Mastering the Power of Process with Elyse Flynn Meyer

Elyse Flynn Meyer is the founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions, a Phoenix inbound agency and HubSpot Gold partner that was just over three years old when this was recorded in early 2016. Gray MacKenzie hosted; Andrew Dymski introduced the episode. Gray asked about Prism’s HubSpot integration work, a client whose sales follow-up needed fixing, the editorial calendar process inside onboarding, and what Elyse was working to improve.

Four years in-house: 40 leads a month to 1,200

Gray asked whether she’d used HubSpot before Prism. She had, running marketing and enrollment at Thunderbird School of Global Management in Phoenix.

We started using HubSpot really about a week after I started there. I truthfully wasn’t really sure what HubSpot was, but I knew that we needed something, because we didn’t have enough leads coming in… Once we got HubSpot on board, we were seeing our leads increase exponentially, from 40 leads a month all the way up to about 1,200 leads a month in the first year.

(Listen at 3:08)

That same job gave her the story she tells every client who doubts blogging.

Before we started using HubSpot, we had about a six month close time from when someone became a lead to when they ultimately enrolled in a program. When we started using content and blogs, we decreased that to two months. So it was a dramatic change, and that was just in six months.

(Listen at 21:27)

Prism works in four verticals (healthcare, technology, higher education, and professional services), about 70 percent B2B.

Integrations: keep a list, introduce them on the client’s timeline

Prism had just won two HubSpot Impact Awards, one for an Uberflip integration for a healthcare client with 16 niche markets and one for GoChime, which retargets HubSpot smart lists on Facebook, for a B2B agriculture company. Gray asked how an agency keeps up when a new integration appears almost every other week.

As part of the onboarding process, we have a list of all of the integrations that HubSpot offers, basically, and there are certain clients who are going to be great for some of the integrations right off the bat. So something like HelloSign, which is an e-signature tool, that’s going to be great for clients right when they first start using HubSpot… But there are some other tools, like an Uberflip or even GoChime, where you might have to wait two or three months to introduce that to them.

(Listen at 12:26)

Clients new to inbound see integrations at their first quarterly review; clients who’ve been on HubSpot a year or two get the plug-and-play, low-cost ones sooner. “We will never introduce all of the integrations, because not all of them are going to work for every client.”

When marketing works and sales can’t keep up

A client about eight months in was receiving roughly twice its monthly lead goal, and sales wasn’t following up fast enough. The fix was HubSpot workflows that route each lead to its rep and manager, update the contact record, and trigger smart content on the site.

So anytime they have an MQL, marketing qualified lead, or a customer that comes to their website, we can automatically insert their account manager’s name on the sidebar or wherever it fits best on the site, so that the prospect can then contact their account manager directly.

(Listen at 16:00)

The client is in a relationship-driven corner of healthcare, so phone calls matter more than form fills.

What we’ve seen is their call traffic has increased three times just directly to the reps, and they’ve seen 1.8 times the growth in revenue over the last four months since this has been implemented.

(Listen at 16:38)

A 126-step onboarding checklist, and the editorial calendar inside it

Gray asked for one process to walk through.

I would say that probably our best process would be our HubSpot onboarding process, but I won’t bore you with the details of that, because that’s a 126 step checklist that we have.

(Listen at 18:25)

Onboarding runs four to eight weeks depending on whether the client is already on HubSpot. The piece she walked through is the editorial calendar.

The first step that we do as part of this is we analyze their existing keyword traffic on the site. So before doing any SEO audits or anything like that, we want to look at what’s been working pre-HubSpot or pre-working with our agency. And then from there we’ll analyze all of the new keywords from a complete SEO audit that we do… But before we present that to them, we always interview members of their marketing team, their sales team and leadership.

(Listen at 19:39)

The interviews do two jobs: marketing teams usually ask for short head terms, which is Prism’s opening to teach long-tail keywords, and sales teams surface the questions they answer every week, which become posts. The deliverable is five to ten target keywords for the next three to four months and 16 to 30 blog topics, in about two to three weeks.

The 2016 focus: hiring, and onboarding employees as well as clients

Asked where Prism was struggling, Elyse named hiring: inbound.org’s job board had made the candidate pool almost overwhelming, and she wanted a more strategic process for choosing well. Internal priorities also slide when every hour goes to clients (Prism’s own blog could go a week or two without a post while ten client posts went out). The next gap was the mirror image of her client process: the same level of onboarding for new employees, because “it’s even more important to get them up to speed faster.”

The full episode also covers Prism’s tool picks: HelloSign, which marks a signed contract as a customer in HubSpot (one client had been paying about $7,000 a month in mileage for reps to collect signatures in person), and Crazy Egg heat maps.