Born in 2021, Worklife is based in Paris, France. Their team consists of over a hundred professionals from different parts of the world. The company has 50+ enterprise clients that have over 100k employees covered so far. 

Oh, and the company uses Outfunnel to connect its sales and marketing workflows. 

The sales and marketing challenges Worklife faced

We talked to Sergio Bellon, co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Worklife, to learn more about Worklife’s sales and marketing strategy, and the challenges the team has faced. 

Bellon shared that they receive a significant share of leads thanks to inbound marketing and that it takes six months on average to reach the right people within a company.

With small steps, we get in touch with different people from different departments, and this takes around six months. We nurture leads with webinars and other activities.

Sergio Bellon – Co-founder & CGO, Worklife

As the Worklife team was offering webinars and physical activities for the leads, lead nurturing via email marketing was an important part of their sales and marketing strategy.  Bellon told us that one of the challenges they faced was creating the right content that would convert. 

The company also needed to implement an effective email marketing strategy and to improve email deliverability. 

Another challenge that appeared over time was the need to better align sales and marketing. Before starting to use Outfunnel, it was hard to get an indication of whether any new leads were ready to be contacted or if it was too early to approach them. They needed to optimize their sales efforts in a way that would make them focus on the most sales-ready leads and save time and energy. 

“We’ve managed to scale our sales and marketing strategy around Pipedrive and Outfunnel.”

First, the company chose Pipedrive to have all the leads coming from different activities and to be able to manage all the leads and related workflows. 

In our sales and marketing efforts, we did not want to use a complex CRM system – we wanted to be agile and fast. That’s why we chose Pipedrive where we are able to see all the contacts, engagement, and conversations in one place. 

Over time, we needed a complementary tool to use with Pipedrive in order to implement and optimize our marketing strategy as well. We picked Outfunnel as that tool.

Bellon says they have tried many marketing tools with a variety of different features.

At the end of the day, they only needed to use only some of those features and decided that they needed a much simpler and more focused tool in Pipedrive’s ecosystem. 

Their goal was to find a tool that would both help them with various automations and work well with their main CRM—Pipedrive.

There are a few tools in the marketing automation sector as simple as Outfunnel that also has a lead scoring software feature in addition to web tracking and email marketing. 

We chose Outfunnel for its simplicity and feature set. We’re using all the features from lead scoring to email marketing.

Bellon says, once they had good content and the emails delivered – the next challenge was how the team would leverage engagement and track all these activities. 

That’s when the company started using Outfunnel’s lead scoring and web tracking features as well. 

Web tracking and lead scoring help to identify sales-ready leads

The team receives several MQLs (marketing-qualified leads, that is) a day through inbound marketing. These leads visit the Worklife website and fill in the forms.

Every time a lead fills in their forms – be that a white paper download or demo call – Outfunnel creates an activity in Pipedrive and assigns scores to some of these activities using Outfunnel’s lead scoring and web tracking features. 

In that sense, Pipedrive and Outfunnel work like a power couple for Worklife in terms of connecting and tracking their sales and marketing efforts.

Want Outfunnel to help you boost your sales strategy?

It feels great to help a young and successful company leverage its sales and lead generation strategy with a well-performing product! 

We want to help you too. 

Sign up for a free trial today, and you can:

• use web and email engagement to highlight qualified leads
• automatically calculate lead scores based on engagement
• record lead scores and all marketing engagements in the CRM so the sales team can have full context

The post How Outfunnel Helps Worklife Scale Their Sales Strategy appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

We recently chatted with Mollie Monett, Brand and Design Lead at AutoLeadStar, about how they go about nurturing their leads.

But first, some context.

What is AutoLeadStar?

AutoLeadStar is a marketing automation platform for car dealerships. They have a laser-sharp focus on helping car dealers easily create and run ads, capture and convert leads as well as gain insights into campaign performance.

And they’re certainly doing something right, as their glowing reviews show:

AutoLeadStar’s offering is a no-brainer for car dealers looking to move their lead generation online. Shoppers who used to visit 5-7 dealerships before purchasing a car now only visit one.  Online research and reputation has never been more important.

The challenge: integrating marketing with the CRM tool

Customer relationship management is the backbone of every B2B business. For AutoLeadStar, Pipedrive is the system that forms this backbone.

