Starting from Scratch (The Right Way)
Week 2 began with a clean slate and a clear mission: build a proper lead management foundation. No shortcuts, no temporary fixes, no “we’ll add that later” compromises. Utilizing Customer Insights platforms will help streamline the process and ensure we gather the right data.
After the discovery of Week 1, we knew exactly what needed to be built. The question was whether we could do it in a week while maintaining our sanity and our client projects.
The Lead Process Architecture
With customer insights platforms, we can tailor our lead process to better meet client needs.
First, we had to design a lead process that actually made sense for our business. Not a generic template, not what we’d seen work elsewhere, but something that fit how Reach actually sells.
Our Lead Lifecycle Stages:
- Warm – Fresh from web forms, events, or imports
- Marketing Qualified (MQL) – Met scoring threshold, showing buying signals
- Sales Qualified (SQL) – Had meaningful conversation, budget/timeline discussed
- Opportunity – Convert to contact and create opportunity
This seems basic, right? It is. That’s the point. We’d been trying to run sophisticated campaigns without these fundamental building blocks.
The Configuration Marathon
With the architecture defined, we dove into configuration:
Forms Overhaul:
- Reconfigured 10 web forms to create leads instead of contacts
- Implemented progressive profiling to gather information over time
- Created form-specific thank you pages with relevant next steps
The Innovation: The Nurture Button
Here’s where we got creative. Our marketing team kept saying, “I wish I could just click something and know this lead won’t be forgotten.”
So we built it. The Nurture Button.
How it works:
- Sales or marketing rep reviews a lead
- Lead seems interested but not ready to buy
- One click on the Nurture Button
- Lead automatically added to appropriate long-term nurture campaigns
Why this matters: Previously, adding a lead to nurture campaigns required:
- Opening the lead record
- Navigating to marketing lists
- Finding the right list (if you could remember which one)
- Adding the lead manually
- Hoping you picked the right campaign
Total time: 3-5 minutes per lead. Multiply that by hundreds of leads, and you see the problem.
The Nurture Button reduced this to one second. One click. Done.
What We Accomplished in Week 2
By Friday of Week 2, we had:
- A fully functional lead management process
- 10 automated flows handling routine tasks
- The Nurture Button (which became surprisingly popular)
- Proper lead scoring and qualification
- Clean data flowing into the system
The metrics already showed improvement:
- Lead processing time: Reduced from 15 minutes to 2 minutes
- Leads falling through cracks: Reduced from ~30% to <5%
- Manual tasks eliminated: 20+ hours per week
The Key Lessons from Week 2
- Foundation first, features second: Without proper lead management, nothing else matters.
- Automation multiplies impact: Every flow we built saved hours weekly.
- Simple tools drive adoption: The Nurture Button succeeded because it was simple.
- Test flows in production: Our development environment didn’t catch the flow conflicts. Production did.
- Document everything: We created a simple guide for the team. It prevented confusion and ensured consistency.
Looking Ahead
With our foundation solid and automation humming, we were ready for Week 3: building customer journeys that actually convert. We had leads flowing in, scoring working, and qualification happening automatically. Now we needed to nurture those leads intelligently.
The Nurture Button had shown us something important—when you make the right thing the easy thing, people do it. We’d apply this lesson to everything we built in Week 3.
Transform Your Marketing in 4 Weeks
Stop managing spreadsheets. Start generating revenue. Our Customer Insights platforms Rapid Implementation gets you from chaos to automated campaigns in just 4 weeks—the same methodology we used to transform our own marketing.
