Pwnie Express' challenge
A year before we started working with Pwnie Express, they welcomed a new VP of Marketing and with that a new generation of Pwnie's marketing and sales efforts. Coming onto the team, Dimitri Vlachos quickly identified a number of gaps within their current processes and was eager to find a HubSpot partner that could support both strategically and technically with building out marketing and sales automation that scaled alongside Pwnie's growth.
Pwnie Express found themselves in today's common software start-up story: growing quickly with venture capital funding and a board of directors to answer to, but little to no visibility into their pipeline. A lack of visibility leads to a lack of accurate reporting, which ultimately causes skepticism about marketing and sales' ability to work together to hit revenue goals. Pwnie found themselves unsure of:
- Their primary buyer personas (they had 11 before working with us)
- Their lifecycle stages (they weren't able to report on MQLs or SQLs)
- How to automatically qualify and hand off leads to sales (there wasn't a standardized process)
- The appropriate MQL follow-up process
- How to report on the full funnel
Because of all of the above points, marketing wasn't generating the best leads they could and sales wasn't following up with the hottest leads in a standardized manner. Working together, we changed all of that.
Solution
We worked with Pwnie Express on a number of different projects and services beginning with our Growth Acceleration Workshop where we defined their primary buyer personas. Once we understood who we were attracting to the website and targeting for conversions, we needed to understand what it was about these leads that made them qualified for a sales conversation.
This is where our revenue operations project became key. Through an intensive four-week project, we worked closely and collaboratively with their marketing team to define criteria that indicated when a lead is marketing qualified. Through this process, we looked to identify the different pieces of information we could translate into form fields and a funnel-driven form strategy. We completed detailed documentation for their marketing and sales team which defined:
- Each lifecycle stage
- A master form strategy for each stage of the funnel which included progressive profiling and Smart fields
- Automated persona attribution
- Lead scoring
- Lead flow handoff and assignments
After we defined and documented all of the above elements, the New Breed team moved forward to implement everything within HubSpot.
We leveraged HubSpot workflows to create internal automation that would set leads to MQLs based on our setup criteria, as well as assign them to the correct sales rep based on territory. This workflow also sets tasks for reps with due dates to ensure sales were making their first touchpoint within the first 24 hrs.
We also leveraged the reporting add-on to build pipeline reports for snapshot views of how leads are progressing through the funnel. Once we had all corresponding assets created, we led a training session with the marketing and sales team to ensure everyone was on the same page and in agreement with all processes.
