As a business owner, you know leads are important. But there’s a difference in the quality of leads.
High-quality leads – the ones that turn into actual sales – are the lifeline of your business. They hold the power in propelling your business forward and helping you to achieve continued growth.
Low-quality leads, though? They feel good at first, but when the lead never actually makes a purchase, your ROI suffers. And achieving low-quality leads alone for long enough will cause your business to dry up and die.
Getting high-quality leads is one of the biggest challenges business owners and entrepreneurs face. Constantly trying to expand your reach and generate the kind of leads that turn into actual sales can be challenging and draining.
That’s exactly the challenge one consulting firm faced, but when a fractional CMO stepped in to help, they were able to connect the dots between their marketing and their bottom line.
The Challenge: A Lack of Marketing Strategy
The client, a financial services consulting boutique firm serving community banks and credit unions across the US, was struggling to generate quality leads that turned into sales. It was clear their marketing practices were failing.
Like many other businesses, they tried working with marketing agencies, but with little or no success. These agencies merely offered help with short-term marketing tactics, while the company continued to lack a strategic marketing plan.
It should come as no surprise that the CEO was concerned and feeling frustrated. But help was on the way.
The Plan: Score Higher-Quality Leads
The company knew they needed “someone in marketing who understood what it meant to ‘run’ a business,” so they reached out to Michael Carter, a fractional CMO and seasoned marketing executive with more than 25+ years in the financial industry.
Carter performed a full audit where he assessed the company’s most pressing marketing needs. He found that the company had a marketing and PR agency that was twice as expensive – and half as productive – as his own team which he brought to the table. There was no sales enablement, no linkage between marketing and sales, and the company’s website was a disaster.
Then he developed a customized solution to address those needs from a high-level strategy.
The focus would be on generating higher-quality leads. Using a hands-on approach, he assembled a mix of marketing tools, third-party providers, and internal resources to drive awareness, interest, and engagement with prospective clients.
The Results: Best In Class Marketing
“We needed someone who could connect the dots between marketing and sales and the bottom line,” the CEO told us. “Carter delivered.”
In the beginning, the client was seeing 18-24 Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) per month, but without linkage with Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs are the high-quality leads). During the engagement, Marketing Qualified Leads rose to more than 125 per year, and by the end of the engagement ROI for marketing was over 11.
Website traffic doubled year on year with the percentage of direct URL visitors increasing by more than 20% annually.
And with the use of a marketing automation platform, Executive and C-level management could now be alerted when MQLs were logged and could monitor the follow-up responsiveness of their sales team.
Their staff now included a full-time certified digital marketing manager, a content specialist, and a marketing associate, and they’d even established a marketing intern program with the local university and college.
Additionally, the company began a relationship with the country’s leading financial services PR boutique, securing more than $1.5 million in exposure in industry media.
The content published by the firm included proprietary research conducted with leading research entities such as Harris Insights.
And it was all possible as a result of connections. Connections with the right leads. And connections to their bottom line.
Ready to learn how Michael can help you connect the dots between your marketing and your bottom line?
Michael Carter has more than 15 years of executive technology leadership and more than 25 years in financial services.
Ranging from early-stage start-ups to international organizations, he has helped tech companies through startups, pivots, IPOs, acquisitions, and brand launches, repositions and consolidations.
