Situation

Company had a moderately well-established brand as one of several solutions to the problem they solved for their customer. The sale was not an “if” but “when” and “how” solution, as it was eventually a requirement to remain compliant within the industry.

Historically the company had used cold calling, events and tradeshows to generate business. As a result, they had developed a database of roughly 50K targets representing 60% of the marketing.

During the pandemic their strategy shifted to webinars, industry newsletters, educational articles and a podcast. Company needed to move from Mailchimp and a homegrown CRM to Salesforce and Pardot

They were able to do this quickly because:

• The CEO and COO were industry thought leaders skilled in both training and public speaking
• They had a part time event coordinator and two full time content creators.

The company had four full time sales reps that were historically both inside/outside in geographic territories.

The CEO had experience in managing the company but had not previously overseen a sales team or held a day-to-day sales position before founding the company.

Company was using Account Engagement (Pardot) to send one-off emails with specific offers.

Challenge

The company had tried to implement both Salesforce and Account Engagement on their own. They had sound strategic content marketing instincts, great content creators and inbound experts (but PPC was capped at the results it was producing).

The company lacked outbound marketing and senior sales executive and senior sales marketing expertise. As a result they were struggling with implementing best practices to get the most from their CRM, Automation Technologies and their substantial library of existing and ongoing content creation.

• The company needed to provide their sales team with a sustained flow of leads.
• The CEO needed the ability to manage that team
• The company needed visibility into the effectiveness of their marketing efforts and their sales team
• CEO needed the ability to forecast growth to strategically set growth targets and quotas

Solution

Gabriel Sales was hired to optimize Pardot and Salesforce to ensure that leads were being managed effectively and to create workflows to leverage the company’s content to nurture the database of 50K leads.

Month 1

Gabriel Sales conducted an initial Audit. This allowed Gabriel Sales to:

1. Confirm the basic system implementation was done correctly and GS was able to start to optimize the systems with about 10 hours of additional work so it was campaign ready and ready to be leveraged more effectively by sales.
2. Craft a Road Map to leverage their existing system to nurture and score leads
3. Establish goal for the CRM to:
   • Prioritize leads for sale reps
   • Effectively track sales reps daily activities
   • Increase visibility and ability to forecast the
4. Define the campaign insights required from the marketing automation platform
5. Segmentation of database
6. Establish sales reps workflows in Salesforce
7. Make long term content and campaign workflows
8. Define inbound lead form needs

Month 2

Gabriel Sales addressed the immediate optimization priorities to ensure data, workflows and forms were doing what they needed to do.

Month 3

Gabriel Sales systematically took over the day to day management executing a wide variety of functions with best practices. This allowed company to execute, optimize and increase volume systematically — eventually scaling to:

Marketing Operations:

• Weekly newsletter
• Nurturing Campaigns
• Content Management
• Podcast Management
• Webinar Management
• Database Management
• Segmentation Management
• Campaign Attribution
• Social Posting
• Campaign Specific Reporting

Sales Operations Management:

• List Views
• Lead Scoring Prioritization
• Daily Activity Reporting
• Forecasting and Dashboards
• User Management

Reporting and Analysis:

• Google Analytics
• Attribution
• Social Follower Tracking
• Campaign Attribution

Results

Tactical Results

Gabriel Sales was able to create a technical system, marketing operations and lead transition process that allowed the company to maximize their investment in content marketing, their technology (including additional third-party integrations), database and events.

The streamlined process, increased visibility for sales management, consistent content marketing to stay top of mind with the buyers and lead scoring allowed the company to double their monthly flow of sales ready leads and simultaneously cut their sales team from 4 sales reps to 2 senior sales reps producing the following results.