Field Nation’s core value is obsessing over our users. Whether current or future customers, our users are the center of our universe. They continually inspire us to innovate, deliver, and exceed their expectations. In order to stay in business, it is important that we do exactly that.

You see, we are a small (but growing!) business that runs a free platform for connecting businesses with local freelance expertise. Field Nation has none of your traditional, up-front fees. Instead, we make a small percentage of every work order that is successfully completed through our platform. In short, our business is successful only when our users are successful. This means we must be focused on ensuring the success of millions of work orders, projects and tasks that run through our system.

Ensuring the continued success of our users involves three demands:

1)     A clear understanding of who they are and what they need at the start of our relationship

2)     A keen ability to communicate with them in the language of their world, not ours

3)     A thorough but immediate ability to engage with them throughout their journey

These guiding principles have led the Field Nation marketing and sales teams to work together to implement a process using the Salesforce ecosystem of Pardot, Sales Cloud, and Data.com. This ecosystem and our commitment to meaningful engagement allow our small company to punch above our weight and disrupt an entire sector.

The Secret of Scaling

Marketing is at the tip of the spear when it comes to demand growth. It’s our job to not only build the brand, but most importantly, to drive demand. While it is fashionable to talk about growth hacking and how one weird trick can get you more leads than you have ever imagined, the reality is that success comes down to a lot of small things done right, every single day. It’s the synthesis of what you know, what they want, and your ability to consistently execute.

There it is — the secret of scaling: Orchestration, synchronization, execution and discipline.

This is what our Salesforce ecosystem allows us to do.

Step 1. Orchestration

Orchestration aligns all our channels, segments, and activities and gets them on the same page. Knowing what the prospect wants is a critical step in helping us develop a systematic approach to better learn who our audience is and the pressure points they most care about addressing. Our website’s integration with Salesforce allows us to capture raw prospect lead data, which we then cleanse with Data.com. This ensures the quality of our prospect information. We also combine the Pardot scoring system with Salesforce workflows to effectively segment prospects based on criteria like geography, role, and industry. This high-level segmentation gives us the keen ability to communicate effectively. It lets us craft specifically tailored messaging that incorporates industry and role-specific vocabulary.

Being able to capture the subsequent business and prospect metrics in Pardot reports and Salesforce dashboards has served as the Field Nation “single source of truth.” This enables us to accurately develop targeted, dynamic email, social, and web marketing campaigns that engage each specific audience with appropriate content and analysis. Having a clear understanding of what our prospects want and being able to segment based on common interests has helped us accelerate our demand qualification and get highly-performing leads into the hands of the best sales representative for that prospect.

Here’s the impact of orchestration: we grow faster.

Step 2. Synchronization

Boosting the effectiveness of our campaigns not only reaches new prospects, but by using Salesforce and Pardot, we are also able to synchronize these processes and ensure that everything fires off when it is meant to. Knowing how and when to reach out to a prospect during their lifecycle is crucial to establishing a relationship. Similarly, it provides us with the foresight to identify key issues or concerns before they occur. B2B marketing exists in a multi-channel world. Synchronizing and tracking multi-faceted campaigns across time zones, channels, and segment preferences is no small feat. Doing so with a bootstraps team is amazing.

Here’s the impact of synchronization: we build our capacity without adding cost.

Step 3. Execution

The ability to consistently execute our process has given us the confidence that we can repeatedly experience success rather than merely constructing the plans for what we think might happen. And this is what turns customers into fans. Being able to inform a prospect of a problem they don’t even know they have and offer a solution that is free and immediate is what differentiates us from our competitors. This insight into the prospect lifecycle allows us to set up pre-defined notifications and alert account managers to remind them to send out direct, tracked, and tailored Pardot communications from inside the Salesforce platform. Being able to intuitively predict these events is what lets us continually measure, improve, and ultimately, grow our prospect process and experience.

Here’s the impact of execution: we do rather than plan-to-do.

Step 4. Discipline

While gaining insight into our audience and developing a strategic content, marketing, and sales process that converts quality prospects effectively, the discipline to see the cycle come full circle from start to finish has provided us with a clear understanding of what our next steps should be. Using the Salesforce ecosystem, Field Nation has sped up the qualification of our prospects and established a streamlined procedure that is testable, repeatable, and successful. We mercilessly track performance, measure results, and always ask, “what if”. This means setting aside individual egos and what we think we know and letting the data have its way. Our intuition and shared experience points the direction, but the discipline to measure and the depth of reporting that the Salesforce ecosystem offers guides our path.

Here’s the impact of discipline: we lean in and learn.

The result of this is the one thing that all businesses strive for: growth. Field Nation has been steadily growing over the past two years, and was named to the Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies in America list for the second consecutive time last year.

Field Nation is creating new ways for businesses to get work done while engaging the massive and growing freelance community with opportunity, enrichment, and professional development. Any tool will amplify the character and quality of the team you have in place. For us, Pardot, Salesforce, and Data.com are what amplify our brand and empower our connection to the new face of this global workforce. 

Billy Cripe is passionate about amazing technology that brings people together to accomplish great work. He has authored 2 books on enterprise collaboration and numerous articles on the intersection of technology, people and information. Billy holds an MA in Communications and undergraduate degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from NIU. He has a development and agile product management background but found his home in strategic marketing for cutting edge technologies. Billy is CMO of Field Nation and can be found on Twitter at @billycripe or @fieldnation and linkedin at http://www.linkedin.com/in/billy

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