Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
This stage of the sales process is designed to better understand and potentially challenge the following with your prospect:
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Current Marketing Efforts vs. Ideal Customer Leveraging the 4 Core Services o Driving traffic - SEO, Social Media, Blogging o Conversion from traffic to lead – CTA’s and Landing Pages o Conversion from lead to customer – Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing o Analytics and Measurement – Closed Loop Reporting
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BANT/3C (concept of a conversion, capacity to create content internally, commitment) o Budget o Authority o Need o Timing
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GPCT
Important Note: The Diagnostic and Goal Setting call is a CONVERSATION not an interrogation. While the excel sheet contains a slew of questions, the intention is to facilitate a CONVERSATION about a prospect’s business and confirm what you uncovered in the IMA and further determine if you o Goal o Plan and your services will be valuable to them. Alternatively you may realize that you cannot help them or that you need to challenge that information o Challenge o Timeline they put in the excel spreadsheet. That is ok, feel free to do so.
Ideally, you’ve already asked all the pain questions in the IMA and you know everything about them; now is the time to see if they are willing to make a change in their business and better understand the ways in which you can help them facilitate that change. The example that comes to mind is that you are a doctor, and you already know what’s wrong with the patient
(IMA), so you use this meeting (Diagnostic) to do two things:
1.
To clarify and confirm their pains so you write the proper prescription
2.
To check that they are willing and open to take part in what you ultimately prescribe
To effectively execute a Diagnostic and Goal Setting call you only need to use one tool which is a completed Diagnostic and Goal Setting Excel spreadsheet. The sheet is used in a way in which the prospective client provides you with the opportunity to determine where there are holes or potential pitfalls in regards to current marketing efforts. Then use questions to control the call/meeting as effectively as possible as you move through the steps.
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
Important Note: This excel sheet is not meant to be a crutch for qualification of the prospect. By running an effective IMA you should have already determined that this is someone you want to spend more time pursuing and is qualified to do so. If you end up using this instead as a crutch for qualification you put yourself in the position to spend a significant amount of time providing information to a prospect that may never buy or bring you to the decision maker. This is about taking what you learned in the IMA and bringing it full circle to a conversation around the actual plan to make this prospective client successful and then executing on a contract based on that plan.
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***A completed spreadsheet – have the client fill this out ahead of time if possible as that is the preferred method. Worst case you’ll have to run through it with them question by question, but filled out ahead of time and in enough time for you to review prior with your CAM is preferred. ***
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Build Rapport – Get the prospect at ease, start to build trust.
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Set the Agenda – Establish exactly what will take place during the call.
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Warm Up/Big Picture – Get prospect talking about their experience filling out the excel sheet
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The Diagnostic Sheet a.
Inbound Marketing Questions (Traffic/Leads/Sales/Analytics) i.
How do their current services compare against what you know can be done by leveraging the 4 Core Services of Inbound Marketing and how this information compares/contrasts to what they told you during the IMA, check for any misalignment. b.
Historical Sales vs Growth Goals i.
Understand Current Business Growth Goals
1.
Discuss the numbers entered by the client and compare/contrast to what they told you during the IMA, check for any misalignment.
2.
Expose Consequences and Implications – What if they hit? What if they miss?
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The Goal Sheet a.
Run through steps 1-5 i.
Make appropriate changes to the numbers
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Close for Next Steps – Planning call/Contract or free resources from your website
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Setup for Plan Call
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
1.
Send the Diagnostic and Goal Setting sheet to the prospect ahead of time and ensure you receive it back at least 24 hours in advance so you can adequately prepare for the call.
2.
Once you receive it back ensure all areas are filled out to the best of the clients ability, notate anything not filled out correctly or that you suspect may or may not be accurate based on prior knowledge.
3.
Confirm the call by sending an Outlook/Gmail Calendar update before the call/meeting.
4.
Prepare your strategy for the call anticipating opportunities and objections. a.
Start by looking for any obvious holes in their marketing efforts. Does anything not line up from what you learned during your IMA or what’s currently visible on their website? Did your assumption that they have a top of the funnel issue or middle of the funnel issue come to light based on what they answered under the
Inbound Marketing Questions section? b.
