Call it putting your money where your mouth is. Eating your own dog food, or drinking your own champagne is what tech companies do when they use their own product for their business.
At Hatchbuck, we’re doing just that, and we’ve found that using our own product gives us an edge in developing an innovative, user-friendly product.
How The Hatchbuck Team Uses Hatchbuck to Grow
Hatchbuck isn’t just a peripheral product we make an effort to incorporate in our business process. We aren’t something like talent acquisition software that we might use occasionally to make new hires. Instead, every function of our company runs on Hatchbuck, which is truly unique.
Marketing
We use Hatchbuck for sustainable lead generation. It starts with connecting to new small business owners, warming them up through lead nurturing, and sending hot prospects to our sales team.
Small business owners find us through social media, SEO and referrals. We connect with them through Hatchbuck lead generation forms on our website.
Hatchbuck lead gen forms capture newsletter subscribers, ebook downloads, and requests to demo Hatchbuck. Then, form actions segment new leads and start them on the appropriate campaign or send the appropriate autoresponder.
As new small business owners are added to our database through lead forms, Hatchbuck tracks how they interact with our emails and pages on our website. With these insights, we use email nurturing campaigns to move prospects into the next stage in the buying journey.
To measure success, we use deals to track our quarterly and monthly marketing goals. When a small business owner requests a demonstration of Hatchbuck through a demo request form on our website, Hatchbuck creates a deal and the sales process begins.
Sales
Hatchbuck automates our sales process so that our sales team can spend their time speaking to qualified leads – instead of prospecting or making cold calls.
When our sales team walks in each morning, they simply login to Hatchbuck to see their hottest opportunities and must do tasks for the day.
Hatchbuck automatically creates a deal, sends a notification to our business development team and generates a follow-up task when a small business owner requests a live demonstration. Our biz dev reps can work right through their task list in Hatchbuck to follow-up with new opportunities and qualify them before scheduling their live demonstration with a sales team member.
In addition to demonstrating the product to potential customers, follow-up is key to closing sales. Hatchbuck campaigns make it simple for our sales consultants to follow up with everyone in the sales pipeline, and ensure that we never miss an opportunity to turn a small business owner into a Hatchbuck customer.
Onboarding & Support
Communication doesn’t end after the sale. We are passionate about delivering one-on-one support, and Hatchbuck is integral in managing customer relationships. Each new customer is assigned a Hatchbuck consultant in Hatchbuck’s CRM who walks them through the onboarding process.
New customers are started on an onboarding campaign that include emails to the customer as well as tasks for their Hatchbuck consultant to complete.
One of our consultants, Lindsay, describes how she uses automation daily in her article, Tackling the Whole “Automation” Thing.
Leadership
It’s always tempting to make gut-based decisions, but at Hatchbuck we’re conscientious about being data-driven. Hatchbuck not only helps us automate processes and manage relationships, it is the barometer of our business.
Sales reports tell us how we’re performing on the marketing side to drive deals and helps us forecast how many customers the sales team is going to win for the month.
Lead source reporting shows decision makers which channels we should be investing in and where we might want to pull back some of our resources.
We can see the sales pipeline as a whole, keeping tabs on how much revenue can be mined from pending deals, and how well we are doing for the month, quarter or year.
The Advantages and Challenges of Drinking our Own Champagne
Strategy Smarts
Marketing automation is new and it can be complex. It’s our job to make it super simple for small business owners to pick up and implement.
Sales and marketing involves lots of moving parts that go beyond actual software. Content marketing, social media, SEO and digital advertising all play a part. So while we’ve mastered an understanding of the technology, it’s also imperative for us to understand inbound marketing, content and nurturing – the outer practices that fuel the marketing automation engine.
Operating our business with Hatchbuck gives us the insights to help our small business customers be successful, not just in learning the software, but improving their overall sales and marketing strategies.
The Ultimate Case Study
Because we’ve built our own success story using Hatchbuck, we can provide the framework and show small business owners how it can work for their business. We know the process works because with Hatchbuck’s CRM, email marketing and marketing automation tools, we haven’t made a cold call since we started up in 2012 and we have grown revenue by 2300%.
Organizational Knowledge Bank
Because Hatchbuck is central to our business, everyone on the team knows the product well. So when a small business owner tweets a question to our social media manager, a customer reaches out to their consultant for help with marketing strategy or a technology vendor pings marketing about a potential partnership, we are all equipped to help.
Another bonus is that, because the Hatchbuck team is Hatchbuck’s biggest power user, we are the first customer to work out usability issues and add new feature requests.
However, with all of the advantages of using our own product to grow our business, there is a challenge.
Just like drinking a bit too much bubbly, guzzling our own champagne can skew our vision if we let it.
Ultimately, we’re building a product for our customers – not for us. But we’ll be the first to admit that taking our own company out of the equation can be tough.
Being so close to the product means that we get ultra imaginative when it comes to feature requests and guessing what our customers might like.
However, if we added every feature we dreamed up on the fly, we’d have a monstrous, complicated product.
And that would take us away from our mission to provide small business owners with simple, easy-to-use sales and marketing tools.
We have to be extremely intentional about what we add to the product. This means putting our own agenda aside, and giving ourselves room to let the fizzy buzz wear off before scope-creep sends our roadmap to the wrong destination.
Surveying and interviewing our customers and our audience about what features they will truly use and need helps us stay true to our mission.
At Hatchbuck, we’re drinking our own champagne without losing site of the bigger picture – building a product that helps small business owners manage relationships and grow sales.
Cheers to that.