What happens when a small-town woodturning company suddenly generates more leads than it can handle? For Glacial Wood, a Minnesota-based manufacturer serving designers and builders worldwide, the answer wasn’t to slow down — it was to invest in sales enablement. The result? A $2.15M qualified pipeline and a single deal big enough to double the business overnight.
From marketing win to sales challenge
Glacial Wood entrusted us with nearly every aspect of their business, including updating the look and feel of their brand assets and designing a stunning new, conversion-focused website to bring them into the modern age of inbound marketing. The website included a photo and video shoot, too. Then we launched an inbound marketing campaign aimed at creating content that speaks directly to the buyer personas we researched for them.
That inbound marketing campaign included content creation, infographics, eBooks, case studies, videos, and copy updates.
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.
The solution: strategic sales enablement
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 its 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.
Even after a year since new content was posted to their site, including blogs and landing pages, website sessions were still up over 60 percent, and new contacts were over eight percent. This lends more credence to the power of great, evergreen content.
Setting controllable goals
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 you can control. Knowing this, we didn’t set sales goals for Glacial Wood. I know... this seems counterintuitive 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 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.
These are the number of each outreach actions they completed in a year. Clearly, they blew by the initial goal of 40 outreaches per week. All in all, they exceeded the goal by 252 percent!
How a weighted pipeline improved forecasting
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.
Through strategic sales enablement, Glacial Wood shifted the majority of its deals into the "Quoting" stage of the pipeline, which has an 80 percent chance of closing. 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.
Making sales enablement stick
Initially, we started consulting with one of Glacial Wood’s internal sales reps, Turner. We worked with him on things like sales training and consulting for an hour each week. During that time, we discussed not only tips and tricks for using the CRM itself, but also 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.
Uncovering high-value 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 the products would need to be made in the U.S.A. That prospect found the Glacial Wood website through organic search. They visited the custom woodwork 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 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.
Getting better and moving ahead
One of the core tenets here at Vye is to continually improve. By evolving, we can help our clients improve 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. When they realized their team wasn’t equipped to handle all the leads coming in, they came to us for
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.
Wondering how strategic messaging impacts bottom-line results? Review our recent client projects and the performance gains they generated.
