PrimePay’s Predictive Marketing Journey

How much does marketing and lead generation actually contribute to the sales force, down to the individual sales rep? After a major consolidation, PrimePay went from being a regional provider to one of the largest independently owned payroll and HR companies with a national footprint. With the consolidation came challenging growth questions for my colleagues and me.

PrimePay is a 30-year-old payroll company that has built its reputation providing payroll services to small businesses – from local auto body shops to large law firms. The company began a journey to modernize the growth engine while at the same time merging four regions. We were a new go-to-market organization tasked with accelerating customer acquisition, but we were outfitted with the legacy systems and processes of a decades-old company.

One of the first steps was implementing the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall to get an understanding of what levers we could pull for the greatest top-line impact. The team immediately noticed one critical problem in Demand Waterfall performance: low volume. Conversions were on par with SiriusDecisions benchmarks, so the question became how to intelligently increase volume across channels while maintaining quality conversions.

Like many other organizations targeting the small-to-mid-sized market, we knew that purchasing lists for outbound campaigns had underdelivered in the past. Lists would get dumped into our sales force automation (SFA) system and be stale in six months. With lists, you either spam the market as soon as you get the list, ruining the market and earning poor conversion rates, or you take a phased approach where marginally accurate data decays by the time campaigns are deployed. We needed a way to consume leads more responsibly.

Additionally, we needed to support our sales reps in their regions. As part of our efforts to modernize our approach, we wanted to find a way to automate the self-prospecting that sales reps were doing. After all, it was taking away from time spent actually selling.

The marketing team knew that we had to feed in more at the top of the Demand Waterfall. We also needed a way to segment the market and deploy prospects to individual reps at a pace that they could consume. It would take a centralized view of the market based on real insights from sales history to create a localized campaign presence at the national level.

We initially reviewed predictive analytics solutions but realized what we were looking for went beyond many of the typical capabilities vendors were offering. We needed something that would help us identify better targets, have more of them and access accurate data. After a request for proposal and due diligence process, we selected Radius to power the changes to our sales and marketing strategies.

One of our challenges was communicating and demonstrating that this approach wasn’t just lists. A detailed mapping of our pain points to the solution enabled us to effectively sell Radius internally.

The team now helps sales consume leads responsibly; we are able to turn our volume up or down to maintain a smooth and healthy Demand Waterfall. With our core go-to-market platforms (SFA, marketing automation, predictive) fully integrated, we’re able to capitalize on more opportunities.

The moment we realized that what we built was truly going to change how we grow PrimePay came when the Department of Labor issued updates to the Fair Labor Standards Act overtime rules. Knowing this would be top of mind for a large segment of our market, we utilized one of our e-books to help potential buyers navigate new policies. Our new platform, accented with Radius, allowed our team to identify specific segments of small business owners we could speak to regarding the new changes.

Today, we feel that our process, combined with the right technology, is a smarter approach. It makes sales and marketing teams more efficient, allowing us to reach volume without compromising personalized communications. Personalization today is not just including “[first name]” in a template, but being able to write to the specific audience of a certain industry with a social presence, tech savviness and a review rating of 3 stars.

Looking ahead, we’re not done yet! We see the opportunity for greater personalization at scale. We see the ability to couple broad personalized marketing touches with targeted sales outreach. The key will be analyzing the results and finding the right balance. We are excited by the flexibility we have to drive our progress forward.

The journey you take with vendors can help you change things that you didn’t even know were wrong. Stay focused on solving a specific challenge you’re facing, but stay open-minded by partnering with vendors. The best vendors provide as much value being a trusted advisor as they do being a software provider. After all, they know the product best. Using our partners has been important in crafting our perfect lead scenario.