Contractor Independence Marketing

Contractor Independence Marketing Case Study

Case Study: How Contractor Independence Marketing Revamped CS for Scalable Growth

CONSULTING OVERVIEW

Contractor Independence Marketing, a digital marketing agency transitioning from startup to growth stage, faced challenges with delayed time-to-value (TTV) and misaligned metrics. These issues negatively impacted employee retention, customer satisfaction, and revenue growth.

Their aim? To accelerate TTV, improve onboarding, drive early wins, boost adoption, and establish a proactive engagement model to enhance client success and achieve growth targets. By leveraging in-depth business intelligence and a holistic, customer-centric strategy, our partnership focused on operational excellence, agile project management, journey mapping workshops, and change management initiatives in order to deliver fast results within their business in a number of areas including customer retention, customer satisfaction, employee retention, employee satisfaction, product adoption, operational efficiencies, and scalable, sustainable revenue growth.

CORPORATE OVERVIEW

Company: Contractor Independence Marketing

Size: 11-50 employees

Founded: 2018

Location: Richmond, VA, USA

Industry: Digital Marketing Agency, Marketing, Digital Marketing, Online Presence, Online Visibility

About: Contractor Independence Marketing specializes in building passive lead generation assets that deliver high-quality, exclusive leads. Their mission is to empower contractor to control their growth and break free from traditional marketing methods.

Learn More at: https://contractorindependence.com/

CONSULTING FUN FACTS

Direct Client: Waira Mendoza, Chief Product Officer

Package: CUSTOMIZER PACKAGE - Contractor

Consulting Type:

1. Contractor

6-months
Weekly consulting sessions

2. Strategic Focus:

Customer Journey Mapping Workshops
Holistic CS Strategy Implementation
ADKAR Change Management

C.S.A.T Categories:

40% of Charter
60% of Strategy
60% of Analytics
20% of Talent

Dana has helped us transform major parts of our customer success strategy. She uncovered the root causes of our challenges, guided the rollout of her proprietary framework, and helped us build a world-class customer journey. She even reshaped how we handle change, define our team goals, and measure success.

She truly cares, brings proven tools, and goes above and beyond to drive real outcomes. Highly recommend!

Waira Mendoza Angle, Chief Product Officer
Contractor Independence Marketing

CHALLENGE

Contractor Independence Marketing faced several challenges as they transitioned from a Startup to Growth-Stage powerhouse:

Slow Onboarding Impact: The absence of a focus on early wins within the SEO model created delays in time-to-value (TTV), challenging retention efforts.
Operational Inefficiencies: As the company scaled, their well-detailed, but overly complex processes weren’t sustainable and put undue strain on the team and slowed their ability to scale effectively.
Stressed and Overworked Team: Siloed functions and unclear team expectations and dependencies across the organization led to overworked team members and a disjointed customer and employee experience.
Lack of Holistic Strategy: Disjointed alignment from the top down and across both functions and the customer journey needed to be addressed to improve efficiency, ROI, adoption, and overall retention.
Broad but Misaligned KPIs: Existing metrics tracked many elements but didn’t align with measuring customer success effectiveness, highlighting the need for a more focused approach.
Scalable Growth Challenges: The company lacked a clear roadmap for customer success improvement and enhanced service offerings, limiting long-term, scalable growth.

SOLUTION

The company needed a holistic top-down, simplified, and structured approach to improve adoption, retention, and customer ROI to reach their next stage of growth. To achieve this, Customer Everything Solutions implemented the following strategies:

