Summary

Accounting Services Lead Nurturing Case Study – In this accounting services lead nurturing case steady we will explain how a well-established and successful  accounting services company used targeting marketing and lead nurturing of 6000 targeted buyers to double sales three years in a row.

Company Background

PCO Bookkeepers is privately held, 20-year-old accounting services firm founded by Dan Gordon. PCO Bookkeepers’ team of expert bookkeepers and accountants cater to the pest management and lawn care industry. PCO Bookkeepers offers internal and external accounting, tax planning and bookkeeping services. The company sells these services as a monthly retainer.  The goal of their services to help businesses grow and to help business owners accumulate and preserve wealth.

Launched as a complimentary business in 2012 ,PCO M&A Specialists provides merger & acquisition experts that work day-in and day-out with Pest Control Business owners selling their company.

Situation

PCO Bookkeepers was already a well-established and successful company servicing over 200 clients nationwide. Founder Dan Gordon is an established thought leader – presenting at dozens of conferences a year, writing a monthly column for a trade magazine and participating in sporadic podcasts. PCO had also experimented with digital marketing for over three years by staffing a part time writer producing two articles a month with the goal of winning at SEO. PCO also staffed a half time Marketing Director managing the website, PPC campaigns, Social Media campaigns and executing sporadic email campaigns through MailChimp to generate leads. The company staffed a full time Sales Development Rep (SDR) responsible for following up with these leads and cold calling. The goal of the SDR was to set sales calls for Dan and other managers on his staff to generate proposals and close ongoing monthly services ranging between $12,000 to $40,000 in annual recurring revenue.

Already accomplished:

• Existing and stable client base
• Marketing experience
• Understanding of buyer’s journey

The Challenge

After three years of flat year over year sales growth, Dan Gordon was frustrated. He was investing in content and felt he was doing all the right things but not seeing results. The company was also struggling to get the marketing tech right. PCO Bookkeepers wanted to grow its core accounting and bookkeeping services. Dan also wanted to put more energy behind a stagnant M&A services business which generates substantially more revenue per deal. PCO was using an entry level CRM, an entry level email platform, was active on social media and had a starter database of about 10,000 targeted leads.

The Solution

Month 1

During the first month of the initial launch, Digital Demand Center’s parent company Gabriel Sales conducted an audit of PCO Bookkeepers existing online content and Dan Gordon’s tradeshow presentations, and quicky crafted a go-to-market strategy leveraging and maximizing existing content that included a:

• New initial awareness campaign
• Lead nurturing campaign
• Sales automation and conversion campaign
• Campaign introducing M&A services campaign

The go-to-market campaign strategy also included the introduction of video into the content marketing mix and the recommendation for a more consistent podcast.

Digital Demand Center’s full tech stack was implemented, and Gabriel Sales migrated the existing CRM into Salesforce including the integration of the marketing automation software.

Gabriel Sales also cleaned, augmented and honed the database to a total of 6,000 targets that were the ideal fit for the company.

Month 2 and 3

In month 2 and 3 DDCs turnkey ongoing managed services team kicked off a six-part awareness campaign and then added the ongoing lead nurturing and sales conversion campaigns.  Gabriel Sales ran a content production workshop to create 12 videos to support the campaigns.

Month 4 and Ongoing

In month 4 Digital Demand Center moved into steady state. And during the first year Digital Demand Center drove significant engagement with PCO Bookkeeper’s very focused ideal target market.

Results

Sales Funnel Growth

Digital Demand Center™ and PCO’s commitment to digital first buyer education produced a late stage funnel of well-educated sales ready buyers that predictably scaled over time.

• Within six-month DDC was producing 120 marketing qualified lead a month with 6 -8 Sales Ready Leads/Month and an additional 2 to 4 well educated inbound leads a month
• By the end of year one DDC was producing 240 marketing qualified leads a month, 12-14 Sales Ready Leads/Month and 3 to 4 well educated inbound leads a month
• Within 18 months DDC was producing 300 marketing qualified leads a month, 14-18 Sales Ready Leads and 5-8 well educated inbound leads a month.

Lower Cost of Sales

As a result over the first year PCO Bookkeepers was able to significantly lower its monthly fixed cost of sales.

