SparkReaction

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the director of brand and communication for Medirevv, a revenue cycle management firm in the healthcare space. We help hospitals, large academic medical center, large physician groups, and health systems get paid for their services by doing insurance, patient, and medical billing A/R follow up. We also provide medical coding and are currently expanding our service to be more of an end-to-end revenue cycle organization.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SparkReaction?

I was looking to optimize our use of HubSpot.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We brought HubSpot on as a tool in 2014 and worked with it for about a year and a half before realizing that we weren’t getting optimal use out of it, or getting the results we wanted. We brought in Spark to help us, and they started with a deep dive into our organization that resulted in a roadmap. Spark interviewed us extensively about our target market and content. They set future goals for us in terms of visits—now sessions—and our visitor to lead conversion rate. Overall, it was a three or four-month process of analyzing our workflows and developing a roadmap. From there we could either chose to implement the roadmap ourselves or work with Spark in doing that, and we chose the latter.

With their help we amped up our blog strategy: evening out our publishing pace, making sure there was a call to action at the bottom of each post, and creating content that would appeal to our target audience and personas. For example, they taught us how to write with our CFO hospital executive in mind as opposed to just regurgitating an article.

They streamlined our workflow. Since 2015, we’ve produced four webinars, six or eight white papers and e-books, and hundreds of blog posts that can include video clips, infographics, tip sheets, or checklists. With all of that content, they would handle the design and would occasionally help with the writing.

Additionally, they helped us with our website and continue to refresh it as the business changes. We switched from our own internally built site to the HubSpot platform and they handled everything in terms of design, including navigation and page structure.

Our business is growing as we’re adding service lines, or as there are regulation and patient-driven changes in healthcare, so we are constantly revamping or revisiting our processes, content, and website.

What is the team composition?

Early in the project, both of the founders were involved from a strategic perspective. They were very complementary to each other. One was knowledgeable about the backend of HubSpot, and the other focused on the strategy. We interacted directly with their executive team and had an account executive—I think the position was called an inbound strategist—which we talked to every day.

How did you come to work with SparkReaction?

I was looking for someone that had experience with HubSpot, so I went to a HubSpot User Group in Des Moines, Iowa. Spark hosted it, and I had a long chat with one of their founders. They were insightful and it was clear to me that we were their precise target market.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent around $150,000–$200,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We began working together in October 2015, and after they completed the roadmap for us in January 2016, we went to a monthly retainer. Because our work is constantly changing, we still have a working relationship with them.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

When we first began working with Spark, we used visits as a measurement but those are now referred to as sessions. At the beginning of the project, our visitor to lead conversion rate was minuscule, almost a non-existent percentage, and we are now consistently at 1.5%–2%.

How did SparkReaction perform from a project management standpoint?

Aside from our daily communication with our inbound strategist, we held weekly meetings and received monthly reports that indicated our successes and where we had more opportunities. We would discuss our strategy to understand the next steps and review our previous goals to see if they still made sense with our actual trajectory.

They were always available over phone or email, and willing to help immediately when things came up. There were a few times when the material they were writing didn’t align with what we wanted. We sat down with them, talked through everything, and they were very receptive.

They used Teamwork Projects as a communication and project management tool. We were able to assign tasks with due dates, upload files, and chat through the system. By using that, they created a bit of a movement at the enterprise level to find the most effective project management tools for us. We began by using Teamwork Projects, then switched to Trello, and now internally use an enterprise-wide system.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their design team is amazing. They were able to take us from being maybe a little too colorful, to still having color but in a sophisticated way that better appealed to our target market. They are also strategically very sound. They know what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and how to execute it in HubSpot.

The staff worked at understanding our business, learning our language, and being able to dive into what the issues were. A lot of times, the business is so ingrained in us that we forget to make it digestible for everyone. I was impressed with their willingness to understand our industry, learn our language, and take our content to the next level.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There may be slight room for improvement in relation to leadership accessibility, but that’s so minor I hesitate to mention it. Working with them has been great, so it’s difficult to think of anything.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be honest about what you don’t know and be open to thinking about your processes differently. Spark opened our eyes to a lot of content and strategic pieces in HubSpot that we either didn’t know existed or knew existed but didn’t know how to use.