Dustless Blasting

Summary

Dustless Blasting is an innovative surface preparation company that helps people all over the world restore the toughest surfaces to their full beauty. They came to us with a unique and fascinating challenge: they weren't struggling with generating leads. Instead, they had far too many leads - more than their marketing and sales teams could keep up with.

We helped Dustless Blasting streamline their marketing to sales handoff, build a cohesive sales process that unifies their Sales team, and create better visibility into KPIs that drive business growth.

The Challenge

When Dustless Blasting found Web Canopy Studio, they were struggling with sales and marketing alignment in many different ways:

Unclear process creating confusion

With a direct-to-customer model and an effective ad strategy that was bringing people to their site in droves, they were struggling on managing that volume in a meaningful way that drives results. On the marketing side, they had team members who sometimes spent their entire day answering phone calls and sifting through emails that led to very few actual sales opportunities. On the Sales side, they had a small team of highly experienced salespeople who were each running their own process and there was no core system in place. When the details of their opportunities spread across sticky notes and spreadsheets, there was little to no visibility into their sales process as a whole. This made growth, projections, and staff planning virtually impossible.

Relying only on hand raising

Dustless Blasting had a couple of high-converting landing pages including their Pricing and Financing pages. However, even though these leads were handed off to sales, we uncovered that many people in their target audience were taking these steps while still in their consideration stage. This meant the Sales handoff was often happening far too early, which led to them spending too much of their time tracking leads that weren't ready to buy.

On the flip side, they didn't have a way to distinguish people that actually were ready for a sales conversation on a large scale. Moreover, many of the leads had very high potential of purchasing at a high volume, but they were not filling out the bottom of funnel forms. This meant that the sales team was essentially just "taking orders" as time went on. The sales team could barely keep up with taking orders, let alone aggressively pursue the high fit leads in their process who needed more touches. This is why the flywheel is utilized today over the funnel shown above.

No way to identify and distribute quality leads

HubSpot was not being used effectively to identify the high fit and highly engaged leads that were worth going after. With the extremely high volume coming in, there was simply no time to manually dig into each lead and determine whether they were a good fit, how engaged they were with Dustless Blasting's website and marketing efforts, and who on the internal team they should be distributed to.

Could not expand sales team

Without all of these proper systems in place, it was nearly impossible for the Dustless Blasting leadership team to project their growth or hire additional salespeople and train them properly. They had experienced and successful sales professionals, but because each were using whatever process they were familiar with, there was no unifying system specific to Dustless Blasting. There was no clear-cut process that they could train new salespeople on and only allowed for mediocre results.

Marketing and Sales misaligned

The Marketing to Sales handoff was really murky which led to a lot of confusion on the status of their many leads. There was no way to look at clear projections, and no way to identify where leads were in the buyer's journey. They had revenue goals, but didn't know exactly what they needed to do to hit them and no way to track their progress. This lack of reporting created significant problems for the marketing and sales teams (i.e. what does success even look like?).

Flatlining sales preventing growth

The Dustless Blasting team was seeing amazing volume come in on their website views and lead generation, but their sales numbers weren't enjoying that same success. These missed opportunities to capitalize on the volume coming in created a stagnant sales model and the growth was just not there.

The Solution

In order to better understand their challenges and identify opportunities for improvement, we conducted a 6-week remote workshop where we interviewed their Sales team, spoke to existing customers, outlined their buyer personas, and performed website and content audits.

Once we had completed our Discovery, we took a deep dive into the Sales process to understand exactly where the pains were, where leads were losing interest, how lifecycle and deal stages were being used, and more.

This gave us what we needed to build a comprehensive Sales Playbook to better streamline their Marketing to Sales handoff, bring leads through the flywheel, give clarity to the process to everyone involved, and better report on critical KPIs.

1) The DIscovery Process

Before any proper alignment could be done, we had to first deeply understand the current situation in the business. This included:

Sales, Marketing, and Customer Interviews

We needed to get the big picture, so in addition to talking to their marketing team, we spoke with several of their Sales reps and recent customers in order to understand the company and how it's perceived both internally and externally.

By doing that, we were able to better understand their growth challenges, identify some key pain points in their sales process, and build some next steps to get everyone on their team on the same page.

Content Analysis, CRM Audit

We performed an audit of their sales collateral that was currently being used by their team and took a deep dive into their HubSpot portal. Our goal in this project as a whole was to streamline their process from start to finish. This meant being careful not to add any more steps or tasks than needed, or we knew that we'd never get buy-in from their Sales team.

