Struggling with Success

Implementing Best Practices at a Growing Firm

The Challenge

A CPA firm in Minnesota was experiencing growth in company size and profit. Despite fiscal success, the firm struggled in particular with scaling this success in the marketing department. These difficulties manifested in the following ways:

  • The firm had tried and abandoned three separate CRM implementations

  • Contacts lived in a variety of Excel files and practice management software

  • Form submissions for the ‘Contact Us’ website page went to a WordPress plugin module, where they remained forgotten and stale as time went on

  • The marketing email functionality was disorganized, with no logic to how customers received communications by service line

As a marketing professional with significant HubSpot experience, I was brought on to bring much-needed operational structure to the marketing function.

The Tactics

I implemented HubSpot.

It was important to manage the CRM implementation with a patient but firm outlook. At smaller firms, big personalities can have a large impact. It had to be communicated to senior leadership that this was not a decision that could be revisited on a whim.

We identifed and implemented marketing personas.

In interviews with senior leadership, I compared the client base for each department. I spent one quarterly Firm Growth meeting leading a working group of Partners to consolidate personas to our five most important demographics.

I created a custom property matrix.

I worked with senior leaders from each department and other operations staff to identify the data sets that needed to be populated in HubSpot for optimal audience segmentation.

I overhauled the lead generation process.

We moved form submissions on our contact page to using HubSpot, as well as adding contact forms on individual service offering pages. Previously, any form submission went to marketing and sales and had to be manually routed to the ideal SME within the firm. HubSpot’s submission follow-up function meant that SMEs could be individually attached to the respective landing page inquiries.

I created an email marketing calendar that was persona-centric.

We moved away from the reactionary process of sending one-off marketing emails, By using custom properties, segmentation went from a headache every send to a simple list-pull in HubSpot.

The Impact

  • Marketing became strategic, with a decision-making process that prioritized personas

  • Amount of contacts in CRM went up by 125% in a year

  • The open rate for emails went up past 30%, beating industry averages and increasing by 5% YoY