• Within 6 months PCO was able to: move to a part time Sales Development Rep making 50-100 follow up attempts to scored leads a month. In addition, the company was able to stop paid media campaigns and stop funding a part time marketing director.
• By the end of the first year PCO was able to get rid of the Sales Development Rep completely and hire a full time with industry expertise with their own rolodex and excited by a full sales funnel.

In addition, with and engine in place supporting the core business Dan was able to commit to the podcast and focus more energy on the M&A Services business.

Sales Growth

• Year One – PCO Bookkeepers increased its previous year’s sales by 100%
• Year Two – PCO Bookkeepers increased its previous year’s sales growth by 100%
• Year Three – PCO sustained the same year over year growth experienced in year two
• Over the course of those three years PCO Bookkeepers double their overall market share from 5% of the total addressable market to 10% of the addressable market for the accounting and bookkeeping services
• Simultaneously also doubled the volume and tripled the revenue of the M&A Services business

Summary

In this mobile app software demand generation case study you will learn how privately held software company implemented Digital Demand Center to target 6,000 companies and 18,000 decision makers to develop predictable sales funnel to support two senior closers. 

Company Background

KipTraq is a mobile data collection platform that helps businesses collect data on their mobile devices and report on that data via the cloud. KipTraq is flexible enough to give users full control on what data their employees capture, and their best-in-class reporting/BI tools help create meaningful insight based on that data. Any information usually captured with pen and paper or Excel can be done faster and with more accountability by using KipTraq.

KipTraq makes it easy for end users to capture data anywhere using mobile phones and tablets. The company focuses primarily on serving mid-sized and enterprise Food Growers and Food Manufacturers and is currently testing solutions in other industries requiring in-the-field audits and safety inspections.

Situation

KipTraq is a privately held company with a software solution engineered and initially coded by its sole founder, Bryan Banks. Bryan launched the company with one core customer representing the majority of KipTraq’s revenue.  KipTraq then hired two outside Sales Reps to leverage their existing relationships for additional sales. 

Initially these reps were successful. Eventually they exhausted their existing networks and sales production slowed.

The company had no CRM, a single page website, no content and was not running any campaigns. They had access to a database of 6,000 ideal targets in both food manufacturing and food production in specific geographies across the United States.

Already Accomplished:

• Foundational Customer
• Focused Target Market
• Outside Sales Reps

Challenge

Bryan wanted to continue to grow the company organically without taking outside investment. To do this, Bryan needed to affordably and systematically develop a sales funnel to support his sales team. Additionally, the outside sales contractors provided limited visibility into their sales pipeline.

Bryan is a thought leader, technologist and inventor with no sales and marketing operations expertise. Bryan was bandwidth constrained as he was managing the development team, the client servicing team and product enhancements. He needed to scale these to service new business while supporting the sales team.

The Solution

KipTraq hired Gabriel Sales to launch Digital Demand Center™.

First Gabriel Sales (GS) began crafting a strategy to introduce a core audience of food growers and manufacturers to the value of KipTraq. GS conducted a deep dive into KipTraq’s differentiators and mapped these to the needs of the target Buyer Personas. Next, Gabriel Sales delivered a go-to-market strategy that included messaging, a content plan and an awareness campaign strategy, a PPC plan, lead nurturing campaign strategy and sales automation campaign strategy. 

This was followed by a three-day onsite content production workshop to create the necessary content to launch the engine including, videos, articles, case studies, use cases and online video demos. Gabriel Sales then managed a complete overhaul of the website and brand, expanding it from one page to dozens for more substantial buyer education.

Next, Gabriel Sales implemented a full Digital Demand Center™ technology stack for measured, systematic and scalable execution. This marketing tech stack was then integrated with three new Salesforce seats to accurately measure the progress of leads through the sales funnel.

Finally, both Digital Demand Center™ and Pay Per Click campaigns were  launched. The initial four months were focused on establishing KipTraq as a brand. Then DDC™ moved into steady state with ongoing lead nurturing and sales automation campaigns. 

With the foundation established for a scalable demand generation, KipTraq was able to score leads for follow up, conversion and closing by the existing sales team. In addition, DDC was also able to provide KipTraq with data and insights to optimize messaging and ad budgets in order to maximize their investment. Combined, all these efforts produced a predictable and sustainable sales funnel. 

