Elevated Sales and Marketing Effectiveness Driven By Automation and Accurate Data

CHALLENGES

McKonly & Asbury serves businesses of all sizes and types locally and out of state. In addition to the typical services most accounting firms provide, McKonly & Asbury is unique in the degree of specialization it offers for companies in industries like manufacturing, distribution, construction, technology, healthcare, nonprofit, and affordable housing. The firm’s distinctive attributes call for nuanced sales and marketing processes. Unfortunately, those processes did not exist because the company didn’t have a software solution capable of supporting them.

Time-Consuming, Manual Processes; No Insights to Guide Marketing and Sales Strategies

According to Hillary Daecher (Marketing Coordinator) and Rob Duffield (Director of Client Engagement and Growth), McKonly & Asbury did not have an actual sales and marketing solution before working with Cargas. The company handled its sales process almost entirely through Excel sheets, and marketing efforts were also manual.

From a sales standpoint, they struggled with bottlenecks in the process and lacked meaningful insights about clients and prospects. Duffield described their sales forecasting abilities as “rudimentary at best.” They couldn’t tell who was visiting their website and engaging with specific pages. Hence, it was difficult to capture leads, identify people interested in their services, and recognize opportunities to gain customers and grow accounts.

“The sales process was clunky at best, and we couldn’t get the information we needed about our customers,” shared Duffield. “We pride ourselves on an excellent customer experience. So having a process that made becoming a customer clunky, inefficient, and ineffective created a less-than-stellar customer experience. That wasn’t true to who we are.”

Daecher said they used MailChimp for email marketing, but it didn’t have the personalization capabilities required for effectively targeting recipients based on their specific needs and interests. Moreover, managing email lists was an overwhelming and tedious task. Truing up of lists — dropping or adding recipients — was done completely manually.

“We didn’t have any tags to segment messages, so all emails would go to everybody on the list. There was a lot of data to comb through. One list had over 4,000 email addresses and updating it on a regular basis was cumbersome and time-consuming,” said Daecher.

Recognizing the need for a solution with robust data capabilities to drive the decision-making process in marketing and sales, Daecher and Duffield began exploring software options and implementation partners.

SOLUTIONS

HubSpot for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Relationship Management

McKonly & Asbury researched various software options and discovered HubSpot as a viable solution that fit the size of their firm and could expand with them. Daecher shared, “We became aware of Cargas as a company we could partner with when implementing HubSpot.”

According to Duffield, McKonly & Asbury had known Cargas for a long time. In fact, Cargas is one of the firm’s clients.

He said multiple factors go into making a software partner decision. Number one is reputation, and he said Cargas is known for providing stellar customer service and taking the time to understand clients’ unique needs.

“What we were looking for from Cargas was the ability to take what was ostensibly an archaic system of distributing marketing materials and trying to put our best foot forward to leverage technology in a way that allowed us to get things out more quickly and efficiently,” described Duffield.

They knew Cargas had the experience and expertise to help them get data points and establish baselines for measuring their effectiveness and determining what efforts are moving the needle and whether they are advancing in a direction that makes sense.

McKonly & Asbury began discussions with Eric Gervase (Cargas CRM Business Unit Sales Manager) and Wes Kintner (Business Development Representative) in mid-2022.

Cargas CRM Project Manager Daniel Hayes guided the implementation, and in January 2023, the solution went live with the following HubSpot products:

HubSpot Sales Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Cargas has also helped McKonly & Asbury implement integrations with CVENT (event management software) and GoToWebinar (webinar software).

“I cannot speak highly enough about the experience we’ve had with Cargas and the relationships we’ve built that continue to this today and continue to find value in.” 

—Rob Duffield, Director of Client Engagement and Growth, McKonly & Asbury

BENEFITS

A Holistic, Complete View of Customers and Prospects

HubSpot’s customized software tech stack, combining CRM and marketing, has been immensely valuable to McKonly & Asbury.

Daecher said it allows them to identify what people are looking for and interact with them more thoughtfully. “It enables us to capture information about everybody who comes to our website or engages with us through a form on our site or a webinar. It’s a more holistic approach.”

Heightened Efficiency and Productivity via Marketing Automation and Seamless List Management

McKonly & Asbury has saved time, eliminated manual tasks, and improved data integrity thanks to HubSpot’s list management and automation capabilities for email marketing and events.

HubSpot’s list segmentation allows the company to tailor messaging to the unique subsections of the types of clients McKonly & Asbury serves.

Duffield said, “We have the ability to have much more personalized and intimate conversations with our customers, referral sources, and potential customers.”

In addition, McKonly & Asbury has set up automation for their monthly webinars for their clients and prospects. “Setting everything up at the beginning of the month and letting it seamlessly push out means I don’t have to worry about it,” Daecher shared.

She said the HubSpot integration with GoToWebinar pulls customer information into HubSpot and gives her real-time information about who’s signing up for webinars and who’s opening emails.

“It gives us such good insights, which we didn’t have before. We’re able to make better decisions and market better to the people who are asking for the information,” she added.

Email marketing through HubSpot has also profoundly impacted the results of McKonly & Asbury’s annual leadership conference, COLLABORATE!

“We just wrapped up a major annual leadership conference and increased attendance by 30 percent over last year. Last year, we asked partners to send emails to invite clients, which was a tough ask for busy people. This year we did it all seamlessly in an automated way with the technology Cargas has helped us implement.”

—Rob Duffield, Director of Client Engagement and Growth, McKonly & Asbury

Proactive Sales Approach and a Competitive Edge

Daecher and Duffield said that before the HubSpot solution, they had to make a lot of assumptions about who they thought was visiting the McKonly & Asbury website and what their needs and interests were. But now, they have accurate data, enabling a more targeted and focused sales approach.

According to Duffield, the solution helps McKonly & Asbury’s sales team get their foot in the door with potential clients. “McKonly recognizes we can’t outman and outspend competitors, but what we can do is leverage technology to get us in front of decision-makers. That ability of technology to get us into rooms where decisions are made is a competitive game changer for us.”

The Ability to Track Success

McKonly & Asbury is using the solution implemented by Cargas to establish benchmarks for measuring their marketing and sales effectiveness.

Before the HubSpot solution, Daecher and Duffield said they couldn’t quantify metrics to measure success because they didn’t have the necessary data points.

“Cargas has given us the ability to do that. Now we can change headlines on emails to see what’s more effective. We have the ability to see who’s opening what and how they interact with our website and our people. We can see at what point they take action and contact us,” Duffield said. “That’s a game changer because, as we try things and innovate, we can see if we’re being more effective.”

Improved In-House Collaboration and an Enhanced Client Experience

The Cargas-implemented solution has facilitated collaboration internally at McKonly & Asbury.  Daecher explained, “Marketing was not at the forefront and not part of the decision-making process. Now with HubSpot implemented and the ability of our salespeople to see opportunities and results in real-time, we’re having deeper discussions about how marketing can support the sales team.”

The new software environment and process improvements are creating a better experience for McKonly & Asbury’s clients, too. According to Daecher, “It helps us tailor our messages to be more reflective and accurate of solutions that will help our audience.”

Duffield shared that getting relevant information to the right people supports McKonly & Asbury’s core vision statement, “helping others thrive.”

“We base our success on the success of our clients,” said Duffield. “We are leveraging the technology into the sales process to bring value to our customers.”

A Software Partner That “Gets Them”

Both Daecher and Duffield remarked that they appreciate how the Cargas team listened to and understood them.

“From the first conversation, they took the time to understand us. It never felt like a sales process; it felt like a solutions process,” shared Duffield. “Eric [Gervase] and Wes [Kintner] did a fantastic job.”

“It never felt like a sales process; it felt like a solutions process.”

—Rob Duffield, Director of Client Engagement and Growth, McKonly & Asbury

He said he was impressed by how quickly Gervase and Kintner identified which resources within Cargas were ideal for the project. They also facilitated McKonly & Asbury’s direct relationships with HubSpot.

Duffield added that Hayes’s project management contributed to the smooth and successful implementation. “Daniel’s organizational skills kept us focused and on track. The implementation roadmap he created was broad enough to provide the big picture yet included enough minutia, so nothing got missed. Everyone knew what they had to do and when.”

According to Daecher, the Cargas team helped them think through the best way to approach the implementation for maximal efficiency and results. Cargas prepared them for what information they needed to relay to their team.

“We went through a very thorough and thoughtful process with the Cargas team about what we were looking for, and they delivered,” explained Daecher. “It was a huge change for us, and they worked with us to achieve success. The fact that the rollout and implementation went so smoothly is such a testament to the Cargas team.”

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