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Salted Stone is celebrating achieving HubSpot’s CRM Implementation Accreditation, reflecting our commitment to excellence. The process required cross-functional collaboration and a deep dive into client successes, offering valuable perspective and supporting continuous improvement. |
We’re excited to announce that Salted Stone has achieved HubSpot’s CRM Implementation Accreditation, the result of months of hard work and a testament to our vision: being the best global HubSpot Solutions Partner we can be. This accreditation is our second, building on the foundation we laid with the Onboarding accreditation. Our goal is to achieve all six of the accreditations, and any new ones created, as part of our commitment to helping our clients thrive and grow with the support of HubSpot tools.
Because HubSpot is integral to so many of the solutions we provide to our clients, the team that worked together to prepare our submission to the accreditation program pulled from across our organization. They worked side by side for weeks to prepare our case studies and other materials, so we wanted to take a moment to give them a shout out for their hard work and see what they thought of the process.
What was the hardest part of the accreditation process?
“Pulling together work done over 2-3 years for a client and having to summarize it in a 15 min video,” says Michael Peach, CRM Architect and Solutions Lead for our APAC and EMEA regions. “There are so many small things that go into making an agency-client relationship successful and trying to distill these down into the true essence of what we do as an agency and how we help contribute to the growth and success of our clients was a challenge.”
Seeing the forest for the trees was a common thread throughout the process, as we pulled our heads up from the day-to-day of delivering success for our clients and took the long view on our work holistically.
Brandon Jones, GM of our NA team, broke it down well: “The toughest part isn't the technical aspects of the accreditation — but rather, pulling out the overarching narrative from the multitude of day-to-day tasks that were necessary to deliver on the client's business goals. Pulling that central narrative out of the weeds of the day to day was actually incredibly refreshing.”
Why is going through a rigorous process like this accreditation important for technology-focused agencies like S2?
According to Michael Peach, regularly undertaking rigorous evaluations like this accreditation process are important because they give us the opportunity to take a step outside and look back in, to really think about if we’re doing things the best way as tools like Marketing Hub evolve.
He said that processes like this one “help us refocus and align on our process and approach. Before completing the submission we spent time looking over our historical client engagements and reflecting on them before choosing one to use for the submission. This review helped us understand what elements of each engagement were most successful and learn from these, enabling us to optimize our processes and approach.”
For Kaley Deneen, Salted Stone’s Regional Director in EMEA, that opportunity to gain some perspective was extremely valuable. According to her, working through accreditations “forces us to be able to really consider the larger impact that we make with our clients — something that I think we can sometimes take for granted when we're focused on the "doing" part of the work and working on tight timelines.”
What was one unexpected benefit or takeaway from going through this process?
For Michael Peach, the answer was easy: “Global collaboration and teamwork. Accreditations like this truly get everyone working together. Our team from the US, EMEA and APAC all contributed to the accreditation and we got to connect and see some of the great work our colleagues are doing in other regions.” While Salted Stone often shares work and SME focus across regions, it's rare that team members from every time zone get to collaborate together on a single project.
Running through this accreditation process for the second time also helped our team to formalize our approach to tackling challenges like this, and to continuous growth in our knowledge and skill when deploying HubSpot for our clients.
The team we pulled together to pursue this accreditation also included Kady White, Marketing Technology Strategist, Alden Dale, Director of Sales & Marketing Operations Architecture, and Mitch McKenzie from our creative team who edited our submission video. This cross-functional and cross-regional collaboration is the foundation of a renewed focus on staying on the cutting edge of HubSpot, all in service of realizing our clients' goals.
