The Client

NSI is an MSP from Connecticut. Their clients are businesses and non-profits with end-user range of 5 to 100. They help their clients control expense, reduce risk, increase efficiency and make more money with IT.

The Challenges

“We are not generating enough appointments,” said Tom, the CEO.

At the time, NSI had just ended a contract with an award-winning HubSpot Partner Agency who had managed their digital marketing for several years.

"We get a few leads each month, but I don't have time to follow up, and the few whom I do manage to speak with, they are unqualified."

The web leads were researchers, competitors from different parts of the world, as opposed to NSI's ideal client: small business owners from Connecticut.

Aside from Tom's pain points, Simple Selling discovered chaos in their CRM:

• No systematic sales process existed. Each lead was handled differently, and to understand a lead's status required guesswork.
• They had thousands of leads who hadn't been emailed or called in a long time, or in some cases, never been contacted period.
• Hundreds of customer contacts were mislabeled as leads.
• Sales reports were useless as a result of the lead disorganization.

Solutions

Transforming the CRM into a Sales System

"We need to clean things up first" said Derek, founder of Simple Selling.

"Before continuing digital marketing, we need to fix the holes in the bottom of the funnel." 

Transformation began with the agreements on the definitions of the buyer's stages. For example:

• Lead: contacts for whom we only know basic information, like email address and name.
• MQL: contacts who work for CT-based companies and organizations.
• SQL: contacts who request a meeting.
• Opportunity: contacts who request an IT assessment.
• Customer: contacts who are paying customers.
• Other: contacts who are never going to buy from us.

Since there were thousands of leads, the Simple Selling team used lead-scoring, and automation tools within HubSpot, to label each contact accordingly.

Struggling with Outbound Sales

Simple Selling targeted the MQLs with a variety of outbound sequences. These campaigns included personalized emails, LinkedIn inmails, and cold calls. Messages included the recipient's company name, as well as other clues to show it wasn't spam.

Results were disappointing. Despite these MQLs being qualified on paper, the majority were purchased contacts and they had no idea who NSI was in the first place.

Improving Website Conversions

"The majority of traffic left after visiting just half of the home page... considering the volume of visitors overall, some must be local small businesses. This is a missed opportunity," said Derek.

To fix the high abandonment, known as the "bounce rate," Simple Selling revamped the home page as follows:

• Produced a video to showcase the CEO and team
• Updated the design and added copy that speaks to the SMB buyer
• Added a testimonials section, including client logos, end-user counts and respective industries

In addition, a pricing page was created to engage qualified buyers, and chatbots were incorporated to spark conversations.

Solutions

Shortly after the changes, qualified leads started to engage the chatbots. 

In the screenshot below, we can see that this lead followed the new path. She clicked a call-to-action on the home page, viewed the pricing page and, beyond what's visible here, she visited a total of 55 times.

Several other leads converted in a similar fashion, sparking Tom to leave Derek a message in the CRM.

NSI has generated over $50K in opportunity pipeline since these website fixes took place.  Additionally, the average time spent on the website increased from 88 seconds to 131 seconds.