So, their story starts with a simple goal: to keep their marketing communications in sync with Pipedrive.

Mollie: “Before implementing Outfunnel, we looked at different marketing tools that could be integrated with our CRM: Mailchimp, Intercom, Autopilot, HubSpot, Drip, Drift… And found no easy way to integrate most of these tools with Pipedrive in a useful way. 

We then came across Outfunnel and discovered its deep integration with Pipedrive. So, we decided to set up our lead nurturing sequences with Outfunnel, while keeping our outbound email marketing campaigns in Mailchimp and managing our client communications with Intercom.”

How AutoLeadStar nurtures leads in their sales process

Demo calls are a key part of AutoLeadStar’s sales process. And all the leads that go through the demo process get enrolled in one of two lead nurturing drip campaigns, depending if they purchase AutoLeadStar’s solution or not.

Mollie: “Everyone who gets a demo will receive lead nurture emails. We’re looking to stay top of mind and increase awareness, whether or not they follow through as a sale. With the drip campaigns, we try to educate dealers of our data-driven solutions and the power of automation instead of ‘selling’ to them.“

The importance of connecting sales and marketing data automatically

Notably, the enrollment of leads in nurture campaigns happens automatically, thanks to how Outfunnel integrates with Pipedrive.

Mollie: “After the demo, our sales team moves the leads down the pipeline in Pipedrive. This data is synced with Outfunnel automatically. So, if the lead is added to a certain stage in the pipeline, they are enrolled in the appropriate automated email sequence in Outfunnel respectively.”

Tracking the impact of marketing on sales

Beyond tracking direct engagement metrics such as open and click rates, AutoLeadStar does track the revenue impact of their emails and other marketing activities.

Mollie: “We have an internal system that marks if the sale came from outbound efforts. All outbound calls are synced with our system and therefore get marketing emails too, unless the person/deal doesn’t align.

If a prospect that we have emailed later turns into a demo or better yet, a sale, we will attribute that success to marketing.”

Start streamlining your lead nurturing process with the superpowers of Outfunnel, intergated with your CRM. Set up email sequences in sync with your pipeline and monitor the impact marketing has on sales. Try it free for 14 days.

The post How AutoLeadStar Streamlined Lead Nurturing With Outfunnel appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Caddle is a mobile-first marketplace that rewards consumers for engaging with brands such as PepsiCo, P&G, and Nestle. Their model is a true win-win-win.

If someone downloads the app, they’ll receive cashback for answering surveys, watching brand or product video and uploading receipts. In return, Caddle collects data to help their clients make better decisions when it comes to marketing and sales efforts.

We asked Connor Allen, Caddle’s marketing strategist, about the company’s sales and marketing challenges as well as solving some of them with Outfunnel’s Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration.

What tools do you use to manage your sales and marketing funnel?

“At Caddle we serve both B2C and B2B markets so we certainly have quite a plethora of tools that we use. For our B2C newsletter, we use Sendgrid, and for our B2B newsletter, we use Mailchimp. As for the sales side, we use Pipedrive as our CRM.”

The problem: not knowing how marketing efforts are performing

“When it came to our B2B newsletter we were searching around to decide which platform to use. We liked several different platforms but were quite torn because we really wanted one that had an integration that would work well with Pipedrive, our sales CRM tool. Most platforms we found only had a one-way integration with Pipedrive, if that.”

How was it affecting you?

“Had we not found Outfunnel, we’d essentially be in the dark and not know how our B2B marketing efforts were holding up.

I’m sure that there could have been a different avenue that we could have taken—perhaps our development team could have coded something or we could have created a unique filtering solution in Pipedrive, but with the time and effort involved to do something like this, it would have taken away from more important duties.”

Finding a solution: what other options did you look at before you chose Outfunnel?

“We contemplated switching our CRM altogether and finding one that allowed us to do sales and marketing efforts in one platform, but our Client Success Director Amy is a whiz with Pipedrive and has really beefed it up since she joined our team. We didn’t want to start all over again with a new tool.”

Why did you pick Outfunnel?

