INC 5000 Top 25 Fastest-Growing Security Company Diversifies Its Revenue Stream with Service Hub

The Challenge: Diversifying Revenue Streams for Sustainable Growth 

Mr. Coats had success with KENTECH when he approached Revenue River, but this growth-minded ideas man wasn’t ready to rest on his laurels. He wanted to diversify his offerings and create multiple revenue streams to build a recession-proof, growth-positive ecosystem that he could build, manage, and expand. 

Enter eKnowID, an extension of the KENTECH brand. eKnowID would leverage the advanced background technology built by KENTECH and target business owners, hirers, and down the road, childcare, and pet care providers.

The idea would be to take the technology he was using to perform thorough background checks on government officials, which supplemented a more high-touch process and make it available for self-service by this new target audience. He’d be entering into the market with a huge competitive advantage with his superior technology.

Mr. Coats would define success by the following factors:

• Market penetration velocity -- how fast can we get into this market and gain traction?
• Integration with his existing KENTECH business -- how can we keep eKnowID as low-maintenance as possible while still creating a fantastic customer experience?
• New revenue stream -- we created aggressive goals for $2 million in revenue and $8 million in the pipeline for the first year of the brand.
• Keeping customers -- while the product price is low, the LTV of a customer should be thousands through repeat business.

The Solution: Service Hub as the Unlikely Hero

The Service Hub is a notoriously undervalued piece of the HubSpot Growth Suite, the software version of the flywheel model for growth and revenue. 

The good thing about being underestimated, though, is that you can easily exceed expectations. 

In fact, 80% of companies who focus on the customer experience, the part of the Buyer’s Journey addressed by the Service Hub, report increases in revenue; $1.6 trillion is lost annually due to poor customer service.

Let’s take a look at Mr. Coats’s challenges and how they are well-suited for Service Hub:

• Integration with the existing KENTECH business
• Creating a new revenue stream
• Keeping customers

Solution 1: Centralized, Lean Support Activities

How do you make sales without a sales team? You make the purchase process easy and make yourself available to support your customer.

How do you make yourself available to support your customers? You help them help themselves and marketing, sales, and support functions under one roof.

HubSpot's all-in-one growth platform was a great fit, and Service Hub an invaluable piece.

To achieve our multi-million-dollar goal, Service Hub is crucial to ensuring that KENTECH can run eKnowID leanly.

We got to work automating and streamlining the purchase and fulfillment process.

The support ticket and knowledgebase features in HubSpot allowed eKnowID to streamline and get started without taking away resources from KENTECH.

Support Ticket Pipeline

For eKnowID to be as efficient as possible, we knew that 1:1 support emails coming through the same inboxes as KENTECH wouldn't scale well and would affect the quality of service. We built ticket pipelines in HubSpot so the Customer Success team can easily track incoming requests. 

Knowledgebase Articles

The unavoidable trend is that customers are eager to serve themselves during e-commerce transactions. While the Customer Success team is around to help, we built out a knowledge base of common questions to protect eKnowID team members' time while also improving the customer experience.

Solution 2: Keeping High-Value Customers

A key to KENTECH's success has been customer loyalty. Mr. Coats has spent years building KENTECH's reputation and delivering a customer experience that keeps people coming back like boomerangs. From the start, he wanted to ensure that we could not only attract but keep high-value customers. 

The background checks themselves might be low-cost, but repeat customers will have an LTV of thousands of dollars. With those stakes, we needed to get customer delight right from the start.

NPS Surveys

Service Hub has an out-of-the-box solution for NPS surveys that allowed us to quickly stand up a mechanism for collecting customer feedback. 

This two-way communication with customers allows Mr. Coats insight into his customers and helps grow customer loyalty even in sales transactions that have no human touch.

The survey follow-up has 2 tracks: one for evangelist-level NPS scores and one for a negative score. In both cases, the Customer Success team will be alerted to take action.

The Result: A Completed Growth Suite

Once Service Hub was in place, KENTECH's Salesforce license was expiring, and it was time to pull KENTECH into HubSpot with eKnowID. eKnowID and KENTECH now have the full Growth Suite including:

• Service Pro
• Marketing Pro
• Sales Pro
• HubSpot COS

With this infrastructure, we’ll finally be able to turn on the Marketing engine to start filling the pipeline. Our goal is for our new target markets to have a seamless experience using eKnowID’s affordable background checks and get the information they need to make a good hire. This move also allows KENTECH to take more risks and develop their products with additional revenue streams.

Not bad for 3 months into the relationship -- we look forward to reporting the go-to-market successes in 2021.