Raising the Bar of Sales & Marketing with AIF.

The initial stages of a project are crucial to its eventual success, as they provide the opportunity to really get to know a clients' requirements and to establish a firm launchpad upon which to build. For AIF, we started with a sales and marketing alignment workshop, which helped us to define lead volume and quality, and determine to what extent the team was employing lead scoring initiatives, which metrics were being reported on between teams, and whether there was a service level agreement in place.

Our sales and marketing alignment workshop helped us identify each of the stages leads move through before reaching a purchase decision. While this gave us a sound grasp of what they were looking for as buyers, we still didn't have a sufficiently thorough understanding of how to sell to them as people. Over the course of a few weeks (allowing us the necessary time to collect and collate customer information), we carried out several buyer persona workshops to figure out AIF's various buyer archetypes. This analysis gave rise to five personas, each of which were added to a suite of sales enablement tools and served as a beacon to guide AIF's marketing efforts. 

As part of our initial effort, we also took the time to conduct a thorough Hubspot audit, revealing several areas for improvement and optimisation prior to moving into the implementation phase. To this end, we reviewed AIF's existing marketing and customer service collateral, including all ticketing processes, chatbots and landing pages, and provided recommendations for improving their efficacy across the board. 

With the foundation now complete, and the relationship between marketing and sales defined, we moved on to execution and commenced the all-important sales pipeline workshops. 

In these sessions, we got together with the sales team leaders to uncover which performance metrics they rely upon most, and which elements of their role might be automated for maximum efficiency. We researched the roles of all AIF's staff to gain an understanding of how automation could be used in a larger sense, team-wide, and to ensure any benefits of sales automation were able to trickle down as far as possible within the organisation. 

Exploring these opportunities for automation was only possible once we had been able to get a detailed understanding of the existing sales process. Each of the stages in use to this point, however vaguely worded, was broken down to determine exactly what it represented to each of the teams, and what the goals were for movement between stages. 

We then utilised our wire-framing software, Whimsical, to reinvent this pipeline, working out what information had to be pushed where and when, and where we wanted leads and opportunities to be by the end of each stage.

After the strategy had been given the green light, we set up the new pipeline in Hubspot, sustained and supported by a series of lead nurturing emails that would pull prospects through their buyer's journey faster, and limit the staffing hours dedicated to reach-out. 

Next we implemented task automation in order to gain visibility into the sales team's progress on particular leads, reminding reps on follow-up status, and extending the ownership of lead status to the entire team. 

We then looked to further enhance the contextual nature of the automation. We set up SMS reminders through integration with Message Media, sending the recipient a Google Maps link to their meeting a few hours prior, and we automated the display of sales meetings attendance rates to the sales rep, to foster an environment of continuous improvement and padding the process from lead to conversion. 

With the new process firing on all cylinders, our attention turned to ensuring the sales leaders could recognise the difference the new process was making to overall results. Using our Databox software we set up dashboards for the sales data pertinent to each Australian state, together with a centralised board that detailed conversion metrics for all of AIF's lifecycle stages, amalgamated month-on-month. These were set up with an automated daily email to the sales manager for each region, providing them with a near real-time view of the daily state of play, and enabling them to strategise accordingly.