TPG Webinar | September 2022 | The Gist

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Solve for the customer. Put them at the heart of every decision you make.
Reduce friction within your business model to speed it up.
Accelerate the flywheel with sustainable marketing and sales practices.
Keep everything aligned with a single source of truth (your CRM).

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.
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.
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.

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.
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.

This diagram shows all the way you can use content and automation to customize experiences that people have with your business depending on several variables. For example, when a contact submits a form on a website, you can first check to see if they are a client or a prospect (qualified or unqualified). Then you can schedule automated emails and internal follow-ups accordingly, among other actions.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."

When configured properly, a deal pipeline is the nucleus of an effective sales operation. Use it to understand every active deal within your pipeline so you can prioritize the deals that will help you hit your quota, every time. You can also customize deal scoring, trigger sales automation and make the handoff to your implementation team quick and efficient.

Wait... What about Implementation and Customer Service?

Marketing is about influencing people. And every interaction you have with a prospect or a customer is an opportunity to influence them. Our marketing philosophy includes deliberate actions and strategies after the sale is made. (In fact, some clients hire us exclusively to help enable their customer service teams to drive retention, upsells and referrals.) Unfortunately, there's not enough time to cover all of that in this presentation. Fortunately, that's what the next presentation is for. :-)

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.).
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.
Build workflows that notify team members whenever a client or prospect meets the "good fit" criteria of a specific solution.
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.
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.
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.
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!

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