Prepare some examples either from your website or other client’s websites of performing a specific inbound marketing activity well. For example, if they are unsure how driving traffic is critical to driving leads show some of your own analytics to prove how it worked for you or show an example of one of your client’s blogs that has a great call to action located within an article.
5.
Make a preliminary BANT assessment based on your previously acquired information about your prospect from the IMA and from the information provided in the Diagnostic sheet. a.
**Consult your Channel Account Manager for additional coaching on how to ensure your BANT assessments are correct.
6.
Start GoToMeeting at least 5 minutes prior to meeting start time if using GTM
7.
Make sure everyone knows who is running the call and what your role is.
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
Take note of where the prospect is located. Have you been there before? Do you have a friend or a family member who’s been there recently? Has their location been in the news lately? Do you have any common connections on LinkedIn? Think of other things you might have in common. Did you discuss something enjoyable and in common last time you met with them?
“What I would like to do on the call today is start off with a re-cap of our last call and your business objectives then move in to the information you filled out in the Diagnostic and Goal
Setting sheet. We’ll begin the call on the diagnostic portion together and work through the answers you’ve provided, next we’ll take the information you provided and enter it in to the inbound marketing calculator to better understand and come to an agreement on which levers in your marketing efforts you can pull to achieve your goals with the least amount of resistance. Does that meet your expectations for the call today?”
This conversation will focus more around what things you need to do differently in marketing your business; it’s not so much about the services that we typically offer clients. Our methodology for working with clients and the processes we take will of course help, but today we need to keep our business hats on regarding your business and its needs.
Was there anything on here that was confusing or that didn’t make sense as you were filling out the form? Or any changes that have taken place in the business since we last spoke?
To re-cap our last conversation:
You mentioned your goal was… (Fill in their goals)
You mentioned that your current plan is…. (Fill in their plans. *Note - if there is an openness to change their plan or they aren’t confident on it reiterate that here*)
There were also several challenges you expressed to me in our first call, you mentioned that…
(Fill in their challenges)
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
Just to ensure nothing has changed from a timing perspective on these initiatives you mentioned that you’d like to be at (Fill in the goal) by… (Fill in the timeline)
And that in order to move these initiatives through internally the process typically looks like…
(Fill in what you uncovered about their buying and decision making process)
Conversation Point: This is your first opportunity to continue on building trusted advisor status in this portion of the sales process. Your preparation and analyzing of their information is crucial to your success here. A well thought our plan and a relevant story to tell and examples to show of yourself or a similar client who struggled with a top of the funnel issue are great to have handy. This will continue on as a handy item for each section of the diagnostic and goal setting.
Our goal as we walk through the diagnostic sheet is to gain a core understanding as to the current scope of your business from a marketing perspective and where the most opportunity resides to make changes that will drive the biggest impact for you. Typically we see that people need to pull one of three levers in their business: driving more traffic, converting more traffic to leads, or converting more leads in to customers. With the data you provided and the inbound calculator we’ll make the determination today for which lever will have the biggest impact and act as a guide for the way we decide to do business together.
In terms of this top section around driving traffic there are typically 3 ways to do this effectively online and that’s through blogging/content creating, SEO, and social media.
Looking at what you’ve filled in and based on your current web performance how well do you feel that you are filling the top of your sales funnel with web traffic?
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
In analyzing your diagnostic and looking deeper in to your website after our previous conversation the Inbound
Marketing Assessment I found that you could be: (agree or disagree here with the client around their traffic driving efforts, successes, shortcomings etc.
Important Note: Provide specific tips over the course of the call to demonstrate knowledge, build credibility, and gain trust to allow you to dig deeper into your prospect’s business.
The first key activity to driving more traffic and by far the most important is content creation, particularly blogging. The more you publish to your site the more traffic you’ll get to your site from a SEO perspective as a well as social media perspective. Each blog article will help you target keywords for SEO, help attract inbound links to raise your authority in the search engines, and it will also give you content to share on social media channels. So blogging is really the driver here for traffic growth.
If not blogging ask: Were you aware how important blogging can be to SEO, social media the success of your website when it comes to driving traffic growth?
If they are blogging: I took a look at your current blogging efforts and it looks like you’re blogging about X times per week, insert comment about their ability to blog for kw’s, not receiving comments on articles etc. Your goal here is to find something on their blog that is not in accordance to best practices.