In doing so, we identified several opportunities to create automation that would make their lives easier so they could focus on closing deals and not clerical work.

2) The SLA

We established a Marketing and Sales Service Level Agreement (SLA) with their marketing and sales teams to help them understand exactly what marketing would be responsible for, and what sales would be responsible for in return. This consisted of:

Buyer Personas

It's critical in the selling process to know exactly to whom you're selling. Dustless Blasting was using many different buyer personas in HubSpot, but quickly became clear that all of their leads could be bucketed into two groups: Existing Business and Start Up Business. The Existing Business people were middle managers at existing construction or marine companies who were looking for a new solution they could offer to their customers. The Start Up Business folks were people who wanted to launch their own business with Dustless Blasting's turnkey business package.

We built out clear profiles for each of these personas, including their challenges, pain points, decision-making process, where they go for information, and much more.

Defined Lifecycle Stages

We worked together as a team to truly define terms like Lead vs. MQL VS SQL, etc.. The key point here is that we came at it with a flexible approach - we used HubSpots definitions as a starting point but we mapped them out specifically to Dustless Blasting's process so it made sense for their team.

Outlined Goals

Once we had established Dustless Blasting's revenue goals, we figured out exactly how many Leads, MQLs, SQLs, Opportunities, and Customers they'd need in order to hit those goals. This gave us a full spectrum of visibility of how many contacts progress from one lifecycle stage to the next. It also give us visibility into where there might be roadblocks in the sales process. Instead of wondering where people are in the buyer's journey and how the sales model is progressing, we can now see exactly where in the process people might be dropping off and address it accordingly.

Mapped Sales process

Sometimes there's no more effective way to map out a complicated process with lots of moving pieces than with a simple flow chart.

So that's what we built.

We worked with the Dustless Blasting team to build our a detailed document that outline the entire sales process. The entire buying journey, from Marketing/Sales Handoff to becoming a customer was marked on a clean, color-coded flow chart. This way, everyone on the team knew exactly what was expected of them, where contacts lived in the sales cycle, and how each step in the process associated with deal stages and lifecycle stages. When we presented the final version to the Sales team, we broke it down section-by-section with screenshots and detailed instructions on exactly what steps needed to be taken all along the way.

Smarketing Outline

We built an agenda outline for Dustless Blasting's smarketing meetings to encourage transparency, accountability, and progress. This included discussing current deals that were on the table and what was needed in order to close them, why some leads aren't deemed appropriate and what steps may be needed to fix that, what collateral Sales could use from Marketing, and more.

3) The Sales Playbook

After mapping the sales process, we needed to document the sequences, workflows, and scripts for individual stages:

Lead nurturing workflow

Once we had established what a good lead nurturing workflow looks like, we needed to find a way to bring the best leads to the front. For that, we used Lead Scoring.

Using HubSpot's Lead Scoring contact property, we were able to actively score for both high fit (job title, revenue, location, etc.) and high engagement (site visits, viewing high intent pages, clicking marketing emails) and set a number at which we were ready to call that person a Marketing Qualified Lead. Once a contact reached that score, we created an MQL workflow to update their lifecycle stage and assign them to a marketing rep. We also create a task for the salesperson to begin an MQL sequence and immediately reach out to the prospect.

MQL Sequence

When that contact becomes an MQL and they're handed off to sales, we used HubSpot's sequence tool to built automated sales sequences that their reps could use to get them on an exploratory call. This involved setting up a cadence of email and phone calls and setting up separate sequences for their two different buyer personas, each with specific language that's targeted to that persona. The goal of these sequences is to set up an exploratory call.

Exploratory Playbook

We identified the key information that was necessary to collect from the lead during an exploratory call phase. This gave us what we needed to create a checklist of questions for the sales team work against as they conducted each and every exploratory call. This was a critical step for making sure all the sales team was performing on the same tasks in the same way. This also created really good accountability; for example, there was no reason not to collect information about the lead's timeline to buy on the exploratory call because that information was on the checklist.

Throughout the playbook, we made notes for training and teaching. We also helped give visual cues on where to find tools and items inside HubSpot.

