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Designing Inbound Growth for SwipeClock Partners

A special presentation for propelling scalable, organic growth across new and existing accounts within the HCM industry. Prepared for members of SwipeClock's BOSS partners.

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First, a Little Bit About The Gist and What We Believe (and Do)

The Gist is a leading inbound marketing agency and Certified HubSpot Solutions Partner for B2B software and service companies, especially in the payroll and HCM industry. We partner with bureaus all over the country to create inbound growth systems across marketing, sales and customer service functions.

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Introduction

Our marketing strategy is to achieve scalable, organic growth by owning all the channels through which prospects and customers engage with us and building them into self-sustaining assets that deliver compounding value over time.

More specifically, we will:

  • Produce a lot of quality content
  • Grow organic website traffic
  • Increase our social media followers
  • Grow our database of email and/or text subscribers
  • Reduce friction for prospects and customers
  • Convert strangers and subscribers into customers at scale
  • Free ourselves from dependence on ad campaigns and cold outreach

 

This presentation has been customized for professionals in the HCM (Human Capital Management) industry with special considerations for the opportunities to engage customers and prospects on both new deals and product upsells.

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Here's the video of the presentation itself.

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CRM Best Practices

  1. You must start with a clean CRM. Companies, contacts and deals (opportunities). Each object should contain custom fields or properties to help you save information that's relevant to your marketing and sales efforts. No prospect is created, worked or closed outside of your CRM. All roads lead to Oz.
  2. Make sure your CRM reflects all your client companies, their start dates, number of employees, pay frequencies and which products they have (or don't have). This will allow you to target specific clients for product upsell campaigns accurately and effectively.
  3. Have at least one person (an employee or an outside agency/consultant) "own" the health of your CRM. Make sure its being monitored and updated regularly.
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Content Marketing Best Practices

  1. Next, a content strategy. Marketing is about gaining and holding attention. And you can't do that if you don't have something to say or share (on your blog, your LinkedIn page, your email newsletter or anywhere else). Design your strategy to include any specific product, customer or industry targets.
  2. Start executing basic inbound marketing. Publish a couple of blog posts per month and share them on LinkedIn. Create an ebook or a long-form resource and "gate" it behind a form or a landing page to generate leads. Maybe do a couple of those campaigns a year to start. Then sustain a monthly email newsletter. That is your foundation.

Sample a Lead Generation Funnel

Using our fictional company, Inbound Payroll, we created a landing page for a (pretend) Employee Hiring Guide. Click the link to view the landing page. Then submit the form to see the follow-up emails the workflow will send.

Test the Workflow
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Sales Best Practices

  1. Log every activity or update on a customer or prospect in the CRM. If it isn't in the CRM, it didn't happen. Period.
  2. Maintain regular communication with your marketing team (and/or whoever managers your CRM) so that other team members understand (a) what makes a good lead, (b) what information is important for you to look at and (c) what topics are most prospects interested in. We recommend a monthly "Sales & Marketing Alignment" meeting to keep the teams on the same page.
  3. Create saved filters so you can easily retrieve contacts or companies in the CRM based on specific criteria. Like any target account that hasn't been contacted in 30 days. Or any active prospects that recently visited your website. Or current clients who that don't have any ancillary products (like automated timekeeping, for example) that recently gave us a positive survey response. This will help your sales team identify good-fit prospects and spend their time most effectively.
  4. Follow up with prospects as quickly as possible (without sacrificing quality). Especially with new prospects who aren't existing clients, "speed to lead" is critical and sometimes taking even 1-2 days to follow up is too long and the prospect is already engaged with another company that responded faster.
  5. Reduce friction for your contacts as much as possible. Send 1:1 videos that break down complex topics. Use a calendar link to allow people to book meetings with you at their convenience. Automate confirmation emails after customers complete certain actions, if appropriate.
  6. Use automated workflows to enable your sales team. Send them a notification when a new client meets the criteria for a specific product upsell. Or when an active prospect visits the pricing page. We call these "Sales Enablement Automations."
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How To Get Started

  1. Start with a list of all the products and services you want to sell (or at least promote). Then for each solution, outline the characteristics that most good-fit buyers have in common (size, industry, job role, etc.).
  2. Make sure all of those variables are created as properties in your CRM. Teach the users of your CRM how to update those properties when that information is collected. Include those properties in forms so it's captured during website conversions. Import or sync that data from other platforms. Survey your clients about a topic and gather some of that information. Get it in your CRM any way you can.
  3. Build workflows that notify team members whenever a client or prospect meets the "good fit" criteria of a specific solution.
  4. Use that data to score leads (using lead scoring) and qualify and/or assign those leads (using automated workflows) after they request a quote or perform some other action indicating buying interest.
  5. Create content for each of your core solutions. Every solution should have its own product page to start. To take things a step further, every solution would have a free resource (gated content offer) that helps people with the same problem your paid solution solves. Use that as a way to convert leads and nurture them - either manually with your sales team and/or automatically with a drip campaign.
  6. Gather client logos and testimonials. Share them on your website, your marketing emails and as images across your social media channels. Social proof is very persuasive.
  7. When a deal is closed (either won or lost) ask your clients the reason. Capture those closed won/lost reasons in your CRM. And ask for feedback from your clients on a regular basis. Compare your qualitative data with your quantitative data to better understand where you're having success and where you can improve. Refine and keep going!
LEAD FUNNEL

Here Are Some Free Resources

Deal Pipeline Planner

Plan the stages of your deal pipeline and what data your team will capture during the prospecting process.

HubSpot Blueprint

A comprehensive resource for planning how your CRM will function, customized for the payroll and HCM industry.

Content Idea Library

A vast, organized library of content ideas categorized into core HCM topics like payroll, timekeeping and more.

HubSpot Sales Training

A battle tested, plug and play document to help you onboard and train a new HubSpot CRM user at your company.

HubSpot Video Tutorials

A YouTube playlist of two dozen videos that teach you how to use many of the key HubSpot sales and marketing tools.

Lead Funnel Diagram

A diagram of a common lead generation funnel using a gated content offer and lead nurturing tactics.

Testimonials From Our Clients

"They make the process easy and enjoyable, providing great recommendations on how to optimize HubSpot for our business."

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Sonya Ahola | Ahola HR Solutions

"They quickly familiarized themselves with our service offering and helped solidify a great sales and marketing strategy."

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Steven Davis | Tapecon

"We weren't using HubSpot to its full potential. They took over our website and doubled our traffic. Prospects are constantly finding us on Google."

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Kyle Masengale | ASAP Payroll

"The Gist greatly shortened the time-to-value of our inbound marketing strategy on HubSpot."

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David Marshall | Mongoose

"They are so good at breaking down complex business challenges and finding both quick-wins and long-term solutions."

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Allie Rocovich | HubSpot

"There is no one on earth that I trust more when it comes to all things HubSpot."

Headshot - Joe Peluso

Joe Peluso | Complete Payroll

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Let's Close More Deals Together

Let's learn about one another. We'll discuss your goals, explain our agency services and determine if a partnership is a good fit. Schedule an exploratory call on my calendar here. Or contact me using the information provided below.

CJ Maurer

Email: cj@thegistinbound.com

Phone: 716-201-0405

Web: www.thegistinbound.com

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