Signature Tools and Analysis:
- Signature CS Framework Implementation: Creating and implementing a holistic customer success framework that aligns teams, customers, and leadership from the top down.
- Quantitative C.S.A.T. Growth Engine Tool: Conducting a comprehensive quantitative analysis using our proprietary C.S.A.T. Growth Engine Tool, identifying strengths and areas for improvement.
- Quantitative Complexity Assessments: Evaluating product complexity patterns and user complexity challenges to tailor strategies that support a diverse product and user base effectively.
- Qualitative Team Interview Analysis: Conducting individual interviews with team members to gain insights and identify critical pain points and opportunities.
- Qualitative CPO Knowledge Transfer Analysis: Analyzing knowledge-sharing sessions and reviewing relevant documentation to align cross-functional insights.
Strategic Planning: Developing a strategic plan based on qualitative and quantitative findings, setting a roadmap for growth.
Customer Journey Mapping Workshops: Leading four (4) CJM workshops with leadership and customer-facing teams to refine the journey, align cross-functionally, and resolve high-friction points.
AI-Driven Solutioning with ChatGPT: Leveraging custom AI tools throughout the engagement, yielding actionable insights, custom solutions, and faster results.
ADKAR Change Management Process: Applying the ADKAR model to guide change adoption across the organization, enhancing buy-in and facilitating smoother transitions.
Slack Connect: Using Slack Connect to communicate with internal teams for ad-hoc and instantaneous answers.
Project Planning: Mapping out a detailed project plan, timeline, and budget to ensure efficient implementation of proposed strategies.

RESULT

Through our partnership, Contractor Independence has achieved the following early results (organized within our CS.A.T. Growth-Engine Framework):

C.harter

Role Refinement and Organizational Restructuring: Defining internal role’s mission, responsibilities, KPIs, dependencies, etc., aligned and restructured around each journey stage to enhance customer outcomes and customer delight.

S.trategy

Improved Sales and Retention: Boosting sales conversion rates and retention by 30% through milestone-based renewal transitions, enhancing engagement and retention without the limitations of time-based contracts.
Customer Journey Optimization: Shifting to a holistic, journey-focused strategy, enabling seamless progression through each journey stage by emphasizing “first value” wins and milestone-based progression.
Growth-Focused Service Offerings: Offering in-demand services to customers to enhance their experience and contribute to Contractor Independence’s revenue targets.

A.nalytics

Improved ROI, Adoption, and Retention: Boosting customer’s ROI by focusing on milestone-based achievements, and specific adoption and retention KPIs without limitation of time-based contracts.
Mutual Accountability and KPI Refinement: Strengthening collaboration between CSM and Customers by creating a powerful mutual accountability engagement model that focuses on achieving refined KPIs that properly measure customer outcome achievement.
Transparent Reporting System Integrations: Implementing a structured, milestone-driven reporting framework to maintain customer confidence and provide regular updates on progress.

T.alent

Enhanced Team Performance and Efficiency: Laser focus on post-sales improvements and building team capabilities allowed for smaller high-performing teams, reducing distractions and increasing revenue.

CUSTOM DELIVERABLES

Growth-Engine Insights Deck:

Identification of Growth-Engine Maturity, Strengths, Opportunities, Biggest Impact, and FTTV for improvement by group, by function, and by organizational hierarchy.
Results, data, and strategic insights compiled from five (5) assessments, including growth-engine maturity, ADKAR change management ability, etc.
Actionable recommendations, tailored and organized by quick wins, FTTV and biggest Impact across all assessment data points.
Strategic Planning recommendations that were integrated into Monday.com

Four (4) CJM Workshop Miro Boards: Each board is dedicated to a specific stage of the Customer Journey, providing visual insights and collaborative space for strategy refinement.

Customer Journey Map with Persona: Detailed CJM covering (1) frontstage actions, (2) backstage actions, (3) critical milestones, (4) action steps, (5) touchpoints, (6) artifacts, RACI (7) outcomes/KPIs, and (8) comprehensive description for every journey stage.

Signature CS Framework: Fully incorporated top-down framework aligned to corporate’s Mission, Vision, Values including CS Mission, CS Goals, Segmentation & Engagement Strategy, Persona description, Persona outcomes, and customer journey framework.

Abundance of Resources and Tools: Relevant examples, templates, playbooks, frameworks, playbooks, processes, calculators, and more, throughout the engagement to guide their creation of custom assets.