“At first, our biggest driver in choosing Outfunnel was due to its two-way integration between Mailchimp and Pipedrive. Both our Chief Growth Officer and our Chief Technical Officer were quite impressed with what Outfunnel had to offer: keeping marketing contact lists in sync with the sales pipeline, and recording email opens, clicks in the CRM for salespeople to see.

Since starting to use the tool, the other capabilities that Outfunnel offers keep surprising us. We’ve used Outfunnel’s simple email tool to create drip campaigns for our sales team and we’ve recently included the Lead scoring Software as well.

What started off as signing up for a tool that solved one of our problems has turned into a platform that has answered problems we weren’t even entirely aware of. “

— Connor Allen, Marketing Strategist at Caddle

While Outfunnel has allowed us to keep better track of our B2B outreach campaigns, it has truly helped us save a ton of time that can be put towards other critical marketing and sales efforts.”

Any last comments or words of advice?

“At Caddle we pride ourselves in Accelerating Time to Insights. We understand that time is money and with our quick turnaround, we’re able to give our clients the insights they need.

Similarily, by being able to reach out to our clients through Outfunnel’s capabilities, we’ve been able to accelerate our time reaching out to our clients and creating the campaigns they need at the appropriate time. “

The post Connecting sales and marketing data: how Caddle does this with Outfunnel appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Last updated: June 18, 2021

One of the biggest challenges facing businesses of all shapes and sizes is effectively scaling their lead generation and lead nurturing efforts.

If marketing is hoovering up plenty of leads, that’s great news, obviously. But cracks can start to show when those leads need to be passed onto sales.

We chatted with Naomi Blair, Marketing Operations Manager at Alight Analytics, to understand what tools they use, the challenges they faced, and how they were able to bring their sales and marketing closer together with Outfunnel.

What is Alight Analytics?

Alight Analytics provides analytics solutions that are designed with marketers in mind. They work with marketers at brands and agencies who want to use data to demonstrate the value of their work and drive business growth.

Their solutions don’t require clients to be data experts. They take care of all the data architecture and cleanup so that their customers can focus on making analysis-backed decisions.

The Alight Analytics Channelmix Dashboard

Many parts make a picture

The modern sales and marketing stack is made up of many moving parts that all need to be working in harmony. Alight Analytics is no different.

They use:

• Pipedrive – Their CRM and the “single source of truth” for both the sales and marketing teams
• Gravity Forms – Captures leads on landing pages
• Zapier – Sends captured leads to Pipedrive
• Mailchimp – For sending broad email marketing campaigns
• Outfunnel – For sending sales nurture campaigns and syncing email engagements and web visits to Pipedrive
• Leadfeeder – Identifies B2B customers when they visit the Alight Analytics homepage.

The problem

What was the problem that motivated you to find the solution that Outfunnel ultimately helped to solve?

“Our initial goal was to connect leads that were entered into Pipedrive to our primary email tool Mailchimp. We didn’t want to have to upload lists to both systems or export a list from Pipedrive and import it into Mailchimp. We found Outfunnel’s Pipedrive-Mailchimp integration to be perfect for this.”

“We also wanted to be able to create automated email nurture campaigns for our inbound leads based on activities and funnel stages recorded in Pipedrive.”

“For example, if a lead downloads a whitepaper from our website, they’d immediately receive a thank-you message, followed by another message a few days later. Outfunnel’s new simple email campaigns feature was a perfect fit for this process.”

“We’ve set up dynamic filters in Pipedrive that trigger sequences in Outfunnel to nurture those leads. Once they engage with a member of our sales team, they’re automatically removed from the campaign.”

Prior to Outfunnel, we had no way to sync Mailchimp and Pipedrive contacts. This meant we couldn’t easily segment our audience. Our email blasts were all or nothing, unless we took the time to manually update the list.

Naomi Blair, Marketing Operations Manager at Alight Analytics

Coming up with a solution

What other options did you look at before you chose Outfunnel?

“We tried the manual import/export for a while, but that got old very quick. We considered Zapier as well, but the time it would take to set up all the Zaps for all the different scenarios we’d need was just too much to manage.”

“There were a couple of other tools that integrated with Pipedrive that we considered, but none were as seamless as Outfunnel. It really was purpose-built for the exact problem we were trying to solve.”

The result

What impact has Outfunnel had on Alight Analytics’ sales and marketing efforts and where might you be without it.