Sales return to marketing

What happens when a lead is marked as not a good fit? This could be for any number of reasons - they don't have budget, their timeline is way off, or they're simply not interested. When that's the case, we still want to keep them in our nurturing process, just in case circumstances change. We set up a workflow that's contingent on the sales team changing a contact property, which automatically pushes that contact back to marketing so they can continue to be nurtured until they're ready to have a sales conversation.

The Quote Process

There was no clear process established for after a quote was provided to an MQL, so we build another set of sequences for the Quote Review (again, setting up one for each buyer persona). This involved sending emails and asking what they thought of the quote, sending more information that might be helpful to their decision-making process, and asking if they're ready to move on to the next step.

The Path To Success

The 3 pillars to success for Dustless Blasting:

how HubSpot was utilized

Lists: Segmented their prospects using the lists tool as they engage
Workflows: Triggered workflows at various stages of the process for sales team notifications as well as nurturing emails
Conversations: Used the live chat feature to help sales team engage with contacts on the website
Forms: Adjusted form fields based on the data collected that was deemed as essential for moving people through the buyer's journey
Email: Follow up emails and nurturing emails created for lead engagement
Campaigns: Organized all sales activity into campaigns
Meetings: Calendar and appointment strategy utilized for booking international meetings
Deals: Heavily utilized deal stages and pipelines for moving clients through the sales process
Documents: Initial outlines for docs created for sales team to follow
Tasks: Inside sequences and workflows, we established tasks to be given to the sales team for various sales activities
Sequences: This was a major component to our sales process in nurturing leads in a 1-to-1 format and keeping staff on track with sales activities and visibility
Reports: Documented progress towards goals and benchmarks through reporting and analytics

The Results

Here is how Dustless Blasting's newly documented sales process has impacted the bottom line:

MQLs drastically Increase month-over-month

With the advent of lead scoring in the marketing process, marketing qualified leads have become a major source of attention inside the organization. Prior to this method, the sales team was primarily only relying on "hand-raisers," or, people who were asking for quotes and were ready to buy. This left out a large majority of potential clients because they needed additional touches or guidance before becoming a customer. Enter: MQLs.

With lead scoring, the sales team are assigned leads (MQLs) from multiple sources throughout the month that meet a specific lead score criteria based on high fit and high engagement status. At that point, the salesperson begins their MQL process and attempts to schedule meetings with the prospect.

‘Meetings booked’ and sales productivity improve

Literally every stage of the sales process saw a large increase in productivity. ‘Meetings booked’, which rose by over 300%, helped the sales team process calls in their newly documented sales process.

‘Tasks’ documented in the CRM that are assigned to sales people rose by over 580%. Before implementing this playbook, most of these tasks would have been skimmed over, documented individually on paper by salespeople, or not done at all. Notes on individual deals and contacts rose nearly 50%.

Large Increase in Sales performance shows alignment success

After implementing and running the sales process inside HubSpot, documenting all activities in the CRM, and following the playbooks closely, the sales team saw a tremendous uptick in the overall sales performance reports. Most notably, the contacts being worked by the sales team rose by over 240%, showing that the sales staff is now actively reaching out to a considerably larger number of leads who are becoming MQLs. They are creating 170% more deals in the pipeline, and have closed 279% more deals, reigning in 710 total deals in the last 90 days.

At an average sales price of $25,000, those 710 deals create a considerable amount of opportunity.

REVENUE, BOttom Line: Deals closed rises 3x across all pipelines

Dustless Blasting has several pipelines that include financing, new sales, ecommerce, and international sales. After we implemented the sales playbook with their team, they saw an increase of over 3 times more deals close. This was a great win that highlighted the effectiveness of reporting and alignment!

Conclusion

The collaboration with Dustless Blasting has been a fun and rewarding partnership. We are so thrilled with the results they’ve experienced after adopting a sales enablement strategy. The client, as well as the agency, have to be willing to roll up their sleeves and get to work on a project like this. This was an example of unification inside the sales team, which has resulted in growth and scalability.

"We would highly recommend Web Canopy Studio to anyone looking to improve their sales and marketing structure, gain higher quality inbound leads, and increase their overall sales revenue."

- Jennifer Walker, Dustless Blasting

This sales enablement project was selected as the winner of the HubSpot Impact Award for North America.

Need to see these kinds of results?

If you are struggling with your sales team and process and you're concerned about how to get more from your business, please know that we are here to answer any questions you may have and guide you through the process.

let's have a discussion about how to really make your sales process work for you. Click on the live chat icon on the bottom of this page, and let's chat. Cheers!