This article shares the high-level takeaways from a webinar run by our CEO and Founder, Matthew Stibbe. To catch every pearl of wisdom, watch the full webinar here (gated content).
Like many other businesses, Articulate has experimented with various ways to build new relationships and attract new customers. In-house business development representatives (BDRs), salespeople, email agencies, telesales, appointment-setting, advertising… You name it, we’ve tried it. However, over the years, we’ve learned a great deal. And one thing is for sure: cold calling people and hoping they have a request for proposal (RFP) in their hands relies on luck, timing, and volumes of activity that can become dispiriting pretty quickly.
Six years ago, we were getting almost 100,000 visitors every month. Today, it’s a fraction of that. This is caused by a combination of things, including:
The industry has changed forever. Instead of experimenting with strategies we’ve tried before or the latest hacks for success, we decided to try something new. It was time to become our own customer.
We recognised that if we're selling our services to others, we should be doing it for ourselves. At Articulate, we offer a range of brand strategy and website strategy packages to our clients, helping them enhance their brand, website, content, lead generation, and more. Here’s what we delivered when we started treating Articulate as one of our clients:
Less than a year later, we have seen continuous improvement and progress. The result? More good-fit, engaged, sales-qualified leads than we have ever had. They're not the passive, unwitting, unwilling recipients of cold calls. Instead, they are attending our webinars, downloading our flagship reports, reading our blog content, and opening and clicking our emails. By taking our own advice, we’re becoming front of house and front of mind.
In addition to elevating our brand and adhering to website best practices, we decided to intensify our HubSpot experimentation to take our inbound strategy to the next level, with a particular focus on HubSpot’s inbound sales support tools. We are proud HubSpot partners and regularly help our clients maximise their return on investment (ROI) by showcasing what is possible within the tool. Once again, it was time to take our own advice.
Here are the tools, tactics and approaches that helped us connect with more sales-qualified leads than ever before.
HubSpot recently purchased ClearBit, a first-party data provider similar to Apollo. By leveraging this data, our Head of Sales can enrich our own database with company logos, company domain names, industries, keywords, web technologies, geography and more. This provides us with valuable insight for outreach, segmentation and targeting.
At Articulate, we use progressive form fields in HubSpot. This means using a single, smart form across all our content and webinar pages. If anybody fills in two forms, the second time they fill it in, we can ask them a different question. Perhaps we already have their email address, so instead, we’ll ask for their job title. As we build more complete profiles of each contact, we can uncover valuable insights, personalise communications and provide a more tailored experience.
In its updated lead scoring offering, HubSpot enables you to use a fixed amount of scoring points. Then, based on factors such as email engagement, website engagement, form fills, and submissions, leads are ranked on this scale. You can then bucket people into high, medium and low lead scores for more accurate nurturing.
HubSpot Smart Properties uses AI to enhance your contact and company data by providing answers to specific queries based on information already in your database or publicly available online. For example, you could ask whether a company is in healthtech or sustainability tech, and based on website content or previous interactions, HubSpot will classify it accordingly or leave it blank if uncertain. Each AI query costs approximately 10 credits, and most accounts include a monthly allocation. With the proper setup and a controlled list view, you can run up to 500 intelligent enrichments per month without incurring extra costs.
We use a tailored set of lifecycle stages, including subscriber, lead, MQL, SQL, opportunity, former opportunity, customer, former customer, job applicant, partner, supplier and disqualified competitor. Every contact or company sits in just one of these categories at any given time. Assigning a contact or company owner is also helpful, especially if you're using personalised, sender-specific email outreach at scale. This setup helps you manage communication more effectively and create better alignment across marketing, sales and operations.
We’ve deleted tens of thousands of contacts who were unreachable, disengaged, or simply no longer relevant. Either mark them as non-marketing contacts (so you’re not charged for them) or delete them entirely. We use third-party tools, such as Unbounce, to validate emails and identify out-of-date contacts. We also keep ‘do not email’ lists to protect sender reputation.
Every HubSpot plan includes basic tools for manual contact and company deduplication. We recommend setting aside regular time to do this. While some automation is available, it’s easy to overdo it, which is far trickier to fix than avoiding the problem in the first place. Tools like Insycle or Dedupley provide more automation, and some clients prefer these for larger datasets.
Identify gaps in segmentation or classification fields, and assess the effectiveness of your workflows. Over time, the goal is to reduce the number of unclassified records to a manageable handful. With this visibility, you can prioritise data clean-up efforts and continuously improve data quality across contacts and companies.
With clean, accurate data comes more opportunities for generating and nurturing leads.
Experiment with these powerful ways to make your marketing more relevant, efficient and effective.
When you take sales seriously, data enrichment and segmentation are foundational. Spend less time wrangling insufficient data and more time communicating with the right people at the right time. Want to find out more? Speak to a member of the Articulate team today.