“The connection between Outfunnel and Pipedrive has been seamless. They are always in sync, so we can be confident that we’re sending the right messages to the right people. It’s also saving us a ton of time by removing the manual work we used to do to achieve the same result.” 

“Our sales team also loves that they can see each lead’s email and web activity. We’re even going to start building filters based on these activities that alert our sales reps when their leads are hot, which is something they’ve been requesting for a while.”

“Without Outfunnel, I probably would have recommended we switch to a different CRM by now. But because the connection is so seamless, we’re going to be able to do everything we want to do using the tools we already have.”

“Alight Analytics is a growing company, and we see automation as an essential part of our marketing strategy. It’s going to allow us to rapidly scale our outreach and, thus, our entire business. We’re glad that we found Outfunnel!”

The post How Alight Analytics Scales Lead Nurturing: Outfunnel Case Study appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Userlike offers a customer communication solution for web and mobile. Started in Germany in 2011 and initially just a live chat tool for web support, it now also supports Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram, too, with more supported platforms coming soon. 

The company serves 1500 paying customers and more than 5000 free users, ranging from one-person teams to big brands like Nivea and Daimler. I had a chat with Pascal van Opzeeland, the company’s marketing director, to find out how they’ve run sales and marketing to get to this place.

What does Userlike’s marketing funnel look like? How do you get leads? 

Our marketing is inbound based. We’ve tried many things, from searching for web shops and cold calling them outbound. But we’ve ended up focusing on our blog, on creating content for customer support and, more broadly, customer communication (including sales). We then offer white papers, downloads and demos alongside content to generate leads. 

We’ve also started doing more with video marketing which generates a good amount of leads. It’s a less competitive medium still. In the beginning of this year we also started a podcast. While we’re happy with the way it turned out, it’s kind of hard to estimate what the payout is there.

What numbers are you comfortable to share?

The blog gets 150,000 unique monthly readers, and this generates 100 direct signups, which is decent. But in general, content marketing is a long-term play, and there’s also indirect payout that is hard to measure. 

If you look at Kissmetrics only, our YouTube channel seems to perform much better, but our blog is the backbone of many things we do in marketing. It influences the videos we produce, even the product. That’s why I don’t judge the blog as “harshly” as our other channels. 

There’s also the overall SEO benefit from the blog, for instance in Germany we rank well for “live chat software” which would have been very hard to pull off without the blog. 

Any other channels you’re using?

We also run some Google ads alongside landing pages. Another important channel is review sites like G2Growd, Capterra and Alternative.to. We’re quite active in asking our customers to leave us a review on those sites. And we buy ads on Capterra, because it comes up on top for keywords like “best live chat software”.

We picked Capterra after running a process where we plugged URL’s of review websites to Moz and compared their performance for keywords most relevant for us. 

How do you qualify which signups that you generate need to be passed to sales?

We have both inbound and outbound sales functions. The inbound team goes through signups, and they look at business name and the responses to the optional qualifying question of “how big is your service team”. They reach out to the most promising ones and offer a 1-1 live demo and extra support. 

The challenge with our sales process is that it’s not always clear who’s responsible. It could be in the hands of customer support, website manager, marketing or customer experience. Ideally, we’d get all stakeholders on the call.  

The next stage after the demo is a physical meeting where specific requests and requirements are taken care of. And there’s a paperwork stage after that.

And we have recorded webinars for smaller companies. If many would like to get a demo, we do a webinar for them together. Otherwise, we direct them to a recorded session. 

What’s the cut-off point, is there a number of users that determines whether someone goes through the self-service or demo track?

The most important criteria is whether you have a dedicated service or support team. With a product like live chat, you have to be online to offer live support. 

There is no one  thing we look at when qualifying. The tricky thing is, sometimes the user doesn’t know themselves how many seats they need. And large customers sometimes want to implement the solution in a very specific small area of the website. So we look at the number of seats indicated, but also the company size overall and whether they have a dedicated service team. 

For outbound sales we’re more focused, we’re aiming for at least €10,000 as the deal value. Our outbound team uses the BANT+O framework: Budget, Authority, Need, Time, Obstacles. These are the questions that need to be answered to decide whether to pursue a deal or not. 

What tools do you use to manage this sales and marketing funnel?

