Case Studies

Evolve Systems Case Study: Using Automation to Map the Sales Funnel and Win Deals

Summary:

Marketing agency Evolve Systems aimed to be the top digital marketing agency in the middle-market B2B space in Minnesota. To boost brand awareness and gain more clients to help meet this high-reaching goal, CEO Marnie Ochs-Raleigh decided it was time for the agency to rebrand.

Luckily, after winning the SharpSpring ‘Accelerate Your Agency’ contest prize giveaway, Evolve Systems received free consultation sessions from marketing industry experts Jay Baer and Ann Handley. Marnie and her team followed up on tips from the marketing influencers and took steps to completely rebrand the agency.

As an extension of the rebrand, Evolve Systems CEO Marnie Ochs-Raleigh used SharpSpring’s automation platform as the muscle to communicate her agency’s rebrand. By delivering personalized content for each customer, based on their needs, interest and timing – using a ‘marketing brick’ tactic, Marnie and team were able to take the Evolve brand to a whole new level.

“One of the recommendations was that we come up with what is called the marketing brick – a really great piece of content or ebook. So our launch for Q4 was in the manufacturing space because that falls right within what our ideal client is that we want to work with. And we have quite a few manufacturing clients that we already work with. So we were able to create case studies from current client successes to use, and then utilize SharpSpring to leverage that content. It really goes back to content still being king.”
– Marnie Ochs-Raleigh

Challenge

Evolve Systems needed to:

Streamline their clients’ marketing and sales processes.
Organize and manage communication efforts to current and potential clients.
Map the buyer journey and manage the sales funnel management to nurture qualified leads.

Solution

Using the marketing brick strategy of one killer piece of new content, Evolve Systems’ rebranding efforts were successful with the help of the marketing influencers guidance and the SharpSpring platform.

“So I’m your average agency owner. And that means there’s deliverable work for clients and then there’s times that you can work on your own business. Making sure that you schedule that time accordingly, so that you can get that long-term success is really important. And I use SharpSpring for that specific purpose,” said Ochs-Raleigh.

Campaign

Tactic: Streamline the marketing and sales process

The right tech stack makes all the difference in executing key marketing and sales processes. Evolve Systems uses a monthly meeting structure with clients to determine the individual campaign goals and metrics that show meaningful ROI for specific clients.

The agency uses a 5-step process to build a strategic plan for clients to align the marketing and sales team. Evolve Systems strategizes, designs, develops, markets, and sets up ongoing support for clients. Throughout the process, the agency team utilizes automation to help clean up clients’ untouched or messy CRM setup and fine-tunes their email newsletters, social media profiles, website, and more.

“So there’s usually a pretty big cleanup that needs to be done. And that’s when you start to see the fun stuff. I think that’s your opportunity to really build trust with the client because they can’t see what it is that you’re doing on the backend. And sometimes if it’s a mess, you’ve got to take a screenshot and show them before and after so they can understand exactly what it is that you’re doing.

A lot of them know that they have a mess, but they don’t know to what degree. And we just do a nice job of communicating to them – this is how much time this is going to take to fix this,” said Ochs-Raleigh.

Tactic: Organize and manage communication efforts

The SharpSpring platform opened up time for Evolve Systems to focus on speaking with qualified leads that were ready to talk with them.

“It really helps us to manage clients. The task feature helps us remember when we need to do check-ins, when we need to schedule different events, or even just to do engagement. And I love having Mail Sync because as a smaller digital marketing agency, life happens and there’s different things that we need to do to make sure we stay in touch with different clients. So having that Mail Sync tool is a huge asset for us because we can look back to what historic conversations have taken place.”
– Marnie Ochs-Raleigh

Tactic: Mapping the Customer Buying Journey and Sales Funnel

Evolve Systems needed to map their client’s customer buying journey and sales funnel. Using SharpSpring’s platform features like workflows and triggers to notify the sales team when qualified leads take action on the website or with a resource, Evolve Systems showed clients’ a real snapshot of the customer buying journey and sales funnel.

“The different workflows and the triggers that happen and making sure that on our website, when somebody does fill out a form to get additional information, that we can see the journey that somebody has visited our website. So it helps us to make sure that the time that we’re spending with leads that come in, that they’re qualified leads and that we already know quite a bit about what the opportunity is. We can then synthesize that data, not only for ourselves, but for our clients that are utilizing the tool. So it is a great benefit from both sides of that equation,” said Ochs-Raleigh.

Results

Evolve Systems and its clients are now organized and working efficiently to generate quality leads by mapping the customer buyer journey, streamlining tasks, nurturing leads with the marketing brick strategy, and executing marketing and sales campaigns using the SharpSpring platform. Now, everyone wins!