We partnered with 1% recently to analyze their current donor base and derive trends to better inform their growth team to allocate the right resources and invest in the highest impact efforts.
The Vision
1% for the Planet sought to gain a deeper understanding of its donor base and unlock key insights that would help 1% for the Planet encourage similar companies to join its movement and grow the membership base.
The Pain Points
With legacy customer data spread across different systems, there wasn’t a clear view of who their customers were, how they interacted with 1% for the Planet, and what commonalities existed across their customer base. This made it difficult to triage and prioritize outreach for the sales team.
The Plan
Our team began the project with four goals in mind:
- Identify targetable attributes of high-value donors including geolocation, vertical, inbound source, and sales cycle trends.
- Develop a tiered system based on key identified attributes & anchored by lifetime value - to assist with prioritization of incoming leads.
- Analyze the sales cycle of the past four years from a lead’s point of origin through its deal close.
- Translate findings into key takeaways & recommendations for further refinement of 1% for the Planet’s sales processes.
We broke our sprints into 3 distinct phases:
Phase 1:
- Our team of experts embedded into 1% for the Planet’s customer relationship management (CRM) platforms—HubSpot and Salesforce—to begin the process of data evaluation.
- We used a sample of over 115,000 contacts accumulated over 4 years
- We determined the criteria to filter down for our sample target, using information from HubSpot’s Company object, Deals object, and Contacts object to filter.
- Our analysis included investigating lead quality as well as common donor attributes like industry, geo-location, lifetime value, and time-to-close.
Phase 2:
- Once the dataset was determined, we began building reports in HubSpot using the Custom Report Builder tool to provide visualizations for data segments.
- Some of these reports were built to create exportable datasets and others to generate the figures needed for the reports. For example, we created reports to show different lengths of the sales cycle based on a lead’s entry point.
- Donors were then separated into tiers, providing the 1% for the Planet sales team with a framework to prioritize incoming leads.
Phase 3:
- Using the data analyzed for donor attributes and lead sources, the team began sketching out a set of recommendations, including how best to service high-value donors, ways to incorporate automation into the sales cycle, and which targets to leverage for future marketing efforts.
- The team translated these findings and recommendations into a presentation for the 1% for the Planet sales and marketing teams.
The Impact
After our work concluded, we provided 1% for the Planet with the following:
- Three (3) Customer Tiers, broken down by average contribution and lifetime value
- Recommendations for streamlining the sales process for each tier, including the introduction of a white-glove sales service for their Tier 3 contributors while injecting automation solutions to service Tiers 1 and 2.
- Geographic and demographic data to serve future outreach and sale targeting efforts.
- Average time-to-close, contribution levels, and revenue across all three customer tiers to understand how to triage potential members and where to focus future efforts.
- An In-Depth Lead Analysis, that included a detail of the most common and successful touchpoints in their sales and marketing cycle; graphs outlining which marketing sources drew the most traffic, served the most conversions, and delivered the most closed deals, including Organic Search, Paid Media, Social, and Direct Traffic; and shared recommendations for future lead generation efforts to maximize their marketing budget and avoid efforts with low yield and impact.
The Insight
For impact-focused organizations like 1% for the Planet, our biggest takeaway is highlighting the importance of customer segmentation, lead scoring, and the value of prioritization. By understanding your client base, you can see where your sales efforts are most needed and where elements of the sales process can benefit from automation.
Clients that require a lower touch can be handled with automated processes and nurture campaigns that demand less of your sales team’s time—leaving them free to work with higher-touch clients. Ideally, these high-touch clients would also be of a higher value, ensuring your personnel hours are allocated to the biggest targeted accounts. With a model like this in place, you stand to gain efficiencies and reduce bottlenecks for future sales efforts.
And finally, with a clear understanding of where you are—in terms of your customer base—you’ll finally understand where you need to go with your future sales efforts.
One Percent for the Planet is an international organization whose members contribute at least one percent of their annual revenue to environmental causes to protect the environment
The idea was simple: because companies profit from the resources they take from the earth, they should protect those resources. With Patagonia leading the charge, this idea resonated with other brands such as Brushfire Records, Klean Kanteen, New Belgium Brewing, Caudalie, and many more followed suit and joined the 1% for the Planet network.
To date, the 1% for the Planet has certified over $620 million in donations to environmental causes. This number grows exponentially as our network grows each year—proving the power of collective action.