• Mailchimp – we send a monthly newsletter to all customers who are subscribers that we call “Founder notes”.
• Kissmetrics for customer insights
• Grafana for custom dashboards
• Loco for managing translation. We use a lot of translations, the product is available in 7 languages and blog is also translated into several major languages.  
• Priceonomics for Slack updates on how content is performing. You define parameters like “a piece of content is viewed 10,000 times” and get Slack notifications once these things happen. This creates a feedback loop and a “boost” for the content team.
• We use Pipedrive as our sales tool
• Calendly for setting up appointments
• Typinator for text expansion. We do a lot of initial outreach via social media platforms, and Typinator speeds up outbound sales efforts.

There seem to be many moving parts. Have you experienced any issues in connecting sales and marketing, or is everything going like clockwork?

There’s the cliché that sales and marketing should be best friends. In our company, that’s literally true because I’m best friends with Timoor, who’s in charge of sales. That really has improved communication, up and down, on the job and off the job.

Marketing is focused on signups as the One Metric That Matters. Sales is focused on customers, revenue and upselling. Every team needs a single metric to be effective, but this increased the need for communication. 

We’ve had to formalise communication. Two years ago we started a bi-weekly “synergy meeting”, attended by people from marketing, sales and support.

On the one hand, it’s to inform marketing on things like what customers are interested in, what are their problems and desires?  This guides the blog posts and videos we produce. For example, last year chatbots were a big topic, and when sales surfaced this topic, marketing decided to write more about that. 

On the other hand, sales needs specific content to close deals, and these needs are also discussed in the synergy meeting. For example: when case studies are needed for a particular industry. 

The synergy meeting is attended by representatives of each meeting, not whole teams. It’s altogether 5-6 people. 

We also have a quarterly discussion evening, where different departments present what got done, and why. This is attended by the entire company, 40 people in one room. 

There’s also a weekly call between the sales and marketing leads which is a bit less formal. For example, we might discuss using various tools there. 

What kind of goals do you set for sales and marketing and what are your KPIs?

Setting goals is basically planning. We do a top down plan once per year, using the pyramid of clarity from Asana. This starts from mission and strategy, and goes on to business objectives, product objectives and internal objectives, and down to specific projects and activity goals to reach these objectives. 

Coordination and adjustments are important. For instance for outbound sales we changed the goal from 50 outreach messages per day to 50 demos per month, because this was better correlated with driving results. 

We refer back to pyramid all the time, for example in the quarterly meetings. 

Any parting recommendations, or reading recommendations?

Anyone interested in a better customer communication solution, is welcome to check out Userlike. We also have useful content on our blog. 

A couple of posts that caught my eye there:

• Write To the Customer, Not About the Customer (about the small things that make a big difference when writing customer-facing copy)
• The 8 Core Principles of Good Customer Service (no tactical tips there, this post looks at the fundamentals that drive the quality of customer communication)

The post How Userlike Gets Sales & Marketing Synced Up appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

‘The following blog post is an edited down conversation between the co-founder and CEO of Outfunnel, Andrus Purde, and Tim Thyne, Head of Sales & Account Management at Help Scout. (You’ll find the link to the recording at the end of the post.)

Help Scout is a customer service platform that is used by 12,000+ small businesses to better serve their customers. It serves as a platform to manage live chat, email support, and self-service help documentation and resources.

How does Help Scout get new customers?

Tim: Historically, we like to think of Help Scout as a self-service driven business. Although we do have a sales channel, we also have folks on support who are proactively working with customers who are considering Help Scout. 

The history of the business has always been inbound. Everything starts from our content. We’ve built a wealth of really good content for customer service professionals – not only for the leaders of customer service teams, but also for the front line folks who are doing the work in the day-to-day. 

When we started the company in 2011, we didn’t have a sales team. Everything was purely self-service driven. People came to our website, they read our content, they opted in for a trial, and then they converted to a paying customer. It wasn’t until the later half of 2015 and early 2016 or that we actually formally introduced a sales role. When we introduced sales, we did not introduce it to drive growth from an outbound standpoint. It was to better serve inbound requests that were coming in. 

Help Scout started by focusing on a self-service model with inbound content for customer service professionals. They more recently (~2016) introduced a sales role focused on helping to guide larger customers.

