How CRM and Sales Automation reveal 900 leads a month for McCrindle

McCrindle is an Australian-based social research, demographics, and data analytics agency that aims to bring data to life. Led by Mark McCrindle, celebrated author and internationally recognized social researcher, their research methods include national surveys, population modeling, and qualitative research, including in-depth interviews and discussion groups. McCrindle counts among its clients more than 100 of Australia’s largest companies and leading international brands. 

“We are a research company that specializes in a range of research solutions for a range of clients from the not-for-profit sector, educators, and business leaders. This means we have about 8 lists all with specific research ideas.” – Luke Davies, Marketing Executive

As they continued to grow and identify the diversity of their customer base, McCrindle was challenged by a tech stack that wasn’t meeting their needs. 

• Increasing lead generation, conversion rate, and nurturing leads more effectively was a challenge 
• They weren’t able to deliver a personalized experience without spending hours of valuable time segmenting lists and creating content 
• Visibility into the customer journey and the ability to interpret performance across campaigns was a high priority  

They knew they needed to clean up their tech stack in order to get to where they needed to be. Transitioning to ActiveCampaign provided a solution that would scale as the company continued to grow, while also solving the data silo issues McCrindle was experiencing.

“The company had grown over 15 years and data was spread across Mailchimp and in the CRM,” Luke continued, “however, it wasn’t integrated. ActiveCampaign provided the opportunity to bring all the data into one place, to have it all integrated and remove the data silos we were experiencing.”

Sales automation with a personal touch

Every project with McCrindle is a custom project with a lot of moving parts—nothing they do is an off-the-shelf product. 

With ActiveCampaign’s Enterprise plan, McCrindle is able to utilize powerful automations to reach their customers and expand their ability to deliver data insights to their clients digitally, while also leveraging custom reporting dashboards to prove the performance and value of ActiveCampaign’s CRM and Automations.   

“It’s hard to automate our engagement workflow because every single client is bespoke. Our outreach has to be personal in that regard,” Luke continued, “so we automate as much as we can, but there has to be that personal touch. ActiveCampaign enables us to provide that.” 

McCrindle uses automations as a customer education opportunity so that when customers download a lead magnet, the funnel prompts them to take the next step of a bespoke research offering in a series of 4 emails (all on Predictive Sending). Through each step of the funnel, as the customer takes an action they receive a tag as well as a lead score, providing critical data that helps build a profile for each individual, and in turn, provides details for list segmentation. 

McCrindle can track event attendance through an integration between ActiveCampaign and BigMarker, so that as someone downloads a report, opens an email, and attends an event, they increase their lead score and the Solution Design Team can reach out accordingly.

For instance, the lead score for event attendees and registrants receive different lead scores depending on the actions they take. This allows The Solution Design Team to reach out to those who are most interested in engaging with McCrindle.

Within two weeks of a given event, Luke’s team exports the highest lead scores for The Solution Design Team to reach out and follow up. Having visibility into contacts’ engagement activity gives The Solution Design Team the conversation starter they need to find out if McCrindle can help them with their research solution. 

“It’s a very clear path of people coming in through one kind of funnel,” Luke added. “They get our various campaigns, and then when they put their hand up for a project, we make the deal. It’s really helpful to see over time the people we’ve sold to, and we can see in the ActiveCampaign CRM the granularity of how they’ve worked through our system. We can see the big picture of where everyone is, but we can also see the details of how individuals flow  through the pipeline.”

Luke’s favorite ActiveCampaign automations are the simplest ones, because “they are the most effective ongoing client nurture journey they have.” Automations like these are set up for several reports McCrindle has done over the years. “At this point, it’s just so systematized that whenever we need to set up a new automation in ActiveCampaign, it takes about half a day to do it.”

Streamlined integrations, for efficiency and savings

With an integrated tech stack, the small administrative steps necessary to update each project are now automated, saving what adds up to hours of tedious, error-prone data entry every month, and freeing up resources to do what they do best — provide custom research solutions for their customers. 

For instance, McCrindle used to create Word documents for each project proposal, send it out to the client for signature, and then manually enter that information into ActiveCampaign. Then they moved their proposal process to Proposify, which helped with the audit trail. But they were still entering data twice — once in ActiveCampaign for the deal creation, and then again into Proposify. Now, using Zapier to automate that workflow, they are able to send the relevant field information from the new Deal in ActiveCampaign to Proposify, saving time, reducing error, and enhancing that audit trail.  

“We also use Zapier for Facebook and LinkedIn leads. We’ve done a few paid campaigns advertising some of our lead magnets, and when someone submits a form as a new lead in Facebook, this sends them to ActiveCampaign, gives them a tag, and now we can see the source of that lead. Knowing that it was Facebook or LinkedIn, rather than just an organic search helps us know where to place our ad dollars.” 

“The agility of the ActiveCampaign API has proven really useful in being able to connect our different systems” Luke commented.

Actionable reporting

With a strong background in data science, it’s no surprise that Mccrindle and their team are able to harness the ActiveCampaign Custom Reporting tool to tell a meaningful, relevant and informative story around how their ActiveCampaign account is performing for their business.

They use Custom Reporting to generate reports like their Monthly Marketing and Sales Dashboard, which gives them insight into how their business is performing and helps them understand what is happening in their sales funnel.

“Before we were in the dark about how many leads we had in a given period. With ActiveCampaign Custom Reporting, we’ve made the structure of the reporting the same as what we’d expect from our marketing funnel. Now we can confirm that we have about 900 new leads every month, split across our different personas.” – Luke Davies

In addition to 360-degree visibility of the customer journey through the pipeline, McCrindle is able to break down their data by The Solution Design Team, by pipeline, by product, product family, and by persona. “It’s got that agility to it, and we’ve got it set up so that we can toggle between one month or the whole quarter,” continues Luke, “So if we want to know how did we do this past quarter, we just change the time filter, and we can see the big picture, and it’s got that flexibility to change things around on the fly. That’s very useful when we’re in meetings, and if someone asks a data-related question, we can very quickly find the answer.”

During COVID, McCrindle showed their strength and resilience in adjusting to a new business reality by using ActiveCampaign to successfully switch their in-person seminars and events to adapt. 

“The flexibility of Active Campaign to quickly transition so that we can see who we are working with, to continue driving growth in the right areas, gives me confidence that with the tools that we have, we can get to where we want to go.”

McCrindle is extremely engaged with the ActiveCampaign platform and embraces the ability to learn more and ultimately do more to improve their customer experience and achieve their goals. 

Try ActiveCampaign for free, and discover how a sales CRM with automation can help you keep track of leads, organize your contacts, and help you sell more in less time.