Kuno Creative Strengthens Marketing Foundation for White Cup

Introduction

White Cup is a leading CRM and business intelligence software solution for distributors. While it has a longstanding history of serving the industry with solutions known by other brand names, it lacked the brand awareness needed to compete with other leading CRM software, including large players and emerging solutions built specifically for distributors.

The company has ambitious growth goals and needed reliable sources of new leads in addition to its established presence at industry trade shows and virtual events. VP of Marketing Helen Piña sought a partner to revisit the company’s core messaging and serve as its full-service digital marketing team, supporting new product launches and thought leadership while ensuring their sales team had a steady stream of leads to nurture.

The Challenge

Communicating the Value of a CRM for Distributors

Many distributors use ERP systems to manage ordering, purchasing and other critical aspects of their business. Leading ERPs typically have built-in contact management systems with basic capabilities, although they are not designed to be modern CRMs with automated notifications, email workflows and business intelligence.

Distributors are also familiar with large, all-purpose CRM software, and many of their sales teams already have these solutions in place or have past experience using them. Unfortunately, these solutions require extensive customization and integration to display customer and product data from ERPs in a way that enables sales reps to act on them within the CRM.

Because of these challenges, sales leaders weren’t necessarily motivated to search for a new CRM and instead created many time-consuming and costly workarounds. Helping them understand the value of a CRM that’s built for distributors and configured to integrate with ERPs was a key part of the marketing strategy.

The company also lacked user reviews, testimonials and recent examples of how its CRM and business intelligence software led to increased revenue for its customers.

Prospects couldn’t see the product without first scheduling a consultation with a sales rep, so it was difficult for them to understand how White Cup CRM was different from other software they’d previously used. 

The Partnership

White Cup partnered with Kuno Creative to implement a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, beginning with a discovery process and the development of buyer personas and key messaging recommendations.

Kuno developed numerous case studies and resources based on the initial interviews that took place during this process.

To achieve quick wins, the Kuno team also introduced several campaigns within the first 90 days supported by paid advertising, email marketing using HubSpot, and lead scoring and automated workflows designed to optimize the process for identifying prospects ready for outreach from the sales team.  

As the partnership continued, Kuno Creative developed a robust content strategy, creating blog posts, resources, articles for industry publications, and live and virtual presentations that positioned White Cup as an industry expert.

The team focused on improving White Cup's search engine rankings, resulting in top positions for key industry terms such as “AI for distributors” and featured snippets.

Kuno executed targeted email campaigns, resulting in a 13% increase in email sends and improved engagement rates.

They also optimized White Cup's use of HubSpot, implementing lead scoring, nurturing workflows and custom code to improve efficiency.

Some highlights from the past year include:

• Launching a campaign to introduce new AI features, influencing 29 new opportunities, 10 of which were successfully closed
• Supporting more than 30 unique events, including providing collateral material, such as landing pages, invitation emails, slides and speaker notes for presentations, and follow-up emails and sequences for sales reps
• Increasing White Cup’s search impression share by 29% and creating many new opportunities, including at least 10 closed deals as a result of paid advertising
• Creating nine new case studies, more than a dozen new resources, and more than 40 new blog posts
• Sending over two million emails, a 13% increase from the previous year
• Increasing the company’s following and engagement on LinkedIn with more frequent posting, adding more than 5,000 followers in the past year
• Supporting the announcement of a new acquisition, Sales Management Plus
• Improving rankings on Google for numerous search terms, including “CRM for distributors”, “CRM vs ERP” and “AI for distributors”
• Implementing “lead moments” using the Lead Object in HubSpot to provide White Cup's sales team with timely opportunities for reach out
• Launching a chatbot on the White Cup website to increase conversions
• Introducing a live interactive demo to showcase its CRM + BI software

Key Wins

After partnering with Kuno Creative, White Cup experienced significant successes, including:

• Increasing website sessions by 47% year-over-year
• Gaining more than 700,000 impressions through paid advertising
• Adding 288% more new contacts compared to the year prior
• Influencing 61 deals worth a total of $1.6 million