Unipart Ramps Up Global Industry with HubSpot Enterprise Suite

With operations spanning 21 countries, 12,000+ colleagues, a focus on seven sectors and £1bn turnover, Unipart Group’s revenue-generating machine is a miracle of moving parts. In 2022, the new CEO, Darren Leigh, recognised that visibility over that machine, specifically the pipeline at a group level, was key to accelerating growth in line with his ambitions. 

This data was vital to the group’s ability to measure the size and frequency of the projects it sold. It would provide the competitive edge required to grow its market share. It would clearly show which customers it was growing - and had growth opportunities - with, how long it was taking to win customers and how successful its sales and marketing activities were.. And it would facilitate meaningful conversations at the divisional level needed to drive continuous improvement.

• To achieve this, the group’s legacy CRM needed replacing with a new system capable of capturing data, delivering dashboards, and enabling standardisation.
• It needed to be fast to implement and embed across the group  to drive visibility on its pipeline and improve how it manages it and its customer growth
• It needed to integrate with the group’s enterprise resource planning system, SAP.

HubSpot didn’t just meet these requirements; it was designed from the ground up around a customer-centric mantra. Given the size of its organisation and the scale of the operations ahead, Unipart Group selected HubSpot solutions partner BabelQuest to implement it.

HubSpot offered many advantages over the suite of CRM solutions considered but chief among these was its time to value. To implement the full CRM Suite Enterprise, which would provide Unipart Group with all the functionality required, we estimated a completion date of a year. 12 months ahead of the group’s initial two-year estimates, this timeline already made HubSpot more cost-effective compared to other platforms with longer deployment times.

With cost and time to value ranking highly, it was important that we understood where there were risks. Unipart Group believed that the most significant hurdle would come not from its choice of platform but from the size of the internal group of stakeholders, the scrutiny of whom raised the potential for unanticipated issues, group decision-making roadblocks, onerous project gateways, and general delays associated with the stakeholders’ availability.

To get around this, we familiarised ourselves with the group’s internal Project Delivery Methodologies to understand how its executive leadership team (ELT) makes decisions. When we recognised the ongoing need of different teams and individuals across the group for platform demos throughout the planning phase, we produced a series of two-minute videos. Each of these walked the viewer through a specific process, for example creating and managing a contact or walking them through the reporting or analytics tools. 

But the most influential control we put in place to keep the project on track was our design principles. Darren challenged us to define design principles against which every decision that might need to be made could be tested. These rules wouldn’t just streamline ELT involvement; they could be used to resolve conflicting requirements without escalation and shape the configuration of the platform so that it worked for the whole of the group.

From day one, Darren was clear that the entire group needed to be able to use the solution as quickly as possible. This proved central when defining our overarching design principles:

1. Prioritise user adoption. Does this decision benefit every user on the platform? Every division? Every country? If it does, it can go ahead. If it doesn't, it can't. 
2. Avoid complexity. When deploying the solution in a division, we must not set it up in such a way that it limits the ability of another division to do the same thing.

Between them, these two principles necessitated a global design solution that could be deployed in each division. The impact of this was nothing short of transformative; a billion-pound-turnover business operating out of multiple divisions in 21 countries, and all of it agreeing to use one deal pipeline and one standardised sales process, guided by these two principles. Many much smaller businesses have tried and failed to implement this approach, never mind an organisation with a revenue machine of this size and complexity.

Key to this approach working was the standardisation of the many different sales processes across the group. Where previously, different divisions gathered and stored data or reported differently, they were required to come together and agree on one consistent process that worked for everyone. As for platform ownership, we were clear that no single team should be responsible for everything. Even IT, which traditionally owns this business area, wasn’t to be held solely accountable for it because on its own, no single department has the full picture.

Instead, the group needed to split its responsibilities. The data protection team would be responsible for compliance and policy, for example, where before the seven different divisions had developed regional solutions on how their data protection should be managed. Following this lead, the group put its heads together to agree on a consistent process. The RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consult, Inform) offered a solid framework for this. 

Any essential customisation required by the divisions could be carried out once this was all in place. And when we got to it, there really wasn’t any customisation left because it had all been accounted for by bringing the different processes in line with the standard approach.

Measured against our “Iron Triangle of Project Management” (Scope, Timescale, Budget), we delivered a solution that actually exceeded the initial demands set out by the group. By implementing the full CRM Suite Enterprise, we’ve built a huge range of functionality into the group, much of which was initially ruled out under the belief it would complicate the project. The solution we’ve delivered does everything Unipart Group needed it to do — and more.

The volume of work we estimated was exactly where we were at the project close. There were plenty of moments where the scope could have crept over, but we avoided this through the combination of project management rigour, the design principles we set out at the start to facilitate good decision-making, our alignment with the group’s product data management process, and the development of a cohesive, productive culture within the Steerco group.

Through Unipart Group’s commitment to the process, its trust in us, and Darren’s leadership, we completed the project in six months, unlocking significant value for the group when you consider the cost of the headcount for every Unipart Group employee required to participate in the Steerco on a monthly basis. Based on our calculations, it’s reasonable to estimate that the group saved at least £250k in hidden costs on its internal stakeholder time and project management time by working with us to hit the deadline six months early.

Additionally, there was the revenue impact associated with our completion of the project ahead of time. Access to its new platform six months earlier than estimated gave the group the ability to start using it to ramp up its operations and hit its revenue goals sooner.

The cost saving of that reduction in time covers the cost of the project itself, while the value in new opportunities the group has since engaged wipes out the cost of the HubSpot portal. As a result, it’s not unrealistic to estimate that the group is already at a positive ROI.

The decision by Unipart to move away from its legacy system was not an easy one. During the tenure of its first platform, the group has grown into a British institution with global reach, one which has defined the way we manufacture, manage, and transport goods all over the world. That CRM took the group to its first billion, but a new solution was required to reach its second. 

For many organisations, the scale of this project would have been its end. But through its legacy of reinvention, Unipart has unlocked a new, better way of keeping its wheels moving, a thousand parts turning in synchronicity to one pipeline, one platform, and one standardised process: one Unipart, united with the help of BabelQuest in HubSpot.