We recently published our customer success story on Joyride, a beverage manufacturer and distributor that has had some amazing results with Act-On’s marketing automation platform. In this Rethink Marketing podcast, Joyride’s Kat Krieger shares why Act-On has been a great fit for them and their customized sales qualification score.
Joyride delivers cold brew coffee kegs and specialty office coffee in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego and Boston. Sustainability and doing good in the world are core to Joyride’s brand. Joyride is the only beverage distributor and manufacturer in the world to be completely bottleless —having eliminated all single-use containers from our supply chain. They have saved over 11 million bottles and cans, and 25 million coffee pods from landfills, with 81% of their products made within 50 miles of the communities in which they are enjoyed.
“When we talk about sustainability, it’s not just because it’s a nice to do or a box that we should check,” Krieger said, Joyride’s marketing director. “We truly believe that it’s important and that we are making a positive impact on the world.”
“A couple of months ago when just one of our delivery trucks in Los Angeles saved 16,000 bottles in one day from the kegs that went out for delivery that day,” Krieger recalled. “I thought like, ‘Wow, I get to work here, this is amazing.’ Because every keg we sell saves roughly 80 bottles from being used. And so here we are, this craft beverage company, drinking way too much coffee, and yet we’re really having a net positive impact on the world, and it feels great.”
Customizing your lead qualification process
One of the cool things Joyride has been able to do — and win more business — is customizing their Contact Us form using Act-On forms. They call it their sales qualification score.
Joyride took a step back and really identified their ideal customers and what qualities or characteristics they had. For example, for an office wanting to offer a beverage service, Joyride wants to know how many employees they have, how many offices do they have, what industry are they in, what Joyride services are they interested in, are they just interested in hot coffee or are they also interested in cold, do they need equipment, do they not, are they the decision maker and so forth.
And they build all that — some 45 different criteria — into their inbound form. And that comes into Act-On and Joyride has assigned points based on how someone has answered every question. And then that immediately syncs to Joyride’s CRM, letting their sales leads or sales managers know how quickly they should act on the opportunity, and whether it’s really a fit for Joyride at a glance. And based on that lead score, they will know whether to follow up within the hour or within the day.
A form with 45 different criteria sounds off-putting. But as Krieger explains, “It is conditional, so depending on how they answer, they get presented with different options. It’s not quite as daunting as you would think. But if they are wholesale, they go down one path. Perhaps they want us to carry their product, they go down a different path. If they’re an office customer, yet a third path.
And we ask questions that really help us identify what kind of opportunity it is. And I think in the past we did no lead qualification at all. So our sales team was really spending just as much time chasing leads and opportunities that had no chance of closing and were not a great fit, as they did ones that were a great fit. And so in building the system, we’re really trying to not only increase leads, but increase the kind of leads we want to be customers, that are a great fit for Joyride.”
One of the benefits Act-On customers have is its Community, an online forum where marketers can share and learn best practices and hacks with the platform. Recent posts from customers include tips for setting up lead scoring and lead qualification.
Act-On’s intuitive platform
In their success story, Krieger discusses why Joyride chose Act-On as its marketing automation solution.
“I just love how intuitive it is. And especially coming from someone that’s used Act-On now for almost five years,” she said. “I think the greatest piece about it now is whether you’re working on a form, or a landing page, or an email, it’s just so drag and drop. And you almost don’t even have to think about it.
“I was also really, really pleasantly surprised by how we were able to build out our sales qualification matrix with Act-On. Could we have done it directly with our CRM? Probably. But it would’ve been a heck of a lot more complicated and really required some custom programming. And here we were just able to like build it right into an automated program. And it’s super easy.”
Episode Shownotes:
- Who is Joyride? What do they do? What makes them different?
- What were their challenges, and why were they looking for a marketing automation platform?
- What was their evaluation process and what other vendors did they consider?
- What were some of the ways they were using Act-On?
- How was Act-On helping Joyride create a more personal experience for their buyers?
- They are a small marketing team, how has Act-On helped them do more?
- One of the reasons they chose Act-On was its ability to scale with them as they grew, can you tell us about that?
- What were the results?