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.

Situation

The five-person marketing team was very skilled in brand awareness, creative, strategy, tradeshow & event support, product marketing and inbound marketing. After years of successful event marketing, media and PPC marketing, they had captured and created an opt in database of close to 70% of the existing market.

They made the strategic decision to maximize the value of their existing database and committed to lead nurturing and ongoing buyer and customer education. Simultaneously, they were tasked with developing leads by increasing content education to move them deeper into the sales funnel.

Challenge

No one on the marketing team had frontline sales experience or marketing automation expertise. The team knew how to create great content and great events but had no familiarity with Salesforce, Sales Operations or Marketing Automation Platforms. They were tasked with maximizing the value of their database and their investment in marketing automation tech. They were also tasked to create prequalified sales ready leads to support their Global Sales Team as well as measuring their campaigns, content and efforts.

Solution

After leveraging Gabriel Sales to optimize their Account Engagement (Pardot) Implementation and Salesforce Integration, the Company moved to an ongoing Monthly Marketing Automation and Salesforce Operations Managed Services engagement. Gabriel Sales staffed a blended team of a marketing automation manager, database administrator, email marketing expert, Senior Salesforce Administrator & Pardot Specialist and account manager.

The Senior Salesforce Admin, Pardot Specialist and Account Manager worked with the marketing team turn their nurturing goals, visions and strategies into reality helping the team to:

• Prioritize a systematic roll out of campaigns
• Optimize technologies
• Integrate additional technologies into Salesforce and Pardot
• Seamless hand-off of leads from marketing to Global Sales team
• Set up systems for long-term measurement and reporting

Simultaneously, Gabriel Sales took on the day-to-day management executing a wide variety of campaigns including:

Trade show pre and post support:

• Account-based Marketing Programs to Subsets of the Database
• Landing Pages for Co-Branded Trade Publication Campaigns
• General Nurturing Campaigns
• Event Based Campaigns (Webinars)

Day to Day Tasks Included:

• Email Templates
• Landing Page Builds
• Dynamic Content Builds
• Form Builds
• Campaign Workflows
• Lead Tracking
• Automations and Completion Actions for Lead Assignments
• Lead Scoring
• UTM Tracking and Profiling
• Testing and QA
• Data Management and Cleanliness

In Addition, Gabriel Sales Continued to Implement Best Practices and Expand Reporting Capabilities in Quarterly Sprints as More Data Became Available

• KPIs
• Data Governance
• SOPs and How-To Guides
• Dashboards
• Quarterly Train the Trainer so tools could be rolled out to Senior Marketers and Sales Teams

Results

Year One Results

Company’s existing marketing team was able to focus on strategy, core competencies and content generation.

Gabriel Sales Launched a Lead Nurturing Sales Ready Lead Process

Company and Gabriel Sales collaborated to introduce systematic content marketing and Sales Ready Lead workflows. This resulted in a 10x increase in New Leads, the introduction of pre-qualified Sales Ready Leads for a seamless hand off from marketing to sales, resulting in 4X the lead conversions in 70% less time.

Scaled Sustainable Marketing Capacity

Gabriel Sales blended team also created the infrastructure, defined, documented and executed multiple day to day tasks leveraging company’s existing technology stack. This maximized their investment in technology, database and content creation. This also created a clear path to ongoing, affordable and sustained sales funnel and pipeline development.

Developed Numerous Measure and Insight Capabilities

Gabriel Sales was also able to provide dashboards, reporting and quarterly reviews to measure:

• Content attribution
• Marketing attribution
• Message measurement
• Specific campaign ratios
• Sales team activity dashboards
• Form productivity and lead source attribution
• Time to conversions

This allowed the marketing team to make smarter decisions which optimized campaigns and empowered sales teams.

Year Two

After the marketing team’s and Gabriel Sales initial success, the decision was made by CMO and Chief Sales Officer to roll out the program across additional divisions.

Gabriel Sales crafted and documented initial SOPs, Workflows and Best Practices and is currently in the process of scaling to 3 additional Divisions within the company.

Situation

The General Manager and Managing Partner of a fast-growing specialized Engineering firm selling complex consulting and engineering deals needed to move his team of 2 sales reps and 30 plus senior engineers and account managers off spreadsheets and into Salesforce.

Challenge

The company had grown organically through their engineers’ Rolodexes. They were selling very specialized solutions to a finite audience of 6000 engineers across the US and sales were being managed from spreadsheets and home-grown project management software.

The GM and Managing Partner needed to implement Salesforce to be able to manage the sales process, support the sales effort and get visibility into the sales funnel to accurately forecast. This would help them ensure their capacity to close business, recruit more talent for growth and forecast revenue.

Solution

Company hired Gabriel Sales to implement Salesforce to meet their specialized needs and then train and transition their staff for ongoing use and management. Gabriel Sales executed their Quick Start + Transition Sales Implementation Solution.

Month 1

Gabriel Sales met with the GM, Managing Partner, Sales Reps and several representative engineers to understand:

• Who is using the system?
• How are they using the system?
• Success Criteria?
• Sales Process and Stages

Gabriel Sales also conducted an audit of multiple databases and home-grown project management software.

Month 2

After plan was approved GS kicked off the technical implementation including:

Technical Set-Up

• Custom Fields
• Lead Sources
• Sales Stage Mirroring
• Sales Tasks
• Custom Page Layouts
• Enhanced Components/Plug Ins
• Third Party Email Systems
• Lead Assignment Rules
• Email Systems Integrations
• View and Access Permissions

Custom Views

• Lead Views
• Contact Views
• Opportunity Views

Database Import

Gabriel Sale then normalized the existing database and loaded into the system.

Month 3

Training

Gabriel Sales trained a core team in the use of the system and worked with the GM to train the trainer. This included:

How to Use to Manage Sales

• How to navigate and access Lead Lists
• How to use Views
• How to Complete Tasks and Log Activity
• How to leverage Email System
• How to track progress and view individual reports

How to Access Basic Reports

• Lead Reports
• Lead Conversion Reports
• Activity Reports
• Opportunity Reports

Results

Sales Team and Engineers started using after 3 months.

After the team used for a quarter and with live data now flowing through the system, GM and Managing Partner circled back for some minor optimizations for increased visibility and insights including:

• Sales Activity Dashboards
• Forecasting Dashboards
• Conversion Dashboards
• Automated Task Triggers and Reminders