Contributed by BTW Content Team 
Acquirent is an outsourced sales and B2B lead generation company based out of Evanston, Illinois. Their mission is to recruit, train, and manage sales teams on behalf of clients ranging from innovative startups to Fortune 500 companies.
“When I started working with them, we asked for three things: leads, leads, and more leads! They delivered on all fronts.” – Kevin Morrisey, VP Acquirent
The Challenge
Our two main goals centered around generating new prospects and ensuring those prospects are qualified. When CEO Joe Flanagan approached Behind the Work for assistance with his company’s marketing goals, he told us he had three objectives: “leads, leads, and more leads.”
Acquirent had outsourced their marketing to companies in the past with mixed results – many of these had overpromised on their services or used measurements that were difficult to understand in terms of value.
Behind the Work recognized that Hubspot Marketing Hub would be the perfect software option for Acquirent, thanks to seamless integration tools and tools that helped deliver results in a way that could be easily communicated to the client.
Understanding the KPIs
- Generate at least 150 leads per month
- Increase opportunity to lead rate by 20%
- Integrate tech stacks into a clean user interface.
- Set up workflows and automation through LinkedIn and Emails
- Utilize PPC to target new prospective leads
- SEO Optimization delivered through weekly blogs and content syndication
The Buyers Journey
Before starting with our marketing efforts, Behind the Work had to understand what brought clients to Acquirent in the first place. We saw an immediate connection between Acquirent’s mission (recruit, train, and manage) and HubSpot’s flywheel (attract, engage, and delight). Their company’s success depends on scaling to client needs as their sales grow, and their business has relied on happy customers who become their best referrals.
Mastering their flywheel depended on reducing friction in this cycle.
Acquirent prides itself on its open office environment, training methodology, and proven success in outsourced b2b sales talent. With the move to remote working, this became a critical pain point for companies that might best utilize Acquirent’s services: “how can I hope to train my own sales team when we can’t even be in the same room?”
Acquirent’s robust roster of salespeople allows them to easily assign people to companies matching their personality type and sales ethic. While Acquirent initially struggled at the beginning of the pandemic, its services are uniquely suited to other companies in a remote working environment. We created lists around these ideal buyer personas and used marketing automation to target them.
Integrations + Workflows
Acquirent has a complex tech stack that had not been integrated into a central database. Hubspot’s dashboard was able to integrate Salesforce, WordPress, Google Ads, Callrail, NeverBounce, and their social pages together into an easy-to-read format.
Salesforce is the primary CRM at Acquirent, and HubSpot’s bidirectional workflows allowed information to be seamlessly updated between the platforms. These workflows also allowed us to clean up and organize their database, ensuring all future contacts would be assigned to their correct categories.
Marketing Automation
Email marketing automation was a strategy that we leveraged in multiple capacities: generating new contacts, and using prior customers to nurture relationships and build a network of referrals.
HubSpot allowed us to build out lists of ideal clients to send targeted messaging to, while engaging new audiences that hadn’t been contacted in the past. Behind the Work’s objective was not only to build out a new list of prospective leads, but to help nurture old ones – marketing automation was a method of achieving both. Targeting older clients with favorable reviews of Acquirent let us eliminate friction in their referral pipeline.
Our Solution
From the beginning, Joe Flanagan made it clear that he was only interested in KPIs that were “good for business, not the scorecard.” He wanted simple results that he could understand, so he could spend more time running his business and less time thinking about marketing strategy.
Hubspot Marketing Hub was the obvious solution to his marketing needs. It would allow us to perform the necessary changes for integrating their tech stacks, implementing marketing automation, and generating massive amounts of leads.
How HubSpot Led to our Success
Workflows
Triggered workflows along Acquirent’s extensive tech stack, allowing us to set and schedule lead generation and nurturing campaigns.
Digital Paid Ads
Google Ads provided a key role in our strategy, targeted around a PPC keyword audit that delivered more focused ads.
Content Marketing
Content optimized to generate better incoming marketing leads through SEO principles.
Segmented Lists
Segmented buyers as they engaged with Acquirent’s digital marketing.
Reporting Dashboard
Acquirent’s marketing dashboard made it easy for them to understand marketing activities and sales performance.
CTAs
Chatbots and CTAs implemented throughout the website to convert leads.
Forms
All forms were built through Hubspot
The Outcome + Looking Forward
Acquirent was stunned by the results that we were able to provide them with, thanks to Hubspot’s lead generation tools and marketing automation features. Not only have we been able to expand their pipeline growth significantly from pre-pandemic levels – we have continued to push their outsourced sales initiatives and expand their team when clients have needed them the most.
- Increased closed deals by 39%
- Increased MQLs by 100%
- Increased users by 46%
- Increased new users by 47%
- Increased sessions by 43.5%
- Increased page views by 19%
39%
39% Increase in Closed Deals
386%
386% Increase in Qualified Leads
Acquirent grew quickly in 2021. Embracing the possibility of remote work, Acquirent has been able to expand its hiring beyond the borders of Evanston, and opportunities arose. In June of 2021, they acquired Vorsight, an outsourced sales organization based in the D.C. area.
Behind the Work wanted to ensure that their branding and image matched the pace of their business. It was imperative that we updated their website to be mobile-friendly as well as simple to navigate.
To create Acquirent’s new website, we connected with Glantz Design. Acquirent has always boasted high traffic through organic searches, so it was important that during the transition, we were able to keep their search rankings intact while refreshing the text and look.
As part of our drive to create new ways of connecting with audiences, we experimented with a video chatbot on their main page. This has proven to be a strong conversion engine for their website, making lead generation even more streamlined.
Summary
Acquirent came to us to get back on track after being derailed by the COVID-19 pandemic. We delivered with optimal results – HubSpot let us deliver more qualified leads at a higher volume, with a range of tools that let us target multiple segments. Acquirent has quadrupled their lead generation through an automated system that consistently delivers on ROI.
