HyperTrack and HubSpot Accelerate Field Sales and Service Performance at India’s Edutech Juggernaut LEAD School

LEAD School is an integrated system for affordable private schools in India to provide excellent education outcomes for every child. LEAD School is growing quickly and needed to think about how they could track productivity in an ever-expanding environment. In the past three years, LEAD School expanded from 4 states to over 25 states and grew its field team from 40 to over 500. As the team scaled, the need to be more prescriptive about managing field activity became more apparent.

By engaging HyperTrack, LEAD School was able to use workforce and logistics automation technology to impact two key areas of the field sales side of their business — granular sales meeting data and expense tracking for field sales teams.

LEAD School has three different fleet types — Expansion, Excellence and Experts — along with four different categories of schools as prospects. As the number of field representatives scaled up, it became challenging to quantify sales results and tie those directly to the projections for territory expansion. LEAD School realized they needed to tie the activity in CRM with the movement of the feet on the street driving the sales and adoption.

Field Sales

While HubSpot served as an excellent CRM, granular details about field activities like the number of meetings held or the length of meetings was very difficult to capture. This was particularly important to LEAD School, as meeting onsite at client facilities (schools) is core to their customer acquisition and account management process.

Key metrics such as meetings held by account managers are important sales indicators. The ability to track, clearly display and share this data with managers allows them to understand team productivity and predict sales growth.

The only way to truly understand the activity of field reps was to introduce automation for tracking actual visits to the sites where meetings are held. As a team focused on continuous improvement, the technical team at LEAD School began to think about leveraging location data to measure, analyze and improve workforce productivity. They were seeking a solution that would let them build a custom application with the flexibility to track a group of dispersed field sales staff in a reliable and consistent manner. This led them to engage a HubSpot partner for workforce and logistics automation — HyperTrack.

Expense Tracking

Account managers had difficulty linking expenses to client visits. With account managers bearing the administrative burden, finance and operations were left with incomplete data and limited ability to forecast and plan for expenses associated with field teams.

Field sales teams incur many expenses related to travel. It is difficult to track expenses associated with field visits accurately without too much administrative overhead for account managers, while still capturing the level of detail needed for finance. LEAD School had this challenge — made even more complex by the quickly expanding sales team and geographical coverage of their client base.

The initial answer was a CRM-based custom app that depended on data input from account managers in the field. This led to inaccuracies in reporting travel, lodging and meal expenses, leaving finance and operations without a reliable basis to forecast and plan.

The team implemented the following solutions to provide tracking through their product and enhance the visibility of the fulfillment lifecycle to their customers.

Geofences

to automate detection of entry and exit times at sites of interest →

With the ability to automatically detect field sales representative visits, LEAD gained accurate real time and historical data pertaining to locations of interests. Operations and management teams can build reports and processes based on location of sales representatives and data about specific schools of interest.

Driver SDK

to accurately track the location of the field representatives during work day →

By having the ability to document travel in real time, operations teams are able to capture the location of field representatives and share this with the field sales management and with customers if needed. By capturing key information about the location of the sales representative, operations teams can easily see which sales reps are visiting which customer locations, increasing visibility of sales activities for the entire organization.

Dashboard

visualizations to display work happening in real time →

Since the operations teams have the location data throughout the fulfillment process, HyperTrack allows streams of this data to be presented on operational dashboards. By receiving this data through webhook streams, LEAD is able to embed these real-time views within customer systems.

HyperTrack and HubSpot

Leveraging HyperTrack helps close the gap between CRM and reality by increasing the amount and accuracy of data pertaining to sales team activities.

The above integrations in combination with HubSpot allows operations and management teams unparalleled transparency. With automations that seamlessly capture time and location data, detailed information related to sales appointments is accurate as it reflects the ground truth of sales representatives’ activity against scheduled and planned activities. This rich data gives management teams the insights they need to make decisions about sales territories and teams.

With HyperTrack, LEAD School can track important sales funnel metrics like the duration of account manager visits to schools, how many meetings were held before a contract was signed, and even how many meetings were held before a contract was lost.

Providing this data to sales and operations managers takes the guesswork out of understanding how field teams interact with customers. Management was able to run reports on relevant metrics with a weekly frequency, helping leadership see the connections between sales activity and pipeline development. These insights led to new perspectives on win/loss data and even influenced incentive planning for sales teams.

While the expected outcome was to have better expense data for field reps, the team gained insights that led to a more accurate understanding of customer acquisition costs and potential budget issues.

Upon learning of HyperTrack, the team at LEAD School decided to implement location-based APIs to improve tracking of travel expenses. Using HyperTrack data in this capacity resulted in a new approach whereby expenses are linked to visit IDs, giving finance more insight into field activity. Now finance teams can run reports that track expenses associated with visits within a desired time frame.

LEAD School is now able to visualize how many field reps are logged on at any given time, which customers the reps are visiting, and link this data with financial systems — with these improvements contributing to over a 20% increase in process efficiency.

Revenue Planning

LEAD’s implementation of HyperTrack Geofences allowed the automatic documentation of specific site visits. By creating 50,000 geofences across 13,000 target schools, the technical team at LEAD began to capture when any member of the company visited target schools. With data about when team members entered and exited specific locations, LEAD operations and management teams were able to understand how much time was spent at each school.

This data had deep commercial value. Unexpectedly, management teams at LEAD found that location data pertaining to specific schools in the network could be informative — and even predictive — when planning and forecasting sales performance.

Over the years, the data fueled by HyperTrack’s geofences combined with HubSpot CRM became so important that the executives at LEAD School now rely on these insights to make data-driven decisions for territory and revenue expansion.