About Hinge
Hinge is a branding, marketing, and research firm that focuses on the professional services market. A full-service agency, they provide a comprehensive suite of branding and marketing services—from audience research, marketing strategy, and implementation services to award-winning brand identity design and website development. They offer four proven, customizable programs to deliver greater visibility and growth—including their signature programs, the Visible Firm® and the Visible Expert®. In addition, they have published five groundbreakings research-based books on professional services marketing.
An Aggressive Growth Strategy
Hinge needed to leverage tools that would be up-to-par to support its aggressive growth strategy without increasing administrative employee headcount. With increasing tasks came the need to facilitate project management, communication, billing, and structure to improve everything across the board. They chose Mavenlink as their PSA solution for its robust integration with Salesforce and Pardot, along with its user-friendly system that would appeal to the internal workforce.
The Big Bang team did an excellent job at integrating Mavenlink to Salesforce, as well as completing customized improvements for both solutions.
Benefits of Mavenlink
“We grew over 60% in the past year. If Mavenlink wasn’t capable of handling that, like our previous system, I think we would be in a lot of trouble now.“
– Joe Pope, Director of Business Development at Hinge
Insights Into the Profitability
Mavenlink has drastically improved Hinge’s ability to quickly have insights into decision-making metrics, like monthly billables—past and future, hours spent on tasks, anticipating future revenues, and probability percentages. The team is also able to set custom reports for specific data, including the profitability of a project.
Added Visibility for Improved Project Management
Mavenlink is a great project management tool that allows Hinge to keep an eye on how many projects are underway and their current stage. It’s also easier to assign and reassign resources when needed.
Faster Transition from Prospect to Customer
Mavenlink improved Hinge’s ability to transition from sale to execution. The pain of needing multiple emails to inform many people to send an invoice out is no longer necessary because everything is automated. It is estimated that over a week in time is saved in turning around a prospect from closed–won to an ongoing account. It keeps their team excited to start the project!
“I would never go back [to the way we were working before].“
Like-Minded Partners
Hinge often recommends to their customers the implementation of software solutions as a way to improve an organization’s business strategy and their ability to execute the campaigns that the team created. Joe Pope shares:
“I know of no other implementation partner that I would recommend before Big Bang, especially for the Pardot and Salesforce realm.“
What did Hinge love about the Big Bang team? Their responsiveness, their knowledge, and also having the intelligence in finding the answers if they didn’t have them right away. The consultants were knowledgeable about the business, and even when another member was pulled in on the project, they were of the same caliber. Big Bang carries the same level of expertise throughout its experts.
“You are a good partner to us because we are very like-minded in how we deliver the solutions.”
Leveraging Salesforce with Big Bang
In order to streamline their business seamlessly and achieve “true digital transformation,” Hinge is looking to leverage the tools they have effectively. They knew that communication was KEY in terms of their systems and leveraging them to do the job for them. So they will continue working with Big Bang’s support to get through other business systems properly integrated like Mavenlink x Salesforce.
Advice
If Hinge was starting the project over, Joe Pope shares that he would have preferred to dedicate more time to the planning and execution of the project. He would also have pushed to eliminate their legacy ERP at the same time rather than trying to over-configure a non-conforming system.
“Knowing that Big Bang existed, I would have let Big Bang choose and make the proper plan for the PSA and ERP, and set a realistic timeframe.”
The team at Hinge has a lot to be proud of—a well-integrated system and a project that finished on time and within budget. The team is no longer bound by individual capacity and can better collaborate as a team.
All quotes by Joe Pope,
Director of Business Development at Hinge
