IP Solutions is a Hosted Telephony, Unified Communications and Cloud Contact Centre solutions provider that makes business and communications technology more accessible, more responsive and more effective.

The company helps its customer to embrace the opportunities of communications technology for greater employee collaboration and productivity. Its core services help businesses to adopt a more agile communications infrastructure and enhance their customer service capabilities, while also reducing operating costs.

IP Solutions works across a wide range of industries, working with notable clients including Which?, Abel & Cole, Chubb, and Action For Kids.

About the Client

Company

IP Solutions began working with First Base in February 2017. The company had three key drivers for seeking First Base’s support.

Firstly, IP Solutions wanted to build pipelines that connected sales and marketing for a more seamless customer acquisition process, and could prove the ROI of marketing activities. The business’s sales and marketing teams had traditionally operated in two separate spheres, proving wasteful. They needed a mechanism that would bring everything they did together.

Secondly, the company wanted to change the way in approached marketing. The company’s previous marketing approach relied heavily on outbound efforts, such as emails and cold calls. This approach made it difficult to forecast and plan around their marketing efforts.

Finally, IP Solutions had recently completed a rebrand, and wanted to take the new brand proposition into its marketing. This included the creation of content that reflected the new brand personality.

The creation of content that reflected the new brand personality.

The key objective of First Base’s programme was to integrate all phases of the customer journey into a strategic marketing pipeline.

This meant installing a process that identified and nurtured Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), and giving IP Solutions’ sales teams the tools and content they needed to more accurately qualify leads and nurture them through their sales funnel.

This process involved creation of a lead development bridge between sales an marketing. In practice, this meant that as new leads arrived from marketing activities, they would be passed on to the lead development team for qualification before being handed to the senior sales team for conversion.

First Base became an integral part of IP Solutions’ team in order to effectively deliver this process.

As a starting point for the programme, First Base completed as series of internal interviews with IP Solutions’ senior executives and sales teams to better understand who was buying the company’s services.

Through this analysis, First Base distinguished two broad types of buyers - business solutions focused and technical solutions focused – from which to base a series of persona types. This helped IP Solutions to consolidate a view of whom they were seeking to engage, and the varied needs these buyers may have.

This audience development helped uncover the topics and issues important to these persona types, helping to define the content that would appeal to them and address their needs.

The process also revealed the challenge IP Solutions was having in identifying the right message for the right buyer persona. Previous marketing efforts failed to properly address the different levels of technical understanding between the audiences, therefore meaning marketing messages often proved ineffective.

By filtering these personas through the marketing and sales materials, IP Solutions was better equipped to find the right touch points for establishing contact with prospects, and for more accurately identifying the appropriate point for sales contact.

The main focus for the programme was in finding a way to strategically bridge IP Solutions use of HubSpot for marketing and CRM, and Salesforce for sales.

In order to streamline this process and make the customer journey more trackable, First Base designated responsibility for passing leads between the two platforms to the lead development team. This meant that prospects that engaged with marketing content could be elevated into more sales-focused communication in order to close.

First Base also created an automated follow up process for nurturing leads. This involved establishing a sequence of communications based on actions and triggers, which would automatically allocate tasks for lead development to help them manage the pipeline.

This process to integrate the functionalities of HubSpot and Salesforce served to join two siloed teams, creating a feedback loop whereby prospects that didn’t convert could be passed back to marketing for longer term nurture.

The HubSpot and Salesforce activity was supported by paid media, including Sponsored LinkedIn, Google PPC and Display Ads, and Content syndication.

This media strategy helped IP Solutions to make sure they were delivering the right message, to the right personas, at the appropriate point in the sales process.

“Working with First Base has had a significant impact on the way we approach our marketing. Adopting First Base’s proprietary process has given us a much clearer view of our buyers’ journey and a solid lead scoring framework through which to qualify the suitability of prospects. Our sales and marketing teams are now able to work in tandem to make sure that we deliver the most suitable content and take the most appropriate action for each prospect. This framework is likely to underpin our sales and marketing strategy for many years, helping us to connect with the very people we want to be working with and contributing greatly to our bottom line.”

Jeremy Langley | CMO | IP Solutions UK

Working with First Base has had a significant impact on the way we approach our marketing

IP Solutions is a Hosted Telephony, Unified Communications and Cloud Contact Centre solutions provider with the purpose of making business and communications technology more accessible, more responsive and more effective.

IP Solutions began working with First Base in February 2017, with the goal of developing a more strategic and seamless sales process. This process would need to overcome a perceived issue whereby the marketing and sales teams effectively worked in silos, missing out on opportunities to nurture and convert leads.

First Base implemented a strategic programme that united the two teams from a technological perspective, and utilised content geared towards distinct personas to help nurture leads at all stages of the funnel.

HubSpot Setup and Integration Programme

Strategy

Objectives of the

Campaign

Target Audience

Media, Channels or Techniques

Used

Review & Discovery: Audience Development workshop, executive and sales interviews. ‘Quick wins’ campaigns to produce initial insights to support recommendations.

Persona development, HubSpot configuration, and demand generation funnels & customer workflow automation

Real-time reporting using dashboards and monthly reporting by channel

Programme evaluation and forward planning

Mar 2017

Mar-May 2017

Jun 2017

Feb 2017

Timescales of the

Campaign

Budgets

£1,000HubSpot Discover & Review

£7,000HubSpot

configuration

£10,000HubSpot demand

generation funnels and custom workflow

automation

Results

Total Spend!£18k

The key result of First Bases activity was to connect and close the loop between sales and marketing.

Marketing activity could now be accurately attributed to successful lead generation, and prospects could be ascended up the sales cycle or descended for longer term nurture based on the data stored in HubSpot.

The use of such metrics across the process meant that First Base could be more granular and systematic in its approach, allowing the needs of

prospective customers to be more accurately and contextually targeted with content.

Testimonial