So over time as our traffic continued to grow, trials signups and demo requests grew. We realized that larger customers needed a little bit more help. They liked somebody to help guide them through not only what was possible with the software, but really give advice on how they can figure out what custom setups they need. They wanted help with the change management – training the team migrating their data, things of that nature. 

So we really introduced the sales role to help work with those larger customers in our inbound funnel. We are now starting to experiment with what outbound could look like, and we’re seeing some really good early success.

How does Help Scout’s sales team direct its attention towards signups? What is the qualification process?

Tim: First, we look at our high-intent inbound funnel. These are folks who are interested in evaluating the product – and our two most popular inbound channels are our trials sign-ups and demo requests.

One of the qualifying questions we always ask is how many users do you expect to use Help Scout. We don’t just ask because it tells us how much money you would pay us, although that is one factor – but the other reason is that teams of different sizes often have very different requirements for how they purchase and get started with our software.

The main qualifying question is “how many users do you expect to use Help Scout”.

If you plan to have 11 or fewer users, you end up entering into what we call our support-driven growth funnel. This is primarily a self-service funnel, though we do we augment that with some personal interaction.

If you go through the sales funnel if you’re with 11 or more planned users, you have a dedicated contact person. We’ll schedule time with you, walk you through the entire evaluation process, everything from the demos to the account setup to training and onboarding.

If are in the bucket that’s under 11 users – ideally the product is good enough to get you through the process on your own, but we do have a team of folks that will reach out to proactively based on specific triggers.

How did introducing a dedicated sales function affect conversion rates from trial to paid?

Tim: So the 1-to-10 funnel and the 11+ funnel both performed significantly better when we’ve added some level of touch. Not only do they convert at much higher percentages – the other thing that we’ve seen happen is folks that engage with us churn at an incredibly low rate. And they grow exponentially more than the folks that come in a purely self-service way.

So we need to make sure that when we engage with customers, we help them really understand all that’s possible with Help Scout.

How does Help Scout think about KPIs? Are they separate or shared across the three functions?

Tim: On the sales channel specifically, there’s a whole bunch of metrics we can track to understand progress along the way. But there are a couple of core metrics. One is: what are the total opportunities driven into the sales funnel. An opportunity for us is an inbound request that has showed intent to evaluate. 

Sales doesn’t work with folks who just subscribe to our blog or download an ebook. They’re only working with folks who have intent to evaluate the product. So we look at what are the total opportunities generated. That’s a KPI that marketing is responsible for.

Help Scout focuses on looking at “sales-engaged opportunities” – inbound requests that have shown intent to evaluate.

But then the next one is a shared KPI and that’s what we call our “sales-engaged opportunity”. And that is once we’ve established a two-way dialogue, and have verified intent with the opportunity.

So both marketing and sales have “sales-engaged opportunities” as a KPI. And that’s because although sales is responsible for all of the outreach, marketing is equally as responsible for making sure that those opportunities that come in have a strong intent to evaluate.

Do shared KPIs ever create any tension between the teams?

Tim: I could be biased, but I don’t think there’s any finger-pointing when it comes to the shared KPIs. For us, we’re all on the same journey to drive up that sales-engaged number. We are looking at it constantly. What changes are we seeing? 

If we see numbers going up and to the right, that’s great. If we see it dipping down, that’s not so great, but I would say we approach it the same way. We ask why. Why is this number going up now? Is it something that sales is doing differently? Is it something marketing has done differently? If it’s going down, what’s changed? 

We always approach it from a collaboration standpoint and we’re always trying to get it to go up but I think that “why” is the key thing that helps us keep progressing, as a team, together. We’re just trying to learn together. Therefore everyone’s mindset is always “why, why, why.” If we messed something up, great, let’s learn from it.

The teams are focused on learning together, understanding why numbers are going up or down in relation to whatever changes were made.

Here’s an example. Marketing recently changed some CTAs on the website to be a bit more self-service focused and away from the demo request, which is a big driver for us. And we saw a dip, so we asked what’s happening here? Sales didn’t get upset with marketing about that, we’re just happy that we learned from it. 

Apart from common KPIs, what else does Help Scout do differently to keep sales, marketing and support aligned?

