Customers and revenue brought together in HubSpot, giving a coffee retailer decisions based on data and a faster sales team | Kurasu LLC

■ Company profile
Kurasu LLC
Website: https://jp.kurasu.kyoto/
Industry: Retail
Employees: 50 to 100
Products: Sales Hub

Kurasu LLC (founded August 2018, Kyoto) is a fast-growing coffee brand working under the vision of enriching people’s lives through coffee.

Based in Kyoto, it runs a diverse range of businesses, including cafés, an online store, and the import and export of coffee equipment.
It values its connection with everyone involved in coffee, from producers to consumers, while driving innovative initiatives.

The problem: data management getting complicated, and not being able to see the numbers they wanted

Kurasu had been managing customer information and order data on Shopify, their e-commerce platform.
But as the business grew, the volume and complexity of the data grew with it, and three major problems became apparent.

Problem 1: too many fields, leading to missing entries and lower data accuracy

Customer information was often entered by hand on Shopify at the point of order, and there were many fields to fill in, so

• accuracy varied from person to person, and fields were frequently left blank
• company names were written inconsistently (e.g. “Kabushiki Kaisha” vs “(K.K.)”), and contact names were not recorded in a standard way
• searching for customers and analysing data became very inconvenient

These issues made it difficult to build an accurate customer database.

Problem 2: each salesperson managing things differently, so everything depended on the individual

Because the history and progress of customer interactions were also managed differently by each person,

• it was difficult for the team as a whole to follow the history of customer interactions accurately
• it was unclear who had done what and when, so the quality of customer handling could not be made consistent
• checking a customer’s information took time for anyone other than the person in charge

Problems caused by this reliance on individuals occurred frequently.

Problem 3: no accurate view of monthly revenue by company

For the leadership, the biggest problem was how hard it was to track the revenue trends they needed for business decisions.

• Shopify’s standard features collate revenue mainly by order
• they could not meet the need to “see monthly revenue trends by company (customer)”
• so revenue had to be re-collated every month in Excel or similar, which took a great deal of time
• and there was also a risk of human error

Faced with these problems, and wanting “a system in which customer and revenue data are managed in one place and anyone can easily access the latest information”, the company considered adopting HubSpot.

Adopting HubSpot: a simple data design holding “only what is needed”, matched to their workflow

To solve these problems, NowVillage focused on the goal of “ reducing the workload and making visible only the data the business needs“. After an in-depth review of their existing workflow and their Shopify data structure, we carried out the best-fit migration and operational design.

〈What we did〉

・Slimming down and standardising the data structure

To solve the “too many fields” and “inconsistency” that had been problems in Shopify, we thoroughly reviewed the fields to be managed as part of the HubSpot implementation.
For companies, contacts and orders, we organised and defined only the minimum fields essential to running the business.
As a result, staff can record just the important information accurately, the risk of missing and duplicate entries has been greatly reduced, and the data structure is simple enough for anyone to use without hesitation.

・Support in designing the custom reports the business and sales team need

To improve revenue collation, which had taken the most time and effort, we gave training on how to use HubSpot’s custom reports and how to design dashboards.
This fully automated the collation that had been done by hand in Excel. Data needed for decisions on both the management and sales sides, such as “revenue by salesperson” and “monthly revenue trends by customer (company)”, is now much easier to visualise automatically.
We helped create an environment in which accurate, up-to-date figures are available to the leadership and the sales team at any time.

Results: bringing data together delivered “more accurate sales” and “faster decisions”

After adopting HubSpot, Kurasu’s sales and administration improved.

Specifically, in the following three ways.

■ What HubSpot delivered
・Information in one place, and “consistent quality of customer handling” across the team
・”More accurate sales activity” using order history
・”Support for strategy” through automatic visualisation of the data that matters to the business

Result 1: information in one place, and “consistent quality of customer handling” across the team

First, everything from enquiry to order to revenue management is now in one place in HubSpot.
Information that each person had held separately has been brought together on a single platform, and sharing it has become smooth.
And because the whole team can now see the latest customer information, the quality of customer handling can be made consistent.

Result 2: “more accurate sales activity” using order history

Second, with order history linked to each customer (company) as “deals”, the quality of sales activity has improved dramatically.
Based on past purchases and sales conversations, they can now recommend the most suitable coffee beans and equipment.
Using HubSpot CRM, for example with automatic reminders for regular follow-ups, sales activity is efficient and nothing slips through the cracks.

Result 3: “support for strategy” through automatic visualisation of the data that matters to the business

Monthly revenue by customer, which had been difficult to see, is now visible, and leadership decisions have sped up.
Revenue trends and repeat rates can be analysed accurately, making data-driven decisions easier.
It is used for concrete strategy planning, such as “which customers to focus on next” and “which product categories are growing fastest”.

Many in the sales team say things like “opening HubSpot shows me the status of my accounts straight away” and “nothing slips in conversations or follow-ups any more”, and the company seems to be feeling a real effect in both efficiency and results.

A comment from Kurasu LLC

Kurasu LLC shared the following comment on the results.

“Information used to be scattered all over the place, and it was hard work to get an accurate picture of revenue and of how customers were behaving.
Since adopting HubSpot, the whole flow from enquiry to revenue is visible, and everyone on the team can work from the same information.

Having monthly revenue by customer turned into reports automatically is especially useful. NowVillage’s support was genuinely thorough, and because they made proposals only after fully understanding what we wanted, we could go ahead with the implementation with confidence.”

The HubSpot certified partner behind the implementation: NowVillage Inc.

Kurasu’s case is one of leaving cumbersome manual work behind and evolving into a business run on data.

More than the support we provided, this was made possible by Kurasu’s strong determination to “build a better system” and by the team’s active commitment to using it.

As a HubSpot Platinum Partner, NowVillage Inc. works with trust, expertise and, above all, care as its watchwords, aiming to understand each client’s business model in depth and to support the adoption and embedding of “a HubSpot that is genuinely used on the ground and delivers results”.

“We want to fix data management that has become cumbersome”
“We want the data we need for business decisions turned into reports”

If this sounds like you, please feel free to get in touch.

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