Situation

Leadership at a mid-market building products manufacturer was responsible for providing both the internal sales group and distribution partners with a constant flow of sales ready leads.

The team was supported by a Marketing Director, Marketing Assistant and Salesforce Administrator. The company worked with several outside media agencies to generate 10,000 plus inbound leads a month. Over time their multi-million dollar marketing budget had granted an in-house database of 500,000 plus targets across the United States.

The marketing team and agency were great at promoting the brand, producing great creative and educational content. The Salesforce Admin had no experience with Account Engagement (Pardot) and the marketing team was experienced in content production but had limited expertise in lead nurturing in the system.

The Agencies were managing content and forms on the Company’s website and on third party sites. Their accountability stopped once the lead was generated.

Challenge

Leadership, Marketing and the Salesforce Administrator had multiple challenges and goals.

• The team had implemented Account Engagement (Pardot) with no prior experience leading to over design and/or missing solution and as a result the systems failed at volume and scale   
• There were multiple sync errors
• Leads were being lost or routed to the wrong reps/distributors, so they were being ignored and abandoned.
• The company could see what channels were producing the most leads but had limited visibility into what marketing channels and campaigns were producing the highest quality leads and/or which leads were transacting. 
• The company wanted to leverage account engagement for ongoing market and buyer education with lead nurturing campaigns to maximize their existing database of 500,000 existing leads. 

Solution

Leadership of a mid-market building products’ manufacturer was responsible for providing the General Managers of each product group with a constant flow of sales ready leads. The General Managers then shared these leads with 24 plus in-house reps and 100s of distribution partners with contractually well-defined relationships and territories across the United States and Canada.

Quarter 1

Month One – Discovery, Audit, Scope, Budget, Timeline and Final Strategy

The engagement started with senior leaders, the Salesforce Administrator and Marketing Director to understand:

• Who is using the system?
• How are they using it?
• Lead Distribution Requirements
• Marketing Teams Background and Area of Expertise
• Existing Inbound Campaigns
• Segmentation requirements and what criteria defined a good lead

Gabriel Sales then conducted a system audit with particular attention to:

• Alerts and Notifications
• Sync Errors
• Automations 
• Grading and Scoring

Gabriel Sale then provided a scoping document with goals outlined and what was required to technically achieve those goals with:

• Process Gaps
• Technical Gaps
• Skills Gaps (Training Required)
• Recommendations
• Prioritized Road Map
• Preliminary Budget

After reviewing this document with the Company, Gabriel Sales provided a one-year plan with timelines and final budget. Company opted for staffing a blended team at a monthly recurring fee to implement and execute the plan (including training of his existing staff).

The plan was organized into four “Quarterly Sprints” with the goal of providing their team with optimized Account Engagement tools and processes deployed as well as have the team trained within the first year.

Month Two – Systems Clean Up and Features Streamlined

• Gabriel Sales quickly corrected issues related to the initial implementation, so Salesforce and Account Engagement synch errors stopped.
• Turned on and turned off features.
• Pre-subscribed additional custom fields to align systems and company and turned-on automated data enhancement with a third party (Zoom Info) to support both sales rep visibility and make lead scoring and lead grading possible.
• Implemented simpler Form and Form Handler best practices to streamline the flow and distribution of leads

Month 3 – Key System Process Optimizations and Training Started

• Implemented new lead scoring and lead grading criteria.
• Integrated ZoomInfo to augment and append data to improve grading.
• Trained existing team in best practices that were implemented.

Quarter 2

New workflows, campaigns and processes are implemented and custom training of Company’s team kicked off:

• Optimized triggered email and alerts.
• Launched initial drip/lead nurturing campaigns to support one of the product line divisions. Content and strategy supplied by the company’s marketing team.
• Marketing team went through Gabriel Sales quick start online training program (hosted on Udemy)

Quarter 3

Systems and campaigns are scaled with initial reporting for leadership:

• Gabriel Sales worked with existing marketing team to launch three additional product division campaigns and conducted customized best practice training in their systems.
• Gabriel Sales worked with leadership of the company to define their reporting and dashboard needs.

Quarter 4

Final transition takes place:

• Gabriel Sales builds the final required custom dashboard and reporting
• Gabriel Sales moved into a support role answering questions for existing marketing team as they took over the day-to-day management of the systems and campaigns

Ongoing

For a modest and affordable monthly fee Gabriel Sales continues to monitor Data Governance on a monthly basis and functions as a support desk for marketing team when any best practices or technical issues arise in their management of the ongoing campaigns.

Results

In the first three quarters, Gabriel Sales delivered the following measurable outcomes for this building materials manufacturer’s Salesforce and Account Engagement (Pardot) implementation:

Upon completing the engagement, the client’s Marketing Director, Marketing Assistant, and Salesforce Administrator were independently managing 16 Account Engagement best practices — running lead scoring and grading models, managing Engagement Studio nurturing workflows, building and deploying campaigns, and operating full campaign attribution and reporting without ongoing Gabriel Sales support.

The 16 capabilities successfully trained and transitioned to the internal team included: building emails and templates, deploying one-time email campaigns, managing Engagement Studio lead nurturing workflows, maintaining dynamic lists, configuring triggered automations and automation rules, setting up custom redirects and page actions, managing form submissions and form handlers, building landing pages and layout templates, maintaining custom lead views and prioritized lead lists, running lead scoring and grading, and managing campaign tracking, reporting, and attribution.