About the Vendor
HubSpot is a leading CRM platform offering Sales Hub, Marketing Hub, and a suite of tools designed to help businesses manage contacts, automate outreach, and build stronger customer relationships. Its out-of-the-box configurability, Gmail integration, deal pipelines, email templates, and snippets make it a popular choice for sales and customer success teams.
About the Brand
Launched in 2010, GoFundMe is the world's largest social fundraising platform. With over $17 billion raised from more than 200 million donations, it is on a mission to make it safe and easy for anyone to give and get help. The company has a dedicated VIP Experience team that manages high-profile, high-impact customer accounts.
Challenge
GoFundMe's VIP Experience team relied entirely on Google Workspace tools (Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar, and Gmail) to manage their most high-profile accounts, with no true CRM in place. This created visibility issues between the VIP Experience and Partnerships teams, who frequently interacted with the same accounts without knowing what the other was doing. Conversations would move out of Zendesk into Gmail and be lost. Additionally, the team struggled to proactively schedule outreach for customers with annual fundraising campaigns, leading to missed opportunities and unclear account ownership.
Solution
GoFundMe's VIP Experience team implemented HubSpot Sales Hub and the HubSpot CRM platform. Key capabilities adopted included: Gmail integration for full email visibility, contact management for clear account ownership, deal pipeline for tracking referrals and repeat business, email templates and snippets for consistent brand voice and efficient outreach, and the associate companies feature for automatic company-contact linking. The Partnerships team also gained cross-team visibility, and the News team used HubSpot to understand relationship context before engaging customers.
Execution
The team configured HubSpot with its out-of-the-box tools, leveraging the Knowledge Base for support. They assigned accounts, built an outreach calendar, and set cadences. Contacts were catalogued by "type" and "cause" to prioritize opportunities. The Gmail integration was connected to centralize email communications. Deal pipelines were set up to attribute wins and identify loss reasons. Cross-team collaboration was enabled by giving the Partnerships and News teams visibility into HubSpot records.
Results
Within nine months of implementing HubSpot Sales Hub, GoFundMe's VIP Experience team increased repeat and referral business by 180%. The share of total business attributable to repeat and referral customers rose from 11% to 32%, a 191% increase. The team also reported improved cross-team collaboration, consistent brand voice, and more proactive, planned outreach to high-profile accounts.