Why WorkXO Powers Their Newest Project with Hatchbuck CRM Travis Arnold by Maddie Grant, Founding Partner of WorkXO We are WorkXO, a small business in the exciting process of what we call Mapping the Workplace Genome(™). We help companies of all sizes to map their own Workplace Genome, create an authentic brand story that helps to recruit people who are truly aligned to their business, and effectively push the culture transformation they’ve been dreaming of. We are still in the launching process, so in the past few months, we have been busy shoring up our internal processes so we hit the ground running. This includes finding the right CRM so we can build better relationships with our prospects and customers while scaling our business at the same time. The Challenge: Following Up with Prospects and Customers One of the first things we wanted to do to facilitate the launch of the Workplace Genome project – partly because we were combining an existing culture change consultancy with a new partner and new technologies – was consolidate all of the different ways we were reaching our customers. Email Lists: We had email lists all over the place. We had been in a referral business, meaning our pipeline consisted of “being lucky that people email us to ask us to do work”; we had no concept of what a true CRM process would look like. Contact Management: We had a low-tech way (basically a Gmail plugin) of keeping track of certain prospects and whether we needed to follow up or not, but it lacked any kind of to-do reminders. Sales Pipeline: We had some random pipeline spreadsheets where we manually tracked how much money was contracted to come in each quarter, but we had separate documents for pipeline versus sold and no easy way to connect them. We were so busy just doing the really important work that we do, that we had basically no infrastructure. We knew that a piecemeal process wasn’t going to cut it in the new company we were building – we were going to have exponentially many more customers in varying stages of the customer lifecycle. We would have referral business, like always. Our subscriber base is growing through the popular content we’re writing – topics like digital transformation and humanizing the workplace. Lastly, we had some new products and services to sell that we already knew we would want to build campaigns around. It was enough to make our heads spin, trying to make sense of how to organize it all. Oh, and did I mention there are only three of us? So when we started investigating CRMs, we panicked a little, because: We didn’t want to spend a ton of money on some huge system we didn’t need and wouldn’t be able to understand; we knew that we needed to start forming some new habits around building relationships with customers; and we needed it to be like “connective tissue” between all of the new things we were going to be doing. So when we found Hatchbuck, it was like a light shining from above, illuminating the path through the forest. (Not even joking). The Results: Hatchbuck Wins For a start, we could immediately migrate all of our various email lists into Hatchbuck in a matter of minutes, while tagging them with specific tags so we could keep a record of where these lists had originally come from. We immediately began to see how we could slice and dice our now huge list in multiple ways to maintain our ability to nurture relationships with individuals – that personalized handshake which we believe is at the core of building a company. Not only that, but we started immediately seeing how different people were clicking around different places on our website. We were able to set up rules so that we would be notified if someone was clicking around our consulting pages versus our Genome pages. And of course if anyone filled out our contact forms, we would know immediately what exactly they were interested in. And once we had those initial prospect conversations, we could instantly adjust their profile information and proposal statuses to keep track on a constant basis of the progress of those conversations. Most importantly, we could use the email marketing functionalities to make sure we could stay top of mind, by sending them the latest blog posts that were relevant to what they had been looking at. We’re just at the beginning of this journey – we only implemented Hatchbuck a month ago! We haven’t even scratched the surface yet in terms of automating campaigns, further segmenting our leads and customers, and all of the things we want to try. But we’re excited, and particularly grateful to have a partner in Hatchbuck to lead the way. About Maddie Grant Maddie gained notoriety as an expert digital strategist who has helped hundreds of organizations engage with their customer base and build capacity for using social media and online communities to achieve business results. Recognizing the transformative and human-centric power of social media early on, she helped organizations integrate social media into their culture authentically, rather than attempting to bolt it on a new process. In addition to her culture change work at WorkXO, Maddie is Editor of SocialFish.org, one of the most visited and respected blogs written for nonprofit and association executives. She is ALWAYS working on her next book, and the two she wrote with her partner, Jamie Notter, are clearly just the beginning (see When Millennials Take Over). About WorkXO We are WorkXO, a small business centered around what we call Mapping the Workplace Genome(™) – our proprietary assessment, based on years of our research and writing, that allows companies of all sizes to understand “what it’s really like to work here”. With your Workplace Genome, you can create an authentic brand story that helps you recruit people who are truly aligned to your business, and effectively push culture transformation, which so many companies are trying to do in our changing times.