Overview

Like many companies in the food packaging industry, the RevereGroup needed to engage their prospects with value propositions that go beyond their competitive pricing. The company was sending prospects promotional emails, but the process for creating them was time-consuming and didn’t provide their sales team with the analytics they needed.

When the Faye Business Systems Group implemented Sugar CRM and Act-On Software, the RevereGroup was able to cut email development time in half, and provide both marketing and sales with the insight they needed to nurture and convert leads more effectively.

Challenge

The RevereGroup has been providing high quality food packaging to companies for nearly 80 years, with a focus on the specialty food market. Package printing and converting is a commodity, and their pricing was very competitive. But the company had difficulty developing lead generation practices that would position and sell their products based on other attributes. They were sending promotional emails, but designing them in HTML was time-consuming, and managing them required the company to manually connect the emails to an Excel spreadsheet.

They also had to contend with an extremely long sales cycle; it could take up to two years for a new lead to place their first order. The company needed to keep prospects engaged until they were ready to buy, but as a midsized, family-owned business, they had limited marketing resources they could dedicate to nurture them. And in order to be truly effective, their sales team needed marketing analytics that simply weren’t available.

With a large tradeshow looming on the horizon, the RevereGroup had to find a solution quickly.

Solution

To find a solution, the RevereGroup turned to Faye Business Systems Group (FayeBSG), a software company and consulting firm that specializes in marketing automation, CRM implementations, development and support. FayeBSG met this challenge by implementing Sugar CRM and integrating it with Act-On Software.

Highlights

Results

Thanks to Act-On and Sugar’s seamless integration, the RevereGroup was able to completely implement a solution in less than six weeks, giving them plenty of time to nurture leads from the tradeshow. The company sent their first tradeshow follow-up email within a month, and had a full email nurture campaign in place soon after.

Act-On helped the RevereGroup more deeply engage their prospects and customers by making it easy to deliver automated email and social media campaigns on topics other than price. Many packaging printers competing on price do so with extremely small margins, and the RevereGroup wanted to differentiate themselves with unique content about attributes such as LED-Driven Sustainability and Industry-Leading Technology. Act-On’s built-in templates and user-friendly interface allowed the company’s marketing team to cut the time it took to design their emails in half.

Integrating the two platforms also provided the intelligence the sales team was missing. Act-On’s lead scoring helped marketing identify the most qualified leads, and its lead activity history helped sales know when and how to respond to them. From within Sugar, sales can now see when prospects open an email, visit a landing page, or download a brochure, and then use that information to strategically engage their leads. Act-On’s website tracker alert even notifies sales when a lead is currently browsing the company’s website.

With Act-On, the RevereGroup can now segment lists, allowing the company to implement a comprehensive plan for lead generation, nurturing, and engagement. Marketing can assess factors such as lead source, line of business, and lead score, and then develop and send targeted messages that reflect a prospect’s interests, such as an email providing information on clear packaging or labels. RevereGroup’s campaigns also look more modern and professional, which has strengthened their brand.

Together, Act-On and Sugar have given the RevereGroup a marketing command station from which they can engage prospects, monitor their activity, and respond more effectively. Marketing and sales now act as a unified force, with marketing nurturing and scoring leads until they’re ready to hand off to sales, and sales using their greater insight to more quickly and easily turn those leads into happy, revenue-generating customers.