congratulations.
Gaurav Deshpande: Second question is, what was the process of integrating HyperTrack location, intelligence into HubSpot? How long did it take, what did the process look like in terms of timeline?
Logan Sands: Yeah, so it was fairly quick. I think we had everything turned around in. I would say about 4 months. The HyperTrack team was extremely helpful. They carried the bulk load of that for us because we didn't have that experience, and they had most of it pre-built for us. Then I think there's a month or two of additional requests that we had that we worked through, but it was all completed, I would say, in under 6 months.
Gaurav Deshpande: Excellent one more question here, Logan. In terms of the deployment. Now, as you've scaled it out to the field marketing team.
Gaurav Deshpande: Was their experience also similar to field sales in terms of the savings that came out of the HyperTrack deployment.
Have you quantified that?
Yeah. So I would say, most of the savings is coming from the moving, the field, marketing in and being able to eliminate Repsly as an additional software.
They were tracking their mileage within Repsly already. So the sales team we were seeing most of the savings around having more consistent mileage reporting, whereas the marketing, most of that savings is coming from eliminating Repsly, since they were already tracking mileage within there, but the additional - I mean, it's hard to quantify the time that's being saved, you know, man being able to manage both marketing and sales within the same atmosphere. So it's been too soon to really see what that savings is like. Because, like, I said, we're still building the marketing team into there but it will. It'll be instrumental, I'm sure.
Wonderful, and thanks a lot, Logan. for joining us for the Shift Work Summit.
Thank you for joining us, and we'll go to our next session in about 12 min, so we'll give you everybody a break. Come back to us at 11 Am. Pacific for a session with checker pay.
Thanks a lot, and I'll see you in the next session.
For more sessions on the technology shaping shift work, please visit the Shift Work Summit session replay page.