Thomas Had Obstacles to Producing Relevant Content Quickly
Thomas Witt Consulting is a B2B sales consultancy service for retail furniture stores in Germany. The market is small, with only around 200 decision makers in the industry, and the sales process is lengthy; Thomas nurtures between four to six customers over a period of seven to twelve months.
Because of the intimate nature of this industry, the key to success is attracting and winning a big name client that will generate excellent long-term revenue opportunities. Thomas knows that to land and retains those clients, excellent communication is vital.
Before using HubSpot, Thomas was occasionally posting to a rudimentary Wordpress blog and sent out weekly email newsletters through a mailing list provider. However, he knew it wasn’t enough. Thomas explains: “I was doing quite basic marketing. I didn’t add new content regularly to my blog, I was sending out a newsletter per week, some paper mail-outs, and I had one or two telemarketers doing cold calling.”
Thomas’s main challenge was to produce relevant content quickly. The tools he was using were slow and frustrating. For example, he had to follow a multi-day process to make a landing page - he had to create a lead capture form using his email marketing software provider and then mail the code to his Wordpress designer to load up on to his website.
Thomas heard about HubSpot at a marketing mastery group in the US and decided to learn as much as possible about inbound marketing techniques. After one year of receiving HubSpot’s inbound marketing tips, Thomas felt the time was right to give the software a try.
HubSpot’s Tools Help Thomas Double Site Visitors and Quadruple Leads
A critical factor in his decision to buy HubSpot’s tools was the excellent customer service he received from his HubSpot Inbound Marketing Specialist: “One of the best salespeople I have ever met. He asked the right questions and listened.” This high level of customer care is something Thomas values highly and what his own sales consultancy business is all about. It was these shared values that prompted him to make a firm decision to purchase the HubSpot Inbound Marketing Software.
Once he was up and running, Thomas made the most of the HubSpot tools. For example, he used the Blogging platform to create a high volume of useful and informative blogs on sales tips and techniques for retail furniture stores. He was now able to get a landing page up and running himself without relying on web designers, which used to cost him days. He had gained full control of his marketing through HubSpot’s all-in-one marketing platform. Thomas says HubSpot helped motivate him to create more targeted content. The SEO tools in Marketing Hub prompted him to enter keywords with every blog post and warned him if he hadn’t completed the keywords correctly.
Thomas also loves working with HubSpot’s Email, Landing Pages and Call to Action tools. “You create them once, and you can reuse them all the time,” says Thomas. “If you do your marketing yourself if you don’t want to depend on a web designer for your stuff to go out, and if you’re in a very personal B2B situation where you know your leads, HubSpot gives you more control.”
To measure his activities, Thomas uses the Marketing Analytics Software. “The dashboard is excellent. You can always see where you stand compared to your goal and where you were last month or last year.” Thomas had set goals to double the number of monthly unique visitors to his website and increase his leads to 20 per month (from 3 – 5 per month) within six months. He had achieved his goal within a couple of months, so he doubled his targets.
Moreover, his hard work paid off when one day he received a long-anticipated phone call...
The White Whale
A few months after using HubSpot’s inbound marketing tools, the elusive large-scale furniture outlet prospect that Thomas had been trying to capture for over a year finally got in touch. “Someone who wasn’t interested a year ago rang me and said, “When can we arrange a meeting? We need to talk!”
The prospective client had found Thomas through a Google search on a common industry problem they were having. They found a blog Thomas had written on the topic (‘Does mystery shopping make sense?’) and saw him as a thought leader. “He got on my (blog) and website and spent four hours reading all of my articles, then printed them out and put them on his bosses desk and sent them to everyone else in the company. The rest is history,” explains Thomas.
That one big customer brought in a revenue of €80,000, which translated to over 1,000% ROI for Thomas’s first-year investment in HubSpot. Also, there’s an even higher lifetime revenue value for that customer.
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