Closing the Wooden Loop with Sales Enablement Services

Tucked away in small town Minnesota is a custom wood turning company called Glacial Wood. They’re in the manufacturing industry and they produce turned wood products for customers all over the world. The company is a culmination of decades of experience serving designers, stair builders, cabinetmakers, and architects. They’re not your average woodworking company – or the average manufacturer, for that matter. For example, they don’t have a product catalogue and everything they do is custom, from the ground up.

That inbound marketing campaign included content creation, infographics, eBooks, case studies, videos, and the pièce de résistance of their campaign, the anti-catalogue. It was their way of standing strong in - and even dramatizing - what makes them different. As a custom shop, they don’t have a catalogue. So, the offered an anti-catalogue as their version of a request a quote form.

It was a massive undertaking that paid off. Big time. In fact, it worked so well that they had to put their inbound marketing engagement on hold. So many great leads were coming through that Glacial Wood wasn’t able to keep up with them in a manner to meet their exacting standards of customer service. Even though it was a good problem to have, it’s still a problem.

What’s one to do?
 

That’s what this blog is about. It’s the story of how we took a successful inbound marketing client and connected the HubSpot Sales CRM with its marketing platform and helped a business build a repeatable sales process. That sales enablement process has allowed Glacial Wood’s small team to better qualify and prioritize the leads coming from their website.

 The thing is, even though Glacial Wood paused their content marketing initiatives, that doesn’t mean it was all for naught. The inbound machine we helped build is still going strong and generating new leads at an alarming rate.

This chart shows year-over-year numbers from HubSpot. Keep in mind that it’s been over a year since new content was posted to their site, including blogs and landing pages. Given that fact, website sessions are still up over 60 percent and new contacts are up over eight percent. This lends more credence to the power of great, evergreen content.

Sales Enablement Closes the Loop

We’re a big fan of setting goals and consulted Glacial Wood on some goals to set for their CRM. The thing with goals, though, is that they should be around things one can control themselves. Knowing this, we didn’t set sales goals for Glacial Wood. I know... this seems counter-intuitive for any salesperson to not have a lofty sales goal. But, at the end of the day, Glacial Wood isn’t making the decision to purchase – that falls on their customer. So, we advised them to have their goals revolve around actions they can take to can help move the process forward.

With that in mind, we landed on a SMART goal for their sales team to complete 40 outreaches each week. In this case, an outreach could be making a call, sending an email to a prospect, or completing a task.

Those are the number of each outreach actions that have been completed in the last year. Clearly, they’ve blown by the initial goal of 40 outreaches per week. All in all, they exceeded the goal by 252 percent!
 

The Sales Pipeline

During our sales enablement partnership, we worked with Glacial Wood to establish a weighted sales pipeline in the HubSpot CRM. Weighting the pipeline allowed them to better forecast sales based on the likelihood of any given deal closing depending on its stage in the process.

In the last year, a majority of Glacial Wood’s deals are in the "Quoting" stage of the pipeline, which has an 80 percent chance to close. That works out to $2.15 million dollars in revenue. Closing just a fraction of those deals would grow their business by leaps and bounds. In fact, they’ve already had to hire more staff and purchase new production equipment just to keep up with the ever-growing pipeline.

Spreading the Love

Initially, we started consulting one of Glacial Wood’s internal sales reps, Turner. We worked with him each week on things like sales training and consulting via an hour-long phone call with our President, Dan Soldner. During that call, Dan discussed not only tips and tricks for using the CRM itself, from a technical and efficiency standpoint, but also consulted Turner on how to be a better salesman; how to solve for the customer and not for Glacial Wood. Because, as we’ve learned, companies that can best help their customers are the ones who win.

Out of those successes, Glacial Wood has jumped on the CRM bandwagon. This has improved their processes and helped them get better at selling using proven technology.

Big Opportunities

Now that Glacial Wood has a proven sales process, they’re able to identify which leads are worth follow-up and which are not. This has uncovered some huge opportunities for them. One of those is a custom watchmaking company looking for a manufacturing partner to turn out the wooden components for their timepieces. All of the products would need to be turned and carved by a trusted vendor and it was very important the products be made right here in the U.S. of A. That prospect found the Glacial Wood website through organic search. They visited the process page and clicked on a CTA to request a quote without visiting any other pages first. They filled out the form and started through Glacial’s sales process. 

The process page isn’t like most “process” pages out there. It has clear and specific content that outlines the exact process Glacial Wood uses for their customers in seven simple steps – which happen to be graphically displayed via a mini-infographic for easy consumption. It’s also among the ten most visited pages on the entire website.

The fact that this prospect didn’t see a need to validate their decision by consuming other content on the site goes to show that impactful and valuable website copy works wonders. This also brings it back full circle to the beginning of our partnership with Glacial Wood. Had it not been for the website redesign or the content marketing that improved their organic rankings on Google, this prospect may never have found their site at all. Or, if they had, likely wouldn’t have converted so quickly – if at all.

So, why are we talking about this prospect so much? Well, that single lead is currently in the Quoting stage of the pipeline, which has an 80 percent chance to close. And it happens to be a $1.5 million dollar opportunity. Now, Glacial Wood is a two million dollar company as-is. Closing that particular deal would nearly double the size of the company overnight.

#IMPACT.

Getting Better & Moving Ahead

One of the core tenants here at Leighton Interactive is to continually get better. Get better in our careers. Get better in our lives. By getting better, we can help our clients get better as well. And that’s exactly what we did with Glacial Wood.

Our partnership started with a website redesign and brand makeover, then moved into a wildly successful inbound marketing campaign. We helped Glacial get better.

When they realized their team wasn’t equipped to handle all the leads coming in, they came to us for help qualifying, organizing, and nurturing those leads. We helped Glacial Wood get better, again.

The best part, at least in our opinion, is that we did all of it through HubSpot, which allowed Glacial Wood to accurately close the loop on leads. Some companies don’t like the notion of putting all their eggs in one basket. We disagree. The most accurate way to close the sales loop is to have a single source of truth for customer and prospect data. And that’s exactly what we did with the resources at our disposal.

Using the tools and processes in HubSpot Marketing and HubSpot CRM, we helped them win.