The Results

With DDC managing both outbound and inbound lead generation programs, KipTraq’s sales reps became more productive. Over the first three years KipTraq was able to:

• Establish KipTraq as leading brand in the vertical
• Close over 30 new deals
• Scale their avg. deal size
• Reduce KipTraq’s risk and dissipate the company’s revenue dependence on their largest customer
• Grow revenue by over 410%

.

Additional Strategic Benefits

Bryan was able to focus on scaling operations. He was able to hire, train and staff a lead engineer, customer service team and a client service team. He was also able to develop and launch several turnkey solutions into the market.

With the ability to target specific markets, DDC is being leveraged build brand awareness and nurture leads in several new verticals.

Summary

Demand Generation Case Study for HR Benefits Company – Company needed to grow its corporate customer account base by 25% and simultaneously reduce the cost of developing opportunities and closing business.   Their internal team of eight Sales Development Reps were no longer producing enough real sales opportunities to support growth.

In this demand generation case study for a HR Benefits Company you will learn how a demand generation and lead nurturing solution helped double sales and cut cost of sales by 50% in under a year.

Company Background

Collective Goods brings world-class retail experiences with incredible prices to corporate workplaces. These retail events act as an employee benefit that simultaneously allows organizations to contribute to causes they care about. Collective Goods (originally Books Are Fun) is a second-generation family-owned business. Collective Goods runs these pop-up retail events for over 55K schools and 10K corporations annually.

Challenge

Collective Goods wanted to target HR Directors and Benefits Managers with over 200 employees. Generating the deals required an average of 3 to 5 calls to convert into a proposal. Once closed an average deal resulted in $8,000 to $20,000 of annul recurring revenue.

Collective Goods had the equivalent 8 full time Sales Development Reps supporting an independent national rep force with more than 200 salespeople. Sale Development Reps were responsible for generating leads through cold calling efforts and sporadic one-time email campaigns. SDRs were then responsible for a series of calls to educate and qualify the lead before they passed to National Rep to close.

Company needed to grow its corporate customer account base by 25% and simultaneously reduce the cost of developing opportunities and closing business.

Company had a homegrown CRM, a target list of 18,000 companies with names, phone numbers but limited email addresses and no marketing automation tech.

The Solution

Within the first month Digital Demand Center’s parent company Gabriel Sales crafted a go-to-market strategy. Gabriel Sales ran a three-day video production workshop to create lead gen, lead nurturing and sales automation video content. Collective Goods digital marketers provided additional articles and website modifications.

Within the first month Gabriel Sales also addressed gaps in Collective Goods database and augmented that database with an additional 12,000 targets. Gabriel Sales implemented the full Digital Demand Center tech stack and stood up eight Salesforce seats for the Sales Development Reps.

Digital Demand Center’s full tech stack was launched and integrated into Salesforce. DDCs turnkey ongoing managed services team executed a three-part awareness campaign to the entire database over the first eight weeks transitioning into lead nurturing campaign with seven to nine unique offers a quarter.

Within three months Collective Goods Sales Development Reps were receiving a steady flow of predictively scored sales leads.

The Results

Within six months Digital Demand Center™ was producing a sustained flow of:

• 120 scored Sales Ready Leads a Month
• 2x more Sales Appointments (46 a Month)
• Produced 19 New Deals/Accounts Per Month
• Hit their 25% new corporate accounts annual growth targets

In addition, because lead nurturing produced well educated buyers (the average scored lead consumed 4-9 pieces of content and several videos) the company was able to reduce the time an investment required to produce qualified leads and deals The sales team was able to:

• Reduce the calls to conversion from 3 calls to 1 call
• Increase closing rate from 10% to 50%
• SDRs were able to close 50% of deals without needing National Rep
• Company was able to reduce Sales Development Rep headcount from 8 to 4 to reduce overall Cost of Sale Percentage by 40%

.

Additional Strategic Benefits

With a CRM and Digital Demand Center™ reporting and dashboards in place Collective Goods Chief Sales Officers and VPs of Sales had ability to target gaps in the market and the ability to focus on those markets for additional growth.

Newly hired Marketing Director was able to leverage dashboards to refine and hone messages.

Company was able to leverage a portion of SDR headcount savings to create additional content and hire an in-house videographer.

