Since its founding in 2009, SoldOut had focused on telemarketing and other conventional methods to win online marketing contracts. In October 2013, however, the company changed its marketing strategy to enable it to add inbound online marketing to its services for customers. The company’s CMO, Satoshi Hasegawa, explains how SoldOut came to switch its own marketing to inbound: “Before the end of 2013 we won appointments simply by phoning —it was very much an ‘push’ sales approach. And, despite offering online marketing services to our customers, we weren’t even using any web advertising for our own marketing. Until around February 2013, all we were using was an inquiries button that could be clicked to launch e-mail software, plus Google Analytics.”
At that that time, the biggest worries for Hasegawa included the personnel costs and arduous time commitment on employees imposed by this conventional telemarketing, as well as its heavy reliance on human input. SoldOut was using e-mail software for online inquiries, but it outsourced the creation of the e-mail form to an external production company, such was its lack of technical expertise even as it was trying to find a way out of telemarketing. All of these factors put their sales reps in a very demanding situation, as Hasegawa explains: “Sales reps back then had to do many other tasks, as well as make their own phone calls. One day a week they would focus on making calls to arrange appointments, spending non-stop hours on the phone."
The sales reps also often had to make SoldOut’s services cheaper to secure orders from customers, which required even more phone calls to offer discounts, to negotiate, or to follow up - which led to the sales team becoming quite exhausted. SoldOut needed to find a systematic solution to challenges such as these: “With labor-intensive telemarketing our growth as a company was eventually going to reach its limit, so in 2013 we decided to switch our marketing strategy to what we referred to at the time as ‘pull’ marketing, as a means of becoming more efficient.”
Preparing to Acquire Inbound LeadsSoldOut decided to start using HubSpot from October 2013. To prepare, Hasegawa investigated online resources, and the books on inbound marketing and HubSpot just starting to appear in Japan. He was drawn to HubSpot because its design concept was based on pull marketing: “At the beginning of 2013 we were making an online form and advertising online, but that was all, so we were still using no specific inbound marketing tools. When it came to choosing a tool, we did have marketing automation-type tools, but they weren’t capable of handling inbound marketing. I was convinced that HubSpot was the only tool capable of handling inbound marketing, so I was really keen to try it out.” Since SoldOut was starting its own online marketing from scratch, he adds, HubSpot was ideal because it integrated everything including management of social media into a single package, making it the easiest option to implement as well.
Once HubSpot was installed, the first step for Hasegawa and his team was to create a mechanism for capturing leads on the company website. Previously, SoldOut had outsourced the production of its landing page and form at a cost of approximately 100,000 yen (approx. $800 USD). Having installed HubSpot in October, however, by the end of the year SoldOut had produced five or six sets of landing pages and forms internally. It had also established a process to obtain e-mail addresses by enabling site visitors to download marketing literature and corporate materials. Hasegawa describes the next step: “Then we launched three blogs to really start generating leads, and the third one was successful. We had decided that we would commit to blogs as a team for about six months, and we kept on writing them every day. We started the blogs in November 2013, and it was in June 2014 that we started to see the results from all our work. It then took about another four months for us to make our best possible content available for downloading, and in 2015 we started receiving a steady flow of e-mail addresses and names.”
Cold Calling Virtually Eliminated