Optimizing The Lead Lifecycle

CHALLENGES

Having recently gone public, a Voice AI company was looking to deal with 3 major issues related to their growth goals:

1. 1. How many qualified leads are entering the pipeline?
   2. How can we empower the sales team to close deals faster?
   3. How do we use digital acquisition to power our goals of entering a new vertical?

The source of these problems was a lack of visibility and process coupled with a legacy, long-lead cycle B2B business.  As the market in 2022 continued to shift into Artificial Intelligence applications coupled with the labor implications of Covid-19, our client had identified a new vertical in the food and beverage sector where they could provide cost-effective solutions to businesses struggling with managing orders and reservations. The question was, using their existing staff and skills, how could they effectively pivot their strategy, improve their data capabilities, and also lower costs?

OBJECTIVES

Knowing the direction you want to go is only half the battle.  It answers the ‘what’, but not the ‘how’.  Cimply was tasked with helping organize a plan of attack.

We knew that our client wanted to increase revenue and break into a new vertical while preserving their legacy business.  We also knew that there were gaps in the ability to quantify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) like total leads-in-pipeline and time-to-close.  What we didn’t know was where the breakpoints were located.

Coming into this project, we had 3 initial objectives:

1. 1. Perform a gap analysis on capabilities, technology, and personnel
   2. Build the requirements for the client’s attribution needs
   3. Work with the existing team to build a comprehensive action plan to implement a unified brand strategy

From here, we would create a strategy framework, define standard KPIs, and begin the task of up-skilling their team’s capabilities.

APPROACH

The Cimply team started with deep on-site sessions to learn about our client’s current strategy objectives, major stakeholders, and day-to-day personnel.  At the outset, we spent about 2 weeks on their campus conducting interviews, attending senior-management strategy briefings, and documenting where critical data/insights were unavailable.  This upfront work to understand where the disconnect was between strategy and activation would prove to pay dividends for the project.

The next step was to perform an analysis of the company’s current lead lifecycle and data flow informed by the Cimply Data Readiness Assessment™.  The assessment was focused on examining the company’s technology stack and adjacent capability requirements.

We then developed a bespoke lead optimization strategy that took into account their business goals, target audiences, and technical capabilities. This guided the tactical strategy recommendations and implementation-support we provided which included media activation, email marketing , and audience targeting.

Cimply also supported the company in channel planning, budget tracking, and attribution. In practice, this was accomplished through:

• • • Leadership and coaching
    • Marketing strategy direction and a planning process framework
    • Interfacing and coordination with the sales operations team
    • Process improvement, standard tooling, and collaboration with external agency partners
    • Data governance frameworks and processes
    • Technical data layer guidance and reporting methodologies

Cimply helped fill key roles in the marketing organization to minimize disruption while leadership reworked their staff plans.  This was done by collaborating to create an improved planning and activation process, redeploy existing technology infrastructure, and standardize the business process by orienting around the key question “what is a lead to you?

Key statistics:

• • • 250% increase in marketing qualified leads (2022 vs 2021)
    • 130% improvement in conversion rate (2022 vs 2021)
    • 119% increase in conversion to sales qualified leads (2022 vs 2021)
    • 40% increase in qualified opportunities (2022 vs 2021)

TESTIMONIALS

“Cimply provided strategic leadership and tactical guidance in the optimization of the lead lifecycle performance of our artificial intelligence company. The customized lead lifecycle optimization developed and implemented helped the company to improve marketing and sales efforts and increase the number of marketing qualified leads by 250%. The Cimply team has been invaluable in helping the entire growth team with digital lead generation planning, marketing operations and analytics. They are the glue that holds the team together and allows us to do the best work we can do.”

Andrew W., Head of Demand Generation and Digital Marketing

“The accuracy and quality of the data has improved dramatically.  It is much easier to create reports and our ability to understand influence and attribution in Salesforce is much stronger. The business leaders can now find many answers on their own much faster.  The 2023 lead routing process is much better. If I had to go back to the 2022 state of affairs, I would pull my hair out.”

Deepa K., Senior Manager, Marketing Analytics & Operations