Tim: We constantly remind ourselves that, at the end of the day, we want to hit our numbers but it’s not just about a team succeeding. It’s really about the customer. The revenue that we’re driving is an output of customer success. 

So that’s something we have to be mindful of. We’re not optimizing for team performance here, we’re optimizing for customer experience and that’s something that helps all three of our teams stay aligned does that that should be the North Star. Anytime there’s a problem or there’s friction in the funnel, we should focus on what’s gonna be the best experience for the customer, not what we want to optimize for on a spreadsheet.

What indicators does Help Scout use to measure customer success?

Tim: From a tracking standpoint I’d say our North Stars are growth and retention. Customers are successful if they’re continuing to grow with us, and they’re not churning.

Each team also looks at product adoption. We’ve found that some core features particularly help drive user success. So we just ensure that as customers move along their journey with us, they’re adopting the features we believe will be most helpful for them based on whatever goal they’re trying to accomplish.

Even long-time customers can overlook core features, and have to be reminded of them.

Tim: Just last week we talked to a customer who’s been with us since 2012. And it turns out they didn’t know about a core feature in the product that’s been there the whole time, that’s adopted by a majority of our customer base.. Although we have classes, webinars, and emails that go out about this feature, it was not something that was top-of-mind for them. And they were blown away by functionality that’s been there for the last seven years. 

So reminding your customers of the value of the features in context of how they use your tool is really important. It’s easy to just assume everybody knows what’s possible. And that’s often not the case.

What tools does Help Scout use to support its sales, marketing, and support-driven growth?

Tim: There are a couple of core tools, and then a bunch of other tools that support everything. So we have…

– Help Scout – we use Help Scout for all of our customer service. It’s also what the support-driven growth track uses for all of their proactive outreach to customers.

We have Salesforce as our CRM.

And then we have HubSpot that we use for all of our marketing automation, our email campaigns. 

So Help Scout, HubSpot, Salesforce are the three primary systems of record and then there are other tools in our sales tech stack.

We use Troops for setting up a bunch of alerts that come from Salesforce and to keep everybody up to date. We use Mix Max for all of our templates our sequencing our calendar invites. It plugs right into Gmail and also integrates with Salesforce. We use Chorus alongside Zoom for all of our sales recordings. That way we have them to reference back and share with customers, and also for training purposes.

Closing thoughts

Tim: What I’ve seen with customers is that every team has to make sacrifices. If every team is using a product, there are sacrifices on the sales side, on the marketing side, and then also on the services side. I think the best path for a lot of customers, especially small businesses, is to buy products that do exactly what they want incredibly well, and then make sure the different tools are tightly integrated. 

Don’t buy tools that optimize for you as the business, buy tools that optimize for your customers.

Tim Thyne, Help Scout

I think Help Scout often plays incredibly well for small businesses with a lot of the other CRMs that specialize in small businesses and integrates with the marketing tools for small businesses. So I’d say, keep an eye on Help Scout, and as you have customer service needs, make sure whatever system you buy, is going to deliver your customers a personal experience. Don’t buy tools that optimize for you as the business, buy tools that optimize for your customers, and then also solve for your business needs.

Further reading to learn more about Help Scout

• What Is Support-Driven Growth? – how support has become a revenue generator for the business how they’ve implemented the process
• Sales as a Service – talks about how Help Scout has built the sales seem to be a little bit more service-oriented than strictly like a transactional sales process

The post How Help Scout Balances Sales, Marketing & Support To Grow Their Business appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.

Livestorm is a sleek webinar and virtual meeting app that has started to conquer the market, if you’ll excuse the pun, by storm. Founded in 2016 after being frustrated with webinar tools available at the time, the company now features customers like Intercom, Instapage, Chargebee, Autopilot, Pipedrive and even big corps like Bosch and WPP.

The company tripled their annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2018.

I’ve kept an eye on the company since I first had a chat with the founder Gilles two years ago (unsurprisingly we chatted over Livestorm and the recording is available here).

I knew the company was doing something right with their sales and marketing, so I chatted to Thibaut Davoult, their growth engineer and the company’s first ever marketing hire.

Here’s the round-up of our chat: a proper sales-marketing case study based on Livestorm.

What does your marketing funnel look like: how do you get leads and keep track?

