Marketing ❤️ Sales: How the RecRight team is now working together towards a common goal
Before working with us, RecRight was lacking a marketing strategy and the key processes to tie marketing and sales together. While RecRight’s marketing team was working on many individual tasks, they weren’t clear on how their efforts contributed to the bigger picture.
“We didn’t have a lead process in place and we hadn’t identified our ideal target audiences. We wanted marketing to be seen as a true contributor to business results, and we were looking for a partner to help us with that,” says Saara Saalamo, Marketing Lead at RecRight.
RecRight wasn’t looking for an agency to execute one-off marketing campaigns, but rather a strategic partner that would act as an extension to their team. “There are so many new marketing technologies, tools, and methodologies, making it hard to keep up with the pace and master all those areas yourself. We were looking for a partner so that we could scale up our own team,” says Saara.
During the initial strategy phase of the collaboration, we ran workshops with RecRight to get to know their business and identify their company goals. We worked together to determine RecRight’s ideal customers, and got to know their best customers better by interviewing them.
“When we started our collaboration, I was really impressed by how Advance B2B was studying our business and our goals, our customers, and even our brand category,” says Saara. “We worked very closely with the sales and product teams to build a successful marketing strategy, and I think that was really groundbreaking.”
Rather than develop traditional buyer personas based on demographics and psychographics, we used the Jobs to be Done framework to understand the challenges RecRight’s core buyers face and the progress they aim to make. By conducting customer research, we helped RecRight refine their value proposition and clarify their target companies.
“Developing the growth marketing strategy helped us clarify and crystalize our overall business strategy. It’s not just a document that’s collecting dust—it’s really a living document that I’m using on a daily basis,” says Saara.
After building the first version of the growth marketing strategy, we moved into agile marketing operations with RecRight with the aim to support customer acquisition and accelerate revenue growth. 📈🚀
We work together with RecRight in 4-week sprints. Each new sprint starts with a planning session to choose the tasks for the upcoming sprint, and we have 15-minute scrums every Monday to connect about what’s going on that week. Each sprint ends with a retrospective where we analyze their results and performance, discuss any learnings, and determine the focus for the next sprint.
“It’s hard to imagine not working in an agile way. The agile method really helps our team focus on the most important things. I feel like I’m really on top of everything and the communication flow is very natural,” says Saara.
When deciding the focus for each sprint, we prioritize reaching RecRight’s growth goals. “I honestly feel that the people I work with at Advance B2B are more interested in our success than they are in their own. I feel that we are genuinely on the same team. This would definitely be described as a strategic partnership,” says Saara.
Focusing on outcomes over outputs, we’ve helped RecRight adopt a more data-oriented way of working by first setting up clear dashboards in Databox. “Advance B2B has helped us identify the right kinds of data sources, and we use that information to decide what to concentrate on next in marketing,” says Saara.
Early on in the partnership, we worked with RecRight to optimize the sales process and align the sales and marketing teams.
“We developed one of the company’s core processes—the lead process—which ties marketing and sales very closely together,” says Saara.
Working with us has impacted RecRight’s overall company culture, from both the marketing and sales perspectives. “We are more goal-oriented, and marketing has become everyone’s business. People outside of marketing are asking what we’re up to and how they can contribute. And when it comes to results, they’re are eager to learn what we have achieved,” says Saara.
RecRight can now focus their efforts by working towards a common goal with the sales team. “I think our team is more efficient because we are better organized and more focused,” says Saara. Sales and marketing worked closely together, for example, when working on an account-based marketing campaign.
When it comes to sales, the team now gets more materials and ideas from marketing and is better able to focus on their strengths.
“Working with Advance B2B has given a lot of structure to our collaboration with our marketing team. It’s like we got a new team member who is always up to date on modern sales and marketing,” says Miikka Tuomola, Business Development Director at RecRight.
As part of the overall marketing strategy, we developed a content strategy using the topic cluster approach where they identified three core topics for pillar pages and optimized existing content around these pages.
The video recruitment pillar page now ranks on the first page of Google with a featured snippet for a key search term. 👇
Working with us has strengthened RecRight’s marketing team in the areas where they were lacking. “When you’re working within a small team and you have tight resources, it’s key to have an external partner so that you can use their expertise in specific areas where you’re not the strongest yourself,” says Saara.
We also empowered RecRight with expert guidance they can put into practice outside of their collaboration. After planning two webinars together with us, for example, RecRight was able to follow the same practices on their own.
RecRight has recently begun doing paid acquisition together with us to get better results by focusing on the right channels, audiences, and messages. By working together, RecRight is also learning how to improve these skills internally.
For fellow marketers in B2B SaaS companies like ours, I would recommend you look for partners like Advance B2B because they will make sure you’re focusing on the right things and that you’re able to accelerate your own learning."
Saara Saalamo
Marketing Lead, RecRight
RecRight understands that testing and trying new things—and learning from your experiments—is key to business success. As for the next steps, RecRight plans on setting new growth goals now that they have more reliable data.
In the summer 2022, Recright reached out to us again to collaborate on building a go-to-market game plan that would be used in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway. 🇸🇪🇳🇴🇩🇰
Learn more about it 👉 here.
If you’re interested in working with us or have a question about our services, get in touch—we’d love to chat! 🙋🏽♂️
