Tech care specialist Sonder has experienced an explosion of growth with its number of end users increasing by 2,300%.
Intelligent CIO spoke with Christina Knock, Head of Marketing, Sonder, about the tech tools and tactics applied to support such growth
Sonder has experienced significant growth in recent years. What has helped you to achieve this?
While the care-tech industry continues to grow and evolve, many solutions still don’t offer a holistic service. Sonder helps individuals navigate a range of personal and professional challenges. An app connects them with nurses, doctors, psychologists plus a self-care resource hub to ensure they get the right care at the right time.
Sonder’s scale of employee adoption, engagement and support (on average 40% of a workforce) provides business leaders with an aggregated and anonymous view of their people’s health, safety and wellbeing needs. This information enables business leaders to understand what’s going on with their people and get ahead of their employer’s obligations of ensuring a healthy and safe workplace. Armed with this information, P&C and HSC teams can confidently allocate time, effort and resources in more focused ways to Drive a culture of prevention across teams, departments and the whole organisation.
Growth, in part, has been achieved by bringing data, tools and channels all into one streamlined platform, which has allowed us to collaborate across departments, quickly analyse data to make informed decisions, and run seamless automated processes.
Having a single unified view across the business has consolidated our tech stack, freed up resources and given us the time to invest our energy into customer acquisition and retention.
How has Sonder leveraged marketing to grow FY24 pipeline gen?
HubSpot’s CRM – Sales and Marketing Hubs have been the primary toolkit for coordinating all of our sales and marketing activities, acting as a single source of truth. These tools have been instrumental in achieving strong YoY growth and growing our FY24 pipeline gen.
HubSpot’s technology has helped us to achieve 121.38% YoY growth, allowing us to integrate over 10 different tool sets to run multichannel account-based marketing demand generation campaigns to our ideal customer profile. Beyond that, we have over 20 different data points used in HubSpot, across intent and engagement. This creates a continuous intelligence loop that can be shared across our departments, preventing information silos. As a result, we have created a sophisticated and world-class growth and revenue operation.
We have been able to build a strong demand generation engine with HubSpot’s marketing campaign tool, CRM workflows and Sales Hub deal objects. As a result, our pipeline gen has doubled for FY24 to date. HubSpot’s reporting and attribution capabilities have helped us to be more data-driven in our decision making, zero in on the activities that are working for us, understand where to finetune our processes, and abandon activities with poor ROI. For FY24, our pipeline gen pace has been growing at around 20% MoM.
In using HubSpot as our growth platform, we’re able to forecast initiatives and activity outcomes, then execute on them across outbound, inbound, and multichannel campaigns.
What integration partners has Sonder used, and how have these partners helped to deliver YoY channel growth and boost engagement rates?
HubSpot has been a primary integration partner, enabling us to set up a LinkedIn ads integration which has helped us achieve 278% YoY growth for marketing generated sales-qualified leads, and a compounding annual growth of 288% for marketing-qualified leads. Additionally, our recent LinkedIn quarterly business review showed our engagement rates were 60% higher than industry benchmarks. In recent years, our ability to use LinkedIn and HubSpot has fuelled our top-of-funnel, awareness and demand creation and has led to a compounding annual growth rate of 64% for social traffic.
We have completely automated our LinkedIn company targeting through HubSpot which has resulted in campaigns going live three times faster. Thanks to the integration we can send an active qualified audience list of ideal customers to LinkedIn, and narrow our targeting filters based on size, industry and buyer persona to make sure we are telling the right stories, to the right people at the right companies.
Sonder has built a sophisticated marketing ecosystem over the last three years using HubSpot as our source of truth for marketing and sales data. Directly integrating tools designed to future-proof our marketing efforts and gather more first-party intent data, has helped to drive acquisition and improve performance.
The various integrations we’ve implemented through Hubspot have given us world-class capabilities to analyse and assess data from all parts of the market, driving our ability to attribute revenue and therefore make better data Driven decisions to scale our growth.
What have been the key challenges for Sonder when it comes to scaling the business? How have you overcome these?
Finding new audiences and getting in front of the right buyers at the right time has been challenging at times. For our marketing team, whose focus is on attribution, challenges around what’s creating opportunities and driving revenue are all common pain points. Data is primarily what helps us get closer to solving these challenges. Self-attribution mixed with great CRM data from LinkedIn, for example, helps us identify and double down on the things that are making a direct impact to the pipeline.
Another challenge has been in scaling our capabilities. Specifically, how we can become more efficient and ensure we are putting spend on the channels that are producing quality results. HubSpot has played an integral role in this and in our ability to work cohesively, collaborate, and deep dive into data and insights pulled from the CRM. Analysing relevant CRM data like sales-qualified leads and pipeline revenue, and cross referencing with platform performance, gives us a clearer understanding of what’s working. We are then able to send that data back into Google Ads and LinkedIn to optimise our bidding.
The size of our sales team has tripled over the past year and we have expanded operations.
HubSpot has been able to meet our requirements along the way and support our scaling into new geographic regions. Despite most of our new hires having limited experience with HubSpot prior to onboarding, all have been able to rapidly adopt the platform tools via help from the comprehensive knowledge base articles, live support agents and community forum posts. This has resulted in assessed productivity improvements to the sales operations team of around 30% during onboarding and has reduced time to adoption and tool competency by 50%.