Our “marketing DNA” has been focused on inbound so far. We started out producing content on our blog posts as well as “evergreen” content on our website. Coupled with that we’ve made SEO efforts around getting backlinks and optimizing the website.

For example: one of the things which worked for link building was first listing all the software we used in our tech stack and emailed them all offering to write a customer story or review on their site. The success rate was about 30% which is pretty massive, and it landed us great backlinks.

We’ve worked hard to increase our presence on review sites like Capterra and G2Crowd. We’ve also done co-marketing webinars with brands that target a similar audience and been quite active in pursuing partnerships. On the paid side we’ve run Google Search Ads mostly.

And we’ve also experimented with getting more leads among people who come to the site but don’t sign up. We use Leadfeeder to identify site visitors and we run the following workflow:

1. Export the list of company names from Leadfeeder
2. Run them through a script that matches company names with email addresses of people from these companies
3. We then sometimes filter the results, leaving only those with a specific job title (e.g. containing the word “marketing”).
4. Finally, we send the list to our email marketing tool that starts an outreach sequence.

We’ve had mixed results with the latter tactic eg. sometimes filtering only specific job titles cuts the list of leads too short. But our plan is to keep experimenting to find the right “recipe”.

And on the sales side, what does your sales pipeline look like?

If the role of marketing is to drive relevant traffic and leads, sales takes over from the point of qualifying whether someone is a qualified lead or not.

We do qualification by adding specific questions to webinar or product signup process (eg. team size and whether they already plan to use webinars) and by enriching signup data with sources like Clearbit.

We then keep conversations going with leads we’ve identified as good fit using the various lead qualification methods. And the last stage of our sales process is keeping customers happy, measured by NPS (Net Promoter Score) and LTV (Life-time value).

It’s worth pointing out that since we’re a relatively young company, our CEO Gilles has been doing most of our webinars since we started. But we finally brought on our first dedicated salesperson in early 2019, to complement our two full-time Customer Success people.

What kind of goals do you set for sales and marketing and what are your KPIs?

Our main goal is MRR (monthly recurring revenue) growth, which is kind of obvious for a SaaS company. So far, we’ve had an average monthly growth of 20%, obviously this was a lot easier to reach than it is now after 2 years of existence.

In addition to MRR we break this metric down by components and by function. This table summarises the key stages of our sales and marketing funnel, and the KPI’s we track:

What’s your sales and marketing stack like?

Oh man… where do I start?

We’re of course big users of our own product. It only makes sense to learn about a webinar product via a webinar.

On the analytics side we use Google Analytics for overall stats, Attribution to track, well, attribution of different channels that drive leads and Amplitude for product stats.

We get data connected and enriched, using Segment, Zapier and Clearbit.

We use LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Anyleads to identify leads for our outbound efforts. And we mostly use Prospect.io to manage our outreach campaigns to leads. And I already mentioned the role of Leadfeeder in our growth processes.

We use Pipedrive as our CRM and most messaging to various segments is handled via Customer.io, though we also use Intercom for some specific emails. Then of course our live chat and support as a whole goes through Intercom.

Overall, what’s worked for you in keeping sales and marketing in sync?

Sharing data between all tools and creating automations between tools is key. As well as making data easily accessible. We all look at various dashboards that we’ve built. E.g: try to gain insights from Amplitude.

Communication, or even over-communication is super important. We communicate in following ways:

•    Friday written review (keymetrics post on Slack)
•    Monday teamwide meeting
•    Feedback on sales calls
•    Improving our process

And it’s also about the people. I would never start over-optimising traffic that doesn’t convert, even if “my” goals are more related to overall number of leads rather than leads that converted to a paid subscription. What matters is the bottom line, not increasing one metric at the detriment of the rest.

People tend to share goals if there’s a culture of sharing goals. And one of the things you can do to influence this culture is by hiring the kinds of people that look beyond their individual KPIs and keep the bigger picture in mind.

I hope you found this sales-marketing case study useful. You can follow Thibaut on Twitter and check out Livestorm here. And check back here soon or sign up to be notified of new posts, because we aim to bring you more case studies like this soon.

The post Sales-Marketing Case Study: How Livestorm Tripled Their Revenue appeared first on Outfunnel - Sync Sales & Marketing Data.