Knight Frank HubSpot CRM Case Study

Knight Frank is one of the world's leading independent real estate consultancies, with more than 20,000 people in 487 offices across 53 territories, partnering in property with some of the world's largest organisations.

However, the Knight Frank Asia Pacific teams (KFAP) did not have an existing CRM system used across marketing and various business units, leading to siloed views of customer requirements and a lack of dynamically accessible data.

Additionally, due to disparate systems, KFAP struggled with a lack of digital and technological comprehension and continuity across the customer journey.

KFAP wanted to find out if HubSpot could help give them a unified view of their customer data and needed a partner they could trust with migrating an enterprise-scale organisation to HubSpot with a focus on the needs of key stakeholders, as well as data security, finding Huble to be the ideal partner.

The challenge

KFAP was running its business in a technologically disjointed manner, leveraging spreadsheets and email to manage its communications with little insight into data and consistency around building meaningful relationships.

This meant that KFAP did not have a way to capture the client relationship and data end-to-end and needed a way to do so to better service its clients.

The challenge for us at Huble was to determine how to enable KFAP to understand how they are currently doing business and to do business more effectively by leveraging CRM technology.

Initially, three business units would need to be migrated to HubSpot: the marketing, the Occupier Strategy and Solutions (OSS), and the Capital Markets teams.

Technology used before HubSpot

Our solution

We took a three-pronged approach to this challenge.

First, we needed to understand KFAP’s marketing requirements and understand how they were approaching their marketing, what tools they used (DotDigital), and where their data was stored, before determining how to enable them to manage that marketing data more effectively.

Next, we held workshops with the two sales teams - Capital Markets and OSS - to understand their CRM requirements.

We then moved them away from leveraging Excel spreadsheets and put in a systemized approach that would capture not only the deals and the financial data but also the sales activities to enable them to understand how they can enable themselves to be able to do things better and be more effective in building relationships with their clients.

Finally, we addressed their system administration, looking at their technology and data to determine how to best segment the data. This involved ensuring that the correct permission structure and integrations were in place and that only the right people have access to the right information.

Additionally, we needed to ensure that the system was maintained in a way that it does not have duplicates or allow for the incorrect people to have access to the incorrect information.

For example, we ensured that the two different teams know if the other business unit is working with the same company, however, they aren’t able to see any email communications or details around the discussions.

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The results

Here’s how our hard work played out:

- The key stakeholders involved across Knight Frank’s business units all had different requirements and uses for HubSpot. Each lead stakeholder was extremely happy with the rollout of the new CRM system and the architecture designed by the Huble team.

- Huble migrated their different business units and the marketing team from using many different systems and tools into one consolidated system, giving everyone streamlined access to the data and tools they needed. The overall adoption of the tool was very high and followed a smooth change management transition.

- An additional focus of this project was data security and user permission. Across three different business units using the same CRM system, it was important to Knight Frank that data was managed properly, ensuring that only those who needed to see specific deals, contacts and companies were able to do so. This involved a high level of user permission management and mapping before implementing it into the system.

- Over 1,000 new leads were generated within the first six months of migrating from DotDigital.

38.5 %

Pageview to submission rate

19.27 %

Pageview to contact rate

300 %

Improvement in lead response time

Thanks to the team at Huble, the CRM implementation for our two key business units and marketing division went smoothly and resulted in more efficient processes, with encouraging results that will likely lead to more widespread adoption of HubSpot among Knight Frank’s various regional divisions.

Jasper Fee,

Marketing Operations Manager at Knight Frank

Next steps

Through this migration, Huble helped Knight Frank understand how a company with multiple offices and divisions globally can adopt a CRM system. It was a great testing ground to understand how replicable the rollout could be in other regions and divisions in the future.

Having shown that HubSpot is capable of meeting the needs of the different business units while also helping them see improvements in their key metrics, we look forward to continuing this migration in other areas of the business.

Driving Success for Knight Frank with the power of HubSpot

Architecting and onboarding HubSpot for a unified view of customer data