Plastic Printers, a high-growth custom printing company based in Hastings, Minnesota, partnered with Media Junction to develop a plan to achieve their aggressive online business goals—fast!
Overall Goal: Minimize the Impact of a New Business Sales Process Without Disrupting Sales
Plastic Printers leaned to Media Junction to develop a plan to migrate a 4,000+ page website into a more effective sales tool that could improve communication and interactions with their clients. Their sales process is consultative and relies heavily on their sales team guiding prospects through the buying process. This multi-stepped process includes an initial consultation (which may lead to sending samples through the mail for prospects to touch and feel), product design and proofing—all of which require detailed notes.
Research & Discovery
We began the research and discovery phase with our eyes wide open, looking for opportunities to solve the pain points of the Plastic Printers sales and marketing teams. Our team immersed ourselves into the inner workings of the company, dissected historical data, and learned about their products, processes and people. Through this phase we discovered the current internal system was working well for approximately three-fourths of the company—but wasn’t working fluidly for their new business sales team. In addition to an unheard of 30 minute delay for lead arrival into the system, we also found the system itself was not 100% reliable. And unformatted data was causing leads to clog the system, stopping lead delivery to the sales team completely.
This system was negatively impacting overall company efficiency by limiting access to up-to-date information for other team members and departments. Solving this major bottleneck became a priority to ensure that leads could flow smoothly, allowing the company to react in real time—and thus enabling them to hit their growth-driven revenue goals.
Goal #1: Enabling Sales to Do Their Job More Efficiently
Problem: The Plastic Printers Sales Team Was Using a Platform That Was Never Intended to Be a CRM
While it was a fantastic printing software, it was slow and didn’t include the necessary sales reporting to effectively manage a complete sales pipeline. What Media Junction uncovered during exploratory conversations was individual sales people had developed their own processes for managing leads that was external to the existing platform. This made for a very cumbersome process, and didn’t provide sales management real-time access to company data. What little reporting did exist was pieced together from multiple sources including independent databases and spreadsheets. There was no consistent, accurate reporting for management.
Solution: Identify, Implement, and Configure a New CRM
After careful consideration, Media Junction elected to implement a new sales process utilizing the HubSpot CRM. Since we were already using HubSpot to host the website and for marketing automation, it was a natural choice. The HubSpot CRM provided the flexibility to manage users and permissions, and to customize contact properties to populate and store customer data most beneficial to the Plastic Printers sales team. We imported all current and past customer information to ensure ongoing engagement of these contacts by the sales team. Creating custom deal stages also provided the team full visibility to the status of each lead as they progressed through the buyer’s journey—which proved crucial to the Plastic Printers sales team for tracking sales efforts and improving overall sales processes.
Integration of the HubSpot CRM and HubSpot Sales (formerly Sidekick) also gave the sales team access to data they had never had before! Suddenly, they were able to see how leads were interacting with their company—how they found them, what pages they visited on the website, what content they downloaded, and their engagement with received emails. As a result, the sales team was enabled to focus on the most engaged prospects—having better, more informed conversations.
HubSpot Sales has also provided the Plastic Printers team the ability to build a library of personalized email templates that are accessible from the sales team. And thorough HubSpot metrics allow the team to zero-in on which templates are performing the best, encouraging successful continued efforts.
“The switch to HubSpot CRM has increased productivity of our sales representatives on a day-to-day basis. The biggest impact is being able to return the customer’s call in real time as they fill out a form—where before we were delayed by almost 30 minutes with our previous archaic system. Now, our consultants have the ability to make more calls and follow up with more customers daily. We at Plastic Printers look forward to the continued growth and success that having a real sales focused CRM provides and are enjoying the benefits of an integrated system with our marketing team too.”
— Jeff BLoedel, Plastic Printers VP of SaleS
Goal #2: Sales and Marketing Alignment
Problem: Leads From Multiple Sources With Missing Customer Information
Leads were coming in from multiple sources and there was little to no context as to what the customer wanted. Sales and Marketing both struggled to access data in a timely manner and couldn’t rely on the integrity of the information they were receiving.
Solution: Identify SMART Goals, Work Together and Close the Loop
As a team we defined what success meant to both sides of the business, then built a common terminology around it—in this case, that meant defining what constitutes a “lead.” Media Junction helped both teams practice closed-loop reporting—so sales could provide status of their leads while marketing fine-tuned their efforts to increase lead quality. Together these efforts increased productivity for the team as a whole.
Media Junction became an extension of the Plastic Printers team—working in tandem towards data-driven goals. Plastic Printers had a misaligned sales and marketing team, with divided objectives and incentives. Aligning the VP of Sales and the VP of Marketing allowed for cohesive and collaborative initiatives. The team was ready for inbound marketing.
Being able to see our company’s leads both as they come in on the marketing side and also through our sales cycle on the Sales CRM side of HubSpot, has allowed for complete transparency and has removed the guessing. We have been able to see and make necessary changes faster, allowing for a substantial impact on our leads. The result is that our leads grew from 7,818 leads to 10,453 decision stage leads in just one quarter—that is 33.7% growth—just awesome!
— Katie Buss, Plastic Printers VP of Marketing
Goal #3: Understanding Their Buyer’s Journey
Problem: Website Brought in Low Quality Leads
Plastic Printers' #1 sales tool, their website, was optimized to bring in low quality traffic which resulted in unqualified leads—who were also being sold too prematurely. Making matters worse, Plastic Printers' customer profile was too broad and not cohesively defined, making it difficult to develop a proper strategic plan.
Solution: Identify Their Ideal Customer and Reduce the Noise
Media Junction worked with the sales and marketing teams to identify their ideal customer profile—looking at real-time data and developing a plan to segment accordingly into proper personas. We removed all lead sources that were bringing in awareness-stage leads. Eliminating the leads that were not a good fit allowed the sales team to focus on the prospects that are most likely to buy. In addition, we developed a lead rotation routing incoming leads to the hands of the right sales person—in a timely manner.
Goal #4: Shorten the Sales Cycle
Problem: Loose Cog in the Sales Cycle
Plastic Printers' existing sales process included mailing product samples, which slowed their sales cycle—sometimes to a halt.
Solution: Give The Buyer What They Need to Make a Decision
Media Junction's suggested solution (and a cardinal rule of sales): Give the buyer everything they need to make an informed decision. This is why relying on the US Mail system to deliver samples in a timely manner gave us more than a little anxiety. We worked with the marketing team to develop virtual sample videos (like the one below) to shorten the sales cycle and minimize the need to physically mail samples. So far so good—we are seeing some promising numbers that demonstrate the Plastic Printers sales team is using their new website as a tool in the sales process. As we continue to work together, our teams are more collaboratively improving the customer experience and the sales process as a whole.
As a partner, Media Junction helped Plastic Printers sunset an antiquated system and correct sales priorities and objectives. Sales enablement sets up sales teams for success, equipping them with the proper assets and methods to increase business and provide value to customers. We are confident that the team from Plastic Printers is on the right path to delighting their customers at every stage of their sales process.
