Highway 9 Consulting
An Organic Sales Partner in the HubSpot Ecosystem

Highway 9 Consulting is an award-winning HubSpot partner agency with a proven track record in helping businesses improve their marketing and sales outcomes by producing qualified leads that drive more closed-won deals. Highway 9 provides demand generation and digital marketing services to oil and gas, petrochemical, manufacturing, and other industrial companies in the U.S. and beyond.

In a recent interview with CIO Applications, Kevin Brady, president of Highway 9, sheds light on how his firm helps industrial B2B clients grow revenue by implementing cutting-edge sales and marketing strategies to conquer modern challenges in the sales technology space.

How does Highway 9 stay ahead of the sales technology curve?

We are a sales-first demand generation agency that leverages the HubSpot CRM platform to provide a holistic growth plan for businesses. We work with our clients to build and execute highlyproductive sales and marketing programs to manage and grow their prospects, leads, and customers.

I bring my 30 years of in-depth know-how as an expert sales and marketing practitioner, pulling from my experience in oil and gas, field operations, research and engineering, manufacturing, and marketing to steer product launches and drive bottom-line productivity.

Our Houston roots mean that we naturally have oil and gas clients on our roster. But through the HubSpot network, we’ve been able to expand outside of our geographic region and traditional customer targets. One of the best things about working at Highway 9 is learning new technologies and helping clients position product lines that we otherwise would not encounter. It’s refreshing to hear my team discuss the ins and out of commercial generators, a new process for manufacturing plastic pipe, or how to position a drilling fluids company as a responsible environmental steward.

What types of premium content win the marketing game?

Because the dynamics of sales evolve constantly, companies are challenged to transform their marketing efforts from traditional methods to progressive, fast-paced, and highly competitive digital sales. Online content drives a more informed buyer and allows a broader view of the competition while comparing alternatives.

Our client’s sales teams must be ready to act, and a prescriptive sales process helps teams capitalize on these opportunities. As prospects engage in self-education our client’s websites must be loaded with informative content that best fits a prospect’s needs and guides them toward a purchase decision for their products and services.

The Highway 9 team delivers content that builds trust and credibility for our clients and their brand, which increases the likelihood that they get to participate in the selling process. We produce content that resonates with engineers and technical professionals, which is important to establishing credibility, having a good engagement, and creating successful outcomes.

What is the process of HubSpot workflow implementation in Highway 9?

My direct experience building and running high-performing sales teams help me understand our client’s pain. When we engage with a client, we have open conversations about their current sales process to understand what is working and what is not. We identify areas that need improvement and design solutions through HubSpot to help achieve those goals.

With HubSpot, we categorize leads and track their movement through the sales cycle. We build attribution reports and dashboards for the marketing team so they can tell what lead channels are working best and understand those that are not.

We train the sales team to follow a scripted workflow we call the “8/14 Process”. This 8-touch outreach sequence is conducted over a 14-day period and is designed to drive consistency and repeatability into a salesperson’s actions. The process has three possible outcomes: 1. The lead converts to a sales opportunity; 2. It is deemed unqualified; and 3. It goes back to marketing into a nurture workflow.

How has Highway 9 charted customer success milestones?

For some clients, success may mean improving a process that they already have. For example, we had a software client whose main website action was “Request a Demo”, which triggered an outreach from sales for scheduling. Oftentimes sales could not establish contact with the prospect, or the demo would get scheduled, but the prospect would not show up. Data showed that over 60 percent of the time, the demo never happened.

Through HubSpot, we were able to bring in an auto-scheduling integration called Chili Piper. As a result, the demo completion rate doubled almost overnight. An unexpected outcome was that the time between demo request and completion decreased dramatically—from 126 hours (which is over five days) to 36 hours, substantially increasing our client’s win rate.

In another example, we helped a client vastly improve their website traffic and ranking keywords with a comprehensive content campaign aligned with their business growth goals and product launch strategy. After performing content research, we rewrote their website copy and implemented a blog cadence with calls-to-action tied to content downloads for lead generation. Over a two-year period, their website traffic tripled, and ranking keywords increased six-fold. Their website now drives an average of 25 sales inquiries per month, with over 80 percent of traffic originating from search engine queries, (demonstrating a high volume of first-time contacts).

While our client mix is diverse, they all share common challenges and goals—our clients want to be more relevant in an increasingly crowded and competitive market. They want their sales teams to be more productive and efficient. They want to achieve their growth goals that are set by investors, and they want to be seen as leaders among their peers to help recruit and retain the best talent. Highway 9 helps them along this journey.