Episode #8: 10 Years of Inbound Marketing & Sales

He Said She Said - An Inbound Sales & Marketing Podcast

This year is a big one for us. Not only is it Quintain's 10th anniversary, it is also our 10th wedding anniversary. It's been an amazing ride, both personally and professionally and we're so fortunate to not only be married to our best friend, but to be in business together.

Being an entrepreneur can be one of the loneliest journeys, but having someone to travel down that path with and knowing that they have your back NO MATTER WHAT is incredible - even if working together does mean that we sometimes bicker and drive each other nuts!

We've learned a lot in our ten years in business and had successes and failures. Here are a few of the things that stand out as we look back on those ten years...

Having the Right Team is Key

A big part of what gets us excited to come to work every day is the team of people we work with. We're lucky that at Quintain Marketing, we have a great group that not only loves to work together - many of them have become friends outside of work as well .

Recently, three new people joined our team:

• Crystal Monkman (Senior Account Manager), who comes from several years working on the Got Milk? campaign and brings a wealth of experience with big agencies and multimedia marketing and advertising.
• John Shea (Director of Inbound Sales Enablement), who has been an agency owner and sales consultant, coach and trainer to a variety of businesses, big and small.
• Rich McElaney (Director of Sales), who has more inbound marketing industry experience than any of us and knows how to ask the HARD questions that help us as an agency more effectively determine whether we're the right fit for prospective clients.

With new folks on our team, it's been a great opportunity to take a fresh look at how we operate and one of the key outcomes of that has been a renewed commitment to treating ourselves as a client.

Finding the Right Agency-Client Fit

Part of treating ourselves as a client has been taking a hard look at our sales process, which we developed last fall. Prior to that, if you had asked me if we had a sales process, I would have said yes. If you had pressed me to show you a written document outlining that process, I couldn't have done it. A sales process really does need to be documented to be effective. We learned this the hard way after we had some turnoveer in our sales department. After one of our salespeople left, it because clear that they hadn't been following a clear cut process and the result was several clients that were not a good fit for us as an agency. When that happens it's bad for everyone. Bad for the agency because you often can't deliver results the clients will be happy with, and bad for the client because they inevitably feel frustrated that the agency just doesn't "get" them or they aren't seeing ROI.

Now that we have two new sales experts on the team, we've further refined our sales process and have a much more rigorous discovery process. Asking the right questions early on in the sales process is good way to figure out whether the right fit is there and you'll be able to work well with a client. Depending upon the answers you get, you should also be prepared to walk away from a deal. This can be hard to do when you're in start-up mode or you are early in the process of building your business, but it is key to developing long term customer relationships and a sustainable business model.

In addition to revamping our sales process, our new team members are providing helpful feedback on new content that we need to create as part of the sales process. This has been an interesting shift because we have always created a lot of content (that is what inbound marketing is all about, right?), but not all of it was really focused on our customers' pain points. This is a classic mistake that many companies practicing inbound marketing make. They let their marketing department drive the content creation process and forget that their sales team has the most day-to-day contact with prospects and therefore the best sense of the type of information and content that would be most helpful to them.

Moving from Salesforce to HubSpot CRM

Both of us used Salesforce at other jobs prior to starting Quintain, and then for ten years while at Quintain, but this spring, we made the switch from Salesforce to the HubSpot CRM. It's been shockingly easy to make the transition and we're finding that our entire team is using the CRM a lot more now that it is in HubSpot.

Moving CRMs wasn't an easy decision to make, but now that we've done it, I wish we had made the move sooner. Don't get me wrong - Salesforce is a great tool and a world class CRM. The problem is that it was more than we needed - kind of like buying a Hummer when what you need is a Hyundai SUV - and we weren't taking advantage of many of its premium features.

We already "live" in HubSpot because of all the work we do there on the marketing side, and the fact that we can do everything we need to do in our CRM without leaving HubSpot, makes life so easy. This, coupled with the low cost (HubSpot CRM is free - yes, FREE - and we pay to use a couple of its premium features), have reinforced what a great decision it was to make the move.

#CultureCode as a Sales Tool

We recently spent some time with our entire team working on the development of our Culture Code - a slide deck that captures what makes our team special. We developed this as a recruitment and retention tool, but it has turned out to be a great sales tool as well. I was recently talking with a client and they asked how they could get a better sense of whether we would all work well together as a team and it occurred to me that I could share our Culture Code with them to give them a sense of who we are and what makes us tick. I think we're going to use this more going forward and my guess is that it will help us reduce client churn by serving as a tool to ensure we work with the RIGHT clients from the start. This is so key, because when there's a poor fit, it leads to greater churn which can be costly to any company that has a recurring revenue model. In the show, we talked about a blog we wrote on this topic, called The Ugly Truth About Inbound Marketing. Read it to learn more about all the times our client relationships didn't work out, and why.

Quintain Marketing's #CultureCode: What Makes Us Tick from Quintain Marketing

Thank You to Our Listeners

Finally, a big shout out this week to a couple of our listeners, who took the time to Tweet us or reach out personally and let us know they've been listening:

• Frances Bowman (@fbowman)
• Nisha Patel (@namastenish)
• Doug Burdett of Artillery Marketing (@artillerymarket)

Do you love listening to us debate inbound marketing and sales? Want to learn how to improve sales and marketing alignment? Consider subscribing to He Said, She Said on iTunes or Stitcher (the links are up above). We'd also love if you would review the podcast. Your feedback is helpful and we're always looking to hear from you about what topics you'd like us to cover in future episodes.

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