"We’ve worked with other companies that all said they could do what Collideascope actually has delivered upon."
Mario D'Aquila
In Search of: Full-Service Lead Generation Partner that Actually Delivers Results
Mario D’Aquila had heard the promises before. Many times. Big agencies with big promises came, one after the other, with believable pitches and impressive portfolios. But, for whatever reason, none were able to follow through on their projections of great results to come.
So when Mario, founder of Assisted Living Home Care Services of Connecticut, got referred to Curtis Hays and Collideascope, the introduction was met with both hope and hesitation at once. Mario had tried everything from dabbling in self-serve marketing — learning he lacked the experience and time to do it well — to trusting marketing professionals and agencies to generate leads. But nothing…clicked.
In 2017, at the suggestion of a trusted confidant, he tried one final time to get it right. Final, because ever since, Collideascope’s model of transparent, mutually accountable lead-generation program that uses a multi-channel approach to generate convert-able leads has been the difference maker Mario had long been in search of.
Closing the Loop Between Marketing and Sales
What began as an organic search engine optimization initiative has evolved into a robust program of campaigns that leverage a multi-channel approach, including video, digital display advertising, paid search and landing optimization strategies, to capture and convert leads — into actual sales! The difference in approach wasn’t so much the tools being deployed, but rather the strategy and approach to solving the problem of lead generation.
Collideascope partnered with Mario’s home health care company to do a thorough analysis of its customers and referrers, working to understand their behaviors online, then crafting a campaign strategy to reach people where they live, work and play and deliver impactful messages that would appeal to the target market’s motivators and ambitions.
The leads began to come in. What happened next was the key to supercharging a system that would self-optimize and continually improve upon itself, creating a regenerative closed-loop synergy between marketing efforts and sales tracking.
“Curtis insists on mutual accountability,” Mario notes. “Unlike other providers we had used previously, Curtis wanted to know everything he could about what happened to the leads the program was generating — which were good leads, which leads closed, which leads failed to close. Some agencies are afraid to talk about sales. Not Curtis. He insists on it.”
Collideascope used the data he received from the company’s Salesforce CRM software so that he could optimize future campaigns based on the identities and behaviors of the leads that closed, creating a “feedback loop” that works to find more online personas that most closely match those of the closed sales. “Once you see something that works, and do the work of learning why, you double down on that. But you have to want to see that data in the first place for it to work.”
The Numbers Are In…and Keep Coming In!
As results continued to justify the ROI, Assisted Living and Collideascope continued to add to the suite of services, