Austin Lawrence Group

Please describe your company and your position there.

Since 1947, Cole Information has helped real estate, insurance, and home service professionals achieve their sales goals! Headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, Cole Information is a leading provider of actionable data technology that empowers small and medium-sized businesses. Founded as a directory company by Jack Cole, the firm and its integration partners offer hyper-local marketing solutions. Cole Information’s technology enables multi-channel customer acquisition leveraging its national consumer and commercial databases of more than 130 million households and 19 million businesses, plus unique datasets including cell phone numbers, email addresses, and automobile ownership.

For what projects/services did your company hire Austin Lawrence Group, and what were your goals?

After transforming from a print directory business to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, many challenges emerged for Cole. First, it's one-size-fits-all pricing for unlimited access to its data, which its customers were conditioned to expect, impacted revenue growth and profitability. Second, the technical knowledge to integrate its system to automate as much as possible, coach, advise and encourage Sales for quick implementation and revenue-generating results. CUSTOMER RENEWAL RATE DECLINE: For decades Cole operated by assumptively renewing its customer base and not using marketing and system automation to nurture and execute renewals. Cole continued to see its year-over-year renewal decline.

As a result, Cole decided it needed a health checkup on its business and hired Austin Lawrence Group (ALG) to review its marketing, sales, and customer success initiatives and related operations for opportunities to improve its churn rate. SALES & MARKETING TECHNOLOGY SELECTION & IMPLEMENTATION Cole's management team had identified the need to invest in a system to improve its customer's experience - onboarding to renewal. ALG shepherded this review that consisted of many factors and departments. SYSTEM INTEGRATION As ALG onboarded Cole to HubSpot, it was quickly determined that the system would need to pass along key data to provide Cole's prospects and customers with a seamless experience. But also so Cole's management team could utilize reporting to make quick decisions as it evolved into an auto-renewal business model.

SALES EXECUTION & COACHING Since 2020 Cole has started to be faced with a huge challenge. Prospects are increasingly harder to get ahold of, or when a connection is made, the Sales team started to deploy their phone scripts and email templates. Cole quickly needs to align its Sales human capital with proven and tested techniques that scale quickly.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Cole needed to quickly execute quickly (quick discovery to results) and find a trusted partner quickly; the management team turned to its network to find potential SaaS Marketing thought leaders who could execute beyond the recommendations. Cole's CEO had several initial conversations with Mr. Lempit at ALG through a trusted industry leader's referral to determine the fit and next steps. Because of the trusted referral and conversations with Mr. Lempit, and after an extensive review, Cole selected ALG based on; industry knowledge and experience, and ALG understood Cole's business very quickly.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and marking tools used.

To find the right solutions to help Cole retain its current customers and find new ones, the firm went through an extensive, independent review of several different software solutions and put huge metrics together on different companies that offer CRM packages, marketing platforms, and various combinations of these and sales pipeline management solutions. To automate Cole's sales, marketing, and service initiatives, ALG recommended replacing its old client-server CRM system with HubSpot Sales. ALG also recommended creating a customer success function that Cole's service organization would support. In addition, instead of focusing marketing on email-only initiatives,

ALG recommended to Cole that they should develop a comprehensive inbound and outbound marketing program and use HubSpot Enterprise Marketing, which would enable them to create nurture campaigns with customers via workflows. HubSpot's Functionality matched what Cole needed, but it was only one piece of the formula. Cole wanted to flip the switch on its old customer relationship management (CRM) system and the accounting system that it used for all of its billing. This was a major endeavor that could make or break the company. Cole evaluated several different platforms from software vendors and realized that no single solution could do everything.

Therefore, Cole needed to find the best components and figure out how to integrate them so they could talk to one another in a two-way conversation. The biggest challenge during this process was successfully connecting an automated subscription management system to HubSpot and vice versa. This would enable Cole to automate many sales and customer success activities. For example, a soon-to-expire subscription would trigger an email reminder that it was time to renew. To find the right solution, Cole set out on a quest to match features to the sustainability of its business and chose Chargify. ALG worked closely with Cole on the integration process to connect HubSpot and Chargify. It involved all four companies working closely together daily over four months.

ALG determined that another third-party solution was needed to sync HubSpot and Chargify during this process fully. This was new, unchartered territory for Cole, ALG, HubSpot, and Chargify. This project would mark the first-ever full, two-way integration between these two complex systems. The first explored solution was not sophisticated enough to get Cole across the finish line. As a result, ALG researched and presented additional solutions to Cole. One of these solutions, which was recommended to ALG from Chargify, was Cyclr, a low-code integration platform that enables non-programmers to build complex connectors between systems. Cyclr was indeed the missing piece of the HubSpot-and-Chargify integration. Cole, ALG, Chargify, and the Cyclr support team all worked together to set the stage for a two-way sync between the two systems by creating custom properties and tailoring existing ones.

ALG built the connectors, called "cycles" in Cyclr, to accommodate Cole's use cases:

• Sales reps close a deal in HubSpot, creating a new Chargify subscription.
• Sales and customer service reps cancel a deal in HubSpot, which triggers the cancellation of that subscription in Chargify.
• Customer signs up via a Chargify subscription page, which creates a new customer and closed-won deal in HubSpot.
• Changes to existing subscriptions and contacts in either system flow into the other system without creating duplicates. The final solution allowed the Cole team to reach its goal of working primarily within just one system, the HubSpot CRM.

Additionally, Cole has seen a huge increase in its renewal rate because the system solution proposed and created by ALG continues to provide results. Large portions of the system are fully automated and require little human involvement saving time and money.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

• President
• Chief Revenue Officer
• VP, Marketing Strategy & Client Services
• Director of Client Services Manager
• Digital Marketing
• Sales Enablement

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

Cole's annual subscription renewal rate has seen a 20-point increase. Because of the integrated systems created from this engagement, Cole can provide customer nurturing and support to over 50,000+ users. While unpredictable during the engagement, because of the work that started as a business health check into full system integration, Cole could move its workforce virtually during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Providing seamless customer support, deploying relevant content to small businesses all across the country. Cole is now also generating about 50% of its subscription sales through the eCommerce infrastructure created with ALG. Cole management has used many of the findings and recommendations that ALG provides to impact the human capital alignment and system resources. Millions of subscription revenue are now managed and supported by the SaaS system that ALG constructed and deployed on behalf of Cole Information.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

From the start, Cole could tell that the team at ALG genuinely cares for its client's success. From the start, they conducted weekly meetings with the Cole team. They were flexible with timing considerations and always were willing to go long on a call to get to the right solution or next steps. Each week Cole was provided detailed notes and found ALG client managers to be quick in their response or would let Cole know if they needed to get back. Mr. Lempit would attend these calls to ensure the execution was heading in the right direction. He cared that his team's recommendations were implemented, not just bullet points or charts in a presentation. Their team members have been very responsive and always professional, keeping their clients at the forefront.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

Many things impressed the Cole team when and as we continue to work with ALG. These are a few of the big things that make ALG unique:

1. They take the time to learn about you.
2. They get to work quickly.
3. Billing and SOW were always transparent and easy to understand.
4. Their expertise will get you to the results you need quickly.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

We have been very happy with Austin Lawrence Group's full support and they continue to work on our company's growth.