Billion Dollar companies of the world sell to Small Businesses: Using automation + thoughtful processes to scale!

Once upon a time, I signed up for a marketing tool trial from a very established player in the marketing world.

It was an epic tool, but at that time we didn’t have the scale for it to make financial sense.

I also didn’t understand the true value of content. (Hint: it’s not just to entertain people who visit your social media/website pages)

Anyways, after the trial they reached out to me and did a series of exercises with me; They wanted to help me grow my business so I would get on their platform.

It felt uplifting to get one on one time with someone from that company (their size + authority makes them a pretty prestigious firm).

They followed up every quarter, but they didn’t understand one thing – their pricing model was prohibitive to most, less-than-10-people firms; yet they kept reaching out. (This is a topic for a different article.)

Anyways, a couple of years went by… I was researching a solution for one of our clients.

Out of sheer curiosity, I clicked on their pricing page…

5 minutes later I got a heavily personalized email with all the data points they had collected in the past. “Faris! It’s been a couple of years since we chatted…”

I had opened the email, and without realizing it – sent them a read receipt notification.

15 minutes later, I got a phone call. Didn’t pick up, so they left me a personalized voicemail.

A day later I got a follow-up email; they wanted to talk about sales goals & metrics from the past.

I was floored. How the hell did they remember all this?

Then it made sense, the exercises they had put me through in the past was a process. They had noted all the metrics in their CRM. The entire outreach had been an automated system, with a 10-minute to-do list line item on some sales rep’s urgent to-do list.

This business was a multi-billion dollar software business called Hubspot.

They had created a process that allowed them to reach people at mass scale – all while using a small team of sales reps to handle sales calls.

What’s the moral of this story?

Thoughtful messaging when integrated with “smart” marketing automation tools + a personal touch can really help grow a business on autopilot. 

Marketing + sales needs to be an integrated process.