Additional Strategic Benefits

With a CRM and Digital Demand Center™ reporting and dashboards in place Collective Goods Chief Sales Officers and VPs of Sales had ability to target gaps in the market and the ability to focus on those markets for additional growth.

Newly hired Marketing Director was able to leverage dashboards to refine and hone messages.

Company was able to leverage a portion of SDR headcount savings to create additional content and hire an in-house videographer.

This concludes this demand generation case study HR Benefits Company.  We invite you to view additional case studies or contact us for your initial free consultation.

Summary

In this B2B hardware manufacturer lead nurturing case study you will learn how an industry leading diagnostic tools manufacturer used lead nurturing to stay top of mind with new and existing buyers.

Company Background

The Energy Conservatory (TEC) manufactures MINNEAPOLIS brand precision diagnostic equipment and develops processes used to solve comfort, energy use, durability and air quality problems in buildings. TEC’s knowledge of building physics, reputation for innovative design, and excellent technical support have made them the leading manufacturer of performance testing tools for the building science industry.

Founded in 1980 at the Minnesota Energy Agency, their blower door was a pioneer in the energy conservation sector. Today, their blower door continues to set the standard in the industry. Since then, the company has launched multiple diagnostic tools for the industry.

Situation

TEC is the industry leader with the most established brand. 95% of the company’s sales were coming from distributors, but they were getting ready to launch an internal store to offer products directly.

Buying their solution was not an “if” but “when” decision due to state and federal regulations. Inbound leads were not an issue for the company because of the longevity of the brand, their presence at tradeshows, in trade publications and their distribution partners. When a purchase decision was ready to be made TEC was almost always in the running.

Company had built a database of 20K past and existing customers (only 35% had full contact info including email addresses) that was used very sporadically for one off announcements and occasional newsletters.

TEC had a great deal already accomplished including:

• A well established brand
• A required product
• An existing customer base

The Challenge

TEC’s remaining founder was in the process of exiting the company and empowering a new leadership team and new owners. In addition, TEC’s long time head of sales and marketing was preparing to retire. There was also new competitor moving into the market with a focus on digital marketing, and as result TEC’s external sales partners and distributors were asking for additional digital education support.

TEC was interested in Digital Demand Center to ensure:

• TEC remained top of mind with their existing and past customers
• Make it easier for new buyers to understand what product was the best fit to meet their needs
• Ongoing education to remain thought leaders in the market to support their partners and distributors
• The leadership transition did not reduce confidence in the organization/brand

The Solution

Month 1

During the first month, Digital Demand Center’s parent company Gabriel Sales crafted a digital first buyer education strategy that included an awareness campaign to remind the market why it was such a great solution, a lead nurturing campaign, an automated sales education campaign and framed an ongoing newsletter strategy.

Month 2

Gabriel Sales ran a three-day onsite video content production workshop at the company’s headquarters to create the initial content required for the campaigns. Digital Demand Center’s full tech stack was launched and integrated with multiple Salesforce seats. A video channel was launched, and all tech integrations were completed. Data appends and validation was run on their 20,000 records.

Month 3-4

A six-part awareness campaign was kicked off to 12,500 newly cleaned and validated targets. Content production was completed. Ongoing monthly newsletter was launched during month 4.

Month 5

Digital Demand Center™ kicked off lead nurturing and sales automation campaigns then entered steady state with ongoing managed services.

Results

Over time TEC’s mailable database of customers and potential buyers grew from 12K to 20K leads, almost doubling the buyers they can target with digital first education.

Digital Demand Center™ continues ongoing top of mind awareness, customer education, and pre-sales automation communication across TEC’s existing customer base and inbound lead nurturing database.

TEC is able to stay top of mind and drive ongoing engagement with over 75%, of their entire database quarterly basis, with most customers engaging with multiple pieces of digital first education on a consistent basis.​

.

Additional Strategic Benefits

The new ownership and leadership team was able to take over the business and focus on higher priority activities including launching an eCommerce platform, deepening relationships with existing channels and growing their distribution partner network.

TEC built an in-house content production team to focus on digital education for buyers, including video and multi-media production. In addition, TEC built a large on-demand library of case studies, use cases and testimonials to provide social proof to potential buyers.

This wraps up this B2B hardware manufacturer lead nurturing case study. Please visit additional customer success stories or contact us for your a free gap audit to learn more.