Important Note: Blogging may open up the conversation around a pain point of not having resources to blog as often as they should. That’s good! That’s where you come in! BUT REMEMBER keep the conversation about them and their business don’t pitch your incredible blogging skills. Now is not the time, if you continue building trust they’ll know you can blog effectively w/o you having to say it.
The second section on the Diagnostic sheet revolves around the current ability of your website to drive an adequate number of leads for your business.
Conversation Guideline: This part of the Diagnostic is a perfect tee up moving from content creation as it’s a natural progression to go from content creation to using that content to drive leads more effectively and tracking if top of the funnel activities helps their middle of the funnel goals.
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
From the perspective of driving more leads via your website you have some interesting existing assets available that you may or may not have known about.
Before going in to those can you walk me through your answers here first? You listed here that your current website visitor to lead conversion rate is X%, how can you be sure of that? What have you typically defined as a lead in the past? What forms do you see the most conversions on?
Other questions to consider asking:
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Where those visitors are coming from? Can you track that?
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What pages on your website contribute to driving more leads, meaning have you noticed trends amongst your leads that visit specific pages?
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How critical of an issue has lead generation been? Is this a top priority for you? Why?
Why not?
Interesting, well there are a few ways that you can improve your visit to lead ratio’s, have you ever been walked through those?
The easiest way is to simply create more offers on your website and put those offers behind a landing page. Typically only 3% of your website traffic on any day will be ready to hit your
“contact us” button so we’ll want to work collectively together to address how to capture the other 97% of your visitors. I noticed X and Y on your website, those could be great for developing offers around. One of the first things we should work on together is creating appropriate offers (usually 1-2 per page) and then placing those offers behind a landing page.
Our traffic driving activities which we talked about earlier will help compliment these and drive more eyes to your offers which in turn will impact your current lead generation efforts and help contribute to your revenue goals listed below.
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
Conversation Guideline: This is a perfect opportunity to tell a story and showcase some of your own or your customers well done CTA’s and landing pages to provide some content to what you are verbally describing.
ALWAYS ask for confirmation that they understand what you are talking about and see if they have any initial ideas for things that might resonate with their audience.
EVEN BETTER come prepared with a few easy options of CTA’s that would make for good conversation and suggestions.
The third item is understanding your current ability to drive more customers out of the leads you are generating via your website. Looking through your answers (walk through the columns, discuss any prepared holes in their approach or compliment their efforts)…
Typically this solely depends on the ability of your sales team to convert leads in to customers, but from a marketing perspective using inbound marketing we can actually contribute to that process and help create even more customers for your business. The way to do that effectively is through more frequent and more targeted emails to your database of marketing contacts.
This can be done in an automated fashion where we use the data to help us segment your list by the respective interests or by the activities people take on your website.
*Insert a key story about increasing lead to customer rates and how you’ve done it successfully*
The final component to all of this on the marketing side is being able to look holistically at all of the efforts being done and cohesively tie their results together so we can make smarter decisions together moving forward around your business.
(Walk through their answers and address any issues or weak spots you’ve uncovered)
*Feel free to leverage a screen shot or show your “sources” information since you’ve been successful in your inbound marketing efforts**
Our main goal is to cleanly identify with you over time what activities are generating the best results and even sometimes results that are not necessarily ideal so we can make the adequate changes quickly to move those efforts to something with a greater likelihood of success. The great thing about marketing is it’s a science; the bad thing about marketing is that
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012) it’s a science. It takes some time and effort to determine the best approach and best messaging for each stage of your website visitor’s experience. The good news is that having the right analytics tracking on the back end will enable us to effectively do that time and time again as we develop and grow our relationship together.
Are there any questions on driving more traffic, leads or sales via your website? Do you understand how it is a combination of activities that contribute to this and not just one item?
It’s important for us to note that there is no silver bullet, but leveraging consistency across these items is what will help us achieve your collective business goals.
So let’s spend a few minutes walking through what you’ve filled out here in regards to your business revenue goals versus where you currently are as a business. Understanding this will help me gain an understanding as to how you are trending with your business currently and to what velocity the necessary marketing activities will need occur to achieve success.
(Walk through their answers)
Some questions to consider:
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Where did these numbers come from? Is it something your partner has set forth?
Your CEO? Your board of investors?
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How concerned are you about this year’s goal? Do you feel they are realistic?
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If there was one key aspect about the business you felt you had to absolutely nail this year to ensure your goals are achieved what would that be? Why did you choose that?
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The last time you set business goals were you able to achieve them? o What did you implement last time that helped you achieve them? o Why didn’t you achieve them? If you didn’t achieve them what would you change looking back?
Now that I have a better understanding of your current digital marketing landscape as well as an understanding to the importance and likelihood of your business goals let’s spend some time determining which lever will have the greatest likelihood of helping you achieve those goals. I mentioned the idea earlier that there are typically three levers in any business to pull: traffic, visit to lead conversions, and lead to customer conversions. While the lead to customer conversions always seems like the obvious choice it’s far from the typical case.
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
Step 1:
Based on the numbers you provided earlier the calculator lets us know how much new revenue you’ll need to book to achieve your goals listed in the revenue goals section. This is saying X, does that sound about right? Why? Why not? If not what should it be?
Step 2:
We talked about your monthly revenue goal which is already in here, but what we didn’t talk about was what percentage of your new business you expect to come from our partnership.
What would that number be? What other marketing activities are going to help you make up the gap to 100% and drive new revenue this year? Have you determined those?
Step 3:
What the calculator is saying is that based on your goal for new booked revenue and the percentage of customers that need to come from your inbound efforts you’ll need to acquire X amount of new customers per month (F18 BOX)
Step 4:
Based on the numbers you’ve given me about your current conversion percentages this means that you will need X (F25 BOX) leads at your current conversion rates to hit your current revenue goal. So what I mean is that for every 100 leads you generate essentially X become a customer (1% of 100 would be 1  , do the appropriate math here). So at your current revenue per client rate you’ll need to generate the amount of leads shown here. Earlier you mentioned that you currently get X amount of leads per month, so that is an increase of X amount (is this a big jump? Not a big jump? Talk about it)
Important Note: It’s critical that you do this ahead of time and know the numbers you are going to enter here before going in to the call. Preparation is the true key to nailing the calculator with confidence.
With a slight tweak here and leveraging more frequent email marketing and lead nurturing campaigns let’s say we can move the needle to X%. That drastically changes the number to X
(G25 BOX) and changes the number of leads needed to X (is this more realistic? Do they agree
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012) or disagree? Does everyone including you think this is the lever they should pull? Talk about why or why not).
STEP 5:
Alternatively let’s look at another lever which is driving more visitors against the lever of conversion of visitor to lead. So if you were to do nothing different this is saying that you’d need to get X visitors to your website, you mentioned earlier that you currently get X.
So let’s talk about making these numbers work a little easier. This comes back to the key activities we mentioned earlier. We talked earlier about leveraging X,Y,Z to increase traffic.
Let’s say we execute well on that and work closely together leveraging calls-to-action and landing pages effectively to drive up our visitor to lead number. (Use the math you tested earlier and edit the number a bit and discuss the subsequent changes in traffic that it then shows. Is this only 2x what they are doing now? Is it still 10x their current levels?)
Now that we’ve increased your current %’s a bit you can see that the numbers start to look a bit better and certainly more achievable. My recommendation based on our conversations and the calculator is to get your lead to customer level up to X% and move the visit to lead to X%.
Doing this will enable you to reach your goals effectively.
Important Note: Conversion rates can be a tricky thing to talk about. In reality the industry average for many companies is in the 1% range, if someone can achieve a 3% or 5% conversion from lead to customer that is phenomenal. 8% would be the upper most range. Keep in mind that this varies widely company to company and also marketing activity to marketing activity. A great example is that our highest lead to customer conversion percent here at HubSpot is 1% on our organic search, but on specific keywords it’s as high as 3%.
After going through our conversations today, where do you feel the most opportunity lies to help you reach your goals? (Agree with them or disagree, have an open conversation about it, this will be telling to how well they’ve followed the conversation and if they understand how the activities you’ve talked about today will help them achieve their goals).
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
(only applicable if you haven’t decided that they aren’t worth spending more time pursuing. If you’ve determined to stop spending time with them then some free resources are a great easy let down for them).
