Shreyansh Surana is the CEO and co-founder of Fractional CMO, an India-based agency that offers a full suite of digital solutions to help small to medium-sized businesses achieve business growth. When Shreyansh co-founded Fractional CMO with Rahul Mehta in 2017, Marketing Automation had flooded the market, but the duo realized there were only a handful of agencies specializing in marketing automation within the APAC region. The pair knew that as a new agency in the market, they had to associate themselves with a leading marketing automation platform and brand. This meant looking for a partner that could deliver the framework and resources to implement what they needed at scale and speed, and that’s when they engaged HubSpot. Since implementing HubSpot, Fractional CMO has successfully transitioned into a full-stack digital marketing service and gained a steady stream of retainer clients, allowing the business to increase revenue by 60%. This includes a 400% increase in traffic to the website and 2x more proposals generated monthly.
Founded in 2017, Fractional CMO has continued to grow and prosper with its customer first’ and holistic approach to marketing. FCMO strives to build long-term and trusting relationships with those they work with and aim to deliver finished products that constantly drive and improve results.Scrapping Fragmented Solutions for One Powerful PlatformBefore HubSpot, Fractional CMO was using multiple tools for marketing - they had Agile CRM for email campaigns, WordPress for blogging, HootSuite for social media, Raven for keywords data, and deals were tracked on Excel. The disjointed marketing and sales added inefficiencies to operations, sales, and their overall promotional efforts.
Also, while the team invested time, energy, and resources into creating content and sending emails to nurture leads, they lacked clarity on its impact, making it challenging to plan ahead and optimize their campaigns so that it attracted the right audience.
Considering how quick yet tedious the proposal creation process is, Fractional CMO needed a more efficient way to create, manage, and track proposal creation, as well as be able to gather better insights into their sales pipeline and performance. Fractional CMO was familiar with the benefits of setting up marketing automation for clients; however, they had not set it up for themselves due to a combination of meeting current client deadlines, responding to urgent requests, and securing new projects.
Organized and Automated: Consistency in MarketingGuided by the Inbound framework and the platform to execute in tow, Fractional CMO transformed their marketing by creating detailed buyer personas and then mapping out content against those personas. Meanwhile, the HubSpot tool worked in the background to collect data on website visitors and leads that interacted with the content.
The valuable insights gathered helped Fractional CMO tailor their email marketing, and deliver messages in a more personalized manner. This approach led to better lead nurturing programs and improved lead quality overall, which in turn meant better customers - evidenced by the 60% increase in revenue achieved.
In terms of tools, the agency’s favorite HubSpot features are workflows and emails, especially when it comes to nurturing leads. The team set up workflows that accelerated their proposal creation to 2 to 3 proposals weekly, compared to the 3 or 4 generated monthly before HubSpot marketing automation. They are also fond of using blogs and landing pages enhanced by SEO and calls-to-action to execute closed loop marketing. The HubSpot’s Analytics tools is also a favourite as it not only provides a much needed big picture view, but they get to present clients with comprehensive reporting when needed as well.
For Fractional CMO’s continued success, their dedicated channel consultants ensure the team maximizes usage of the tool with specialised training and provide advice on positioning and selling tactics for their new inbound services.
