The Australian Institute of Fitness approached Neighbourhood in late 2018, looking for assistance with the improvement of their Hubspot portal. At the time, they had 28 sales team members in over 6 states across Australia and were struggling to implement the structure that could help them scale and grow effectively.
An update to their out-of-date system
From our perspective, AIF needed to get clear on what constituted a Lead, a Marketing Qualified lead, a Sales Qualified Lead and most importantly an Opportunity. Their sales process when we first met them involved manual phone calls to every lead regardless of quality, a hugely time-consuming process.
We recommended a restructure of their sales process, focusing on stepping through the sales journey and delivering the content that was relevant to where the lead was in the funnel. On top of this, we helped them establish what reporting was most important for the head of sales to make decisions on sales strategies at any time, and put a plan in place for developing that reporting.
Our first activity was to conduct a Sales and Marketing alignment agreement between both Sales and Marketing that put some definition around what leads should be pursued, and which needed further nurturing. This worked to save time on the part of the sales team, and improved the effectiveness of sales calls as they were now being spent on appropriate leads that were ready for conversion.
Once we were clear on what made a lead qualified, we mapped out the sales process and ensured we were identifying possible roadblocks to purchase. This meant organising a plan for the sales staff that incorporated nurturing communications, helping to qualify what had once been cold leads. Email & SMS automation was created to keep the lead informed with AIF’s offerings, features and benefits over a 90 day period. When the lead behaved in a manner that was in-line with established purchasing behaviour, we used automations to notify the local sales team, who could then respond quickly and effectively
Having 28+ sales staff across 6 teams means it was hard work for the sales manager to keep across state performance. We created real time dashboards for each state informing the Sales Manager of metrics like lead generation numbers, conversion rates and % budget for the month & quarter. This assisted the Sales team in focusing their efforts in the right places, resulting in more efficient sales teams.
We needed to ensure that the sales team had the right tools to enable them to close their deals, so we integrated Zoom video conferencing for prospective students, Databox for their real-time reporting and automatic meeting-scheduling tools. Altogether, these allowed the Sales team to work quicker and more effectively.
After the 4 month long project we AIF are now in a position where they fully understand their sales pipeline, the lead quality and when they are ready to purchase. They have a real time view of their inbound leads and what conversion rates are at all stages of the funnel and they are using automation for efficiency for their sales staff they are able to spend more time on closing leads that are ready.
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