Challenge

Numerous clients across a broad spectrum of industries (including software, professional services, construction, and healthcare) have turned to 5280 Accelerator for our unique ability to align sales and marketing people, practices, and tools. Not only did they desire leads, but they understood that with a successful marketing program, they needed internal systems to transform interest into sales. We are about more than “just a pretty campaign.” We help build the processes and the tools needed to get results.

Solution

  • Sales Funnel Development: Every company wants to convert their prospects to customers, but very few document the process, and most have not honed it for maximum effectiveness. 5280 Accelerator has made the sales funnel development process easy for our clients, collaborating on ways marketing and sales can work together, provide open feedback loops for continuous improvement, and document each step from marketing outreach to a new customer!

5280 Accelerator helps our clients advance their funnel to:

  • Create clear handoffs between Marketing and Sales
  • Follow a lead’s journey and influence conversion to a sale.
  • Track and report where each lead is in the funnel.
  • Understand where conversions aren’t happening in order to create better tools for helping them make the decision to buy.
  • Provide guidelines for a salesperson’s next steps, often including emails and scripts.
  • Sales and Marketing Alignment: When sales and marketing are in alignment, it’s magical! At the end of the day, the reason companies invest in marketing and sales is for growth, and when both entities are working together for the good of the whole, it’s a game changer. Even when a company has an internal marketing team, our fractional CMO practitioners are able to open lines of communication to foster better sales and marketing alignment. We facilitate conversations between sales and marketing throughout each phase in the funnel, helping them proactively find solutions to stalled sales, enabling a more streamlined process from awareness to close.
  • CRM Selection: Growing companies quickly understand the need to organize, manage, and track incoming prospects and leads in order to strike while the iron is hot. Yet, there are many different Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions in the marketplace, and it’s often difficult to understand which is best for a company’s unique situation.

Since we’ve seen and worked with numerous CRMs, we understand how to match their functionality with the unique needs of each client. For instance, one of our clients in healthcare relies on Zoho for their CRM and email management, including customer notifications. This platform was a great fit because it provides the reports they need to understand how prospects and clients are engaging with their email content. Read here for more about choosing a CRM.

  •  CRM Buildout: New tools can feel overwhelming. And if they’re not used, they’re a waste of time and money. For that reason, not only do we help with CRM tool selection, but we also stay alongside our clients to ensure a successful build-out so that all stakeholders are comfortable with how to use it and get results.

Here are a few scenarios in which we’ve helped clients with their CRM buildouts:

  1. A SaaS client had already been using HubSpot as their customer relationship management tool but using Constant Contact to deliver email messages. We helped them migrate their disparate CRM and email platforms into one and created an easier way to understand and track engagement.
  2. A professional services firm had Pipedrive set up for them years ago, yet they were using only a portion of its capabilities to track conversations with prospects. We helped them build out their sales funnel, clean up the way they were capturing information for each contact that best fits their existing sales cycle, and purged all of the contacts that were no longer feasible prospects.
  3. A construction company was using a whiteboard and post-it notes to manage leads attained by phone and email. There was no central repository to track leads. We helped them build out a simple, yet powerful, CRM called Less Annoying CRM (LACRM). It had just the right data capturing capability, including an easy way to take notes after a meeting via their mobile device, in order to track progress on leads and prospects.

Results

We’re “all in” when it comes to our approach because our goal is to see results. Because we help clients, not only with exceptional marketing but also with infrastructure, tools, and processes, they are able to make sales and marketing hum and win more deals.