Conversation Guideline:
The below list of questions isn’t meant to be an interrogation, you will probably already know the answers to many of them as they will have come out during the course of your conversations, make sure though that you do have a majority if not all of the answers to the below at some point in your sales process before the final step of presenting your solution and a contract. Refer to the advanced sales training webinar for even more examples of questions.
Also, these are not in any particular order, but more so suggested for flow of conversation.
(ONLY IF THEY ARE WORTH CLOSING!!!)
Based on our conversation today we’ve established that your goals are achievable and that leveraging inbound marketing activities through my firm will enable you to achieve those goals.
What are your thoughts at this point?
Do you feel that I understand your business goals and objectives?
Do you feel that I can help you achieve those goals?
Timeline:
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How long do you have before you need to begin the process of achieving those goals? o What happens if you reach them?
 What happens if you wait too long to start?
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What other things do we need to discuss before you’d be ready to hire me/my company to help you implement inbound marketing?
Competition:
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What other avenues are you exploring to help solve your marketing challenges?
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Are you working with other organizations now?
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Are you interviewing other organizations now?
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At this point, have you discovered any reasons, why you would choose to work with someone else, instead of us?
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
Authority/Decision Making Process:
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Who will be involved in making the decision internally to allocate a firm to assist in your marketing efforts?
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What objections do you foresee them having to what we’ve discussed?
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What information will they want to know before making the decision?
Budget:
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How much can you afford to invest now in order to hit your goals?
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Are you planning to reallocate funds from something else or has this been budgeted already?
Accountability:
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Who will be involved internally at your company to ensure this plans success?
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Will they be able to dedicate time to this imitative?
Typically, we’ll put together a contract so you can understand more about how we’ll actually implement much of the things we’ve discussed. Do you see any reason why you wouldn’t move forward?
Great, so it sounds like we should also invite X,Y,Z people to our next meeting since they’ll be involved in the decision making process. The next call we will review based upon your goals and your allotted budgetary levels the frequencies at which the marketing activities we’ve discussed today will need to occur to help you reach these goals. We’ll also present you with a contract and 3 options for services to choose from. Out of those 3 we will make our recommendation based on what we’ve learned about you, but ultimately it is your choice between them.
Do you have access to X person’s calendar? Shall we schedule that now?
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
So by now you’ve nailed the sales process congrats! They’ve agreed to make a decision during your next meeting and it’s your job to get it signed on the dotted line. In order to come up with a solid plan for the client you’ll need to complete the third tab on the Diagnostic and Goal
Setting sheet so let’s explore that.
So first things first let’s unhide all of the necessary columns in this tab; unhide rows B,C,E and
G. This helps you scale out your service offering accordingly for each package choice.
The top section rows 3-7 come straight from the information provided on the Diagnostic and
Goal Setting info provided by the client. This outlines some numbers for you and the client as to how significant their deficits are currently and how much work needs to be done to get to where they need to be.
The ultimate goal here is to present them with a 3 tiered pricing/packaging approach that either mimics that of your website (if it exists publicly already) or that you’ve customized a touch for them based on the lever you’ve agreed is the best one to pull to help them achieve their goals. So if it was driving more traffic for instance you may allocate more hours in the package towards content creation than say lead nurturing or email marketing, the reverse if they already had a lot of great content and just needed to drive more leads in to customers etc.
Effectively executing this portion means you will need to understand your margins on each of the services within inbound marketing. Fill in the time it takes for you to complete each activity once in row B and then add a cost value for that time in row C based on what you normally charge. After you complete all the services what you’ll end up with is a total package cost.
The only variables across the 3 packages are simply the volume of each activity. It stands true that in order for your client to reach their goals the fastest way possible they’ll need you to perform more of the most critical inbound marketing activities for them in a shorter period of time. So really the only limiting factor to their success is the size of their wallet. If they have aggressive enough goals, the need to hit those goals and the budget to do so don’t be surprised if they choose your most expensive option.
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Diagnostic and Goal Setting Play Book (September 2012)
***If you are a new partner and haven’t signed on any customers yet this is still an EXCELLENT sheet to go through to help derive the outline of your service offerings for your website and inbound marketing services.***
Once you’ve completed this section, ensure that your typed out contract has both a dotted line they can sign and a clearly defined section where your prospective client can choose which of the 3 packages they’d like to start with.
Good luck!
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