Case Study – Gather Workspaces

Pivoting During A Pandemic

An aligned marketing & sales strategy delivered a 12X ROI, 67% increase in tours, 33% increase in members and accelerated pipeline velocity in 2020, despite being directly impacted by COVID.

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The Challenge

Launch Inbound Marketing That Drives Measurable Sales Results

Gather Workspaces is a rapidly-growing co-working business with multiple locations in Virginia. They are expanding quickly and needed a CRM to scale with their team, while their investors wanted measurable results from their marketing dollars and sales efforts.

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They tasked our team with generating quality sales-ready leads that would turn into members, funneling those leads based on location of interest, enabling easy prospect communications for multiple Community Managers, and showing results in real time.

  • Only Targeting “Ready to Buy” Leads. Gather was only targeting “hot” leads who were ready to sign a contract on the spot. Since the only way to capture leads on their website was by scheduling a tour, they were missing out on a pool of leads who were not as far along in their purchasing journey.
  • Lack of Sales Automation. Community Managers are tasked with maintaining their location, keeping current members happy, and wearing the “sales hat” to bring in new members. Without automation to drive efficiency, they were consistently strapped for time and unable to meet their sales quotas.
  • Unable to Connect Marketing to Sales Revenue. Marketing is only as effective as the sales results it drives. Gather’s reporting was distributed across multiple platforms, making it nearly impossible to efficiently connect the dots and know which marketing tactics were producing the best results.

"We engaged Whittington Consulting to help us drive more traffic to our website, turn that traffic into tours, and to measure success. They developed processes and systems to use HubSpot within our daily operations and feed into our sales process. Whittington Consulting was there every step of the way, and always willing to help. They always followed through with everything they said they were going to do."

Photo of James Crenshaw
James Crenshaw Owner & Chief Marketing Officer at Gather Workspaces

Our Solution

Generate Leads With Marketing That Converts, Sales Automation, and Real-Time Reporting

During our engagement, the unthinkable happened, and COVID-19 hit Gather’s business hard. Their model is built on people being together, in-person. Like so many businesses, we had to pivot to navigate the obstacles of 2020. With the volume of prospects suddenly lower, it became even more important to nurture and convert leads at a higher rate. To enable this, we implemented HubSpot to support our inbound marketing and sales enablement strategies.

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Nurture Leads at Every Stage

We moved from a single call to action (schedule a tour) to multiple, addressing every stage of the sales funnel. Offers included content downloads, a guided tour, and a 3D virtual tour, which was in high demand due to COVID-19 social distancing.
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Automate Lead Management & Communication

Gather came to us with three locations and plans to expand to seven, so their sales outreach needed to scale. Using HubSpot, we designed automation to assign leads by location and deploy email sequences to streamline the sales process, increasing close rates while freeing time for busy Community Managers.
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Custom Dashboards for Reporting Transparency

We worked closely with Gather to define their success metrics, and tracked goals weekly. With custom reports and dashboard views in HubSpot, we eliminated the need for multiple platforms, allowing us to pivot quickly based on data insights and trends.

The Result

Quality Leads and Higher Close Rates That Drove Revenue

Despite the significant impact of COVID, our inbound marketing efforts delivered a 67% increase in all tours (with a 149% increase in tours coming just from paid search).

Further down the funnel, we increased active members by 33%, resulting in more than $950,000 in annual revenue directly attributable to our efforts. Our focus on sales enablement also accelerated their pipeline velocity, decreasing the average time spent in key deal stages by a total of 49 days.

A few key stats

  • 12X ROI from our inbound marketing efforts  (based on 2020 revenue and marketing spend with our agency)
  • More than $950,000 in annual revenue directly attributed to our efforts
  • 149% increase in tours from paid search
  • 42% increase in tours from organic search
  • 66.71% increase in total tours
  • 33% increase in active members
  • Decreased average time in tour scheduled to toured by 10 days (2020 compared to 2021 so far)
  • Decreased average time in toured stage by 33 days (2020 compared to 2021 so far)
  • Decreased average time to contract sent to closed by 6 days (2020 compared to 2021 so far)

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