Many services-centric businesses skip or overlook the importance of leveraging the Client Journey – or “Proven Process” in EOS® terms – to acquire and serve more Ideal Clients. This is a huge missed opportunity for many reasons.

In this blog, we will look at a case study that shows how focusing on Ideal Clients and the Proven Process are the foundation for a successful Sales Process.

The Context

We worked with a business that provided back-office HR/benefits support for small to mid-sized companies. The company was growing steadily but not on a trajectory to meet its desired growth goals that would eventually allow it to sell the business. So, they needed to take action.

The Challenge

Their Integrator reached out for some help with a Sales Process to accelerate growth. After some initial discovery, we found that the problem was a bit deeper than a sales problem.
Sales, Marketing, and Client Success were at odds with each other. Sales and Marketing were not working together to fill the funnel with Ideal Clients. The Sales team was frustrated, complaining that they were getting ‘garbage’ leads from Marketing. The leads weren’t converting, forcing Sales to rely heavily on referrals instead.
Given that this was their only source of leads, the Sales team could not be picky, and they did whatever it took to close the referrals they received. Unfortunately, they were selling to clients who were not Ideal Clients, which caused friction between the Sales and Client Success teams. The handoff/onboarding process was constantly challenging, client satisfaction was low, and there was a lot of finger-pointing when it came to taking responsibility for unhappy clients.

Despite all of this, the business was still growing annually at 6.7%. However, this was a far cry from the 25% goal on their three-year plan. While frustrating, there was a good opportunity to align the business to get on track to meet its goals.

The Solution

Our client decided to take action. They sought our help to work with the team to align their business to acquire and serve more Ideal Clients. The entire Leadership team was involved in the project and all agreed that the problem was deeper than just a Sales problem.

Here’s what we did:

1. Refined their Ideal Client Profile:

We ensured all were focused on bringing on clients that the Client Success team was optimized to serve. One significant change was that they narrowed the criteria for the size of businesses they were targeting from 2500-5000 employees to 250-1500.

2. Client Journey / Proven Process Mapping:

Together, we mapped the ideal path to value for their Ideal Clients, ensuring a cohesive journey from initial engagement to long-term success.

3. Aligned their Core Processes:

We optimized Marketing, Sales, and Client Success processes to drive the desired path to value for Ideal Clients.

Here is a video that provides context on how the Client Journey / Proven Process mapping adds Context to the Core Processes:

 

From a Sales perspective, the refined Ideal Client Profile and Proven Process created a strong foundation for a Sales Roadmap designed to:

1. Optimize the “Onboarding” process to improve the handoff from Sales to Client Success in order to improve client satisfaction.
2. Develop a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) Process to immediately impact retention and increase revenue per client.
3. Develop an aligned Sales and Marketing approach to generate more ICP-qualified prospects via referrals and inbound leads.
4. Optimize the Sales Process to align with the newly developed Proven Process to win a higher % of ICP-qualified opportunities.

 

The Result

The immediate impact on the team was tremendous. They were all much more understanding and sensitive to the challenges faced by other team members and their departments. The disagreements and finger-pointing ended. Everyone was focused and aligned on targeting ideal prospects, bringing on the right clients, and ensuring the clients were positioned to realize maximum value from the Client Success team.

The newly aligned business had a freshly optimized Ideal Client Profile and a Proven process that provided a path to value to be used by the entire organization for internal alignment and client communications. They also got what they were initially looking for – an optimized Sales Process. By putting these pieces into action, the team was then able to create the internal processes to deliver a great experience:

• Marketing and Sales were aligned around a process to generate leads and referrals.
• Sales now had a Sales Process.
• Sales and Client Success worked together on an Onboarding Process to ensure clients were set up for long-term success.
• The Client Success team also had additional context to improve client satisfaction.

All in all, everyone – including prospects and clients – were on the right path. The project was so successful that the company was sold a year later, well before the vision.

 

Final Thoughts

This story is all too common. Small businesses naturally grow into misaligned, inward-facing, departmental silos. If this is your challenge, we’d love to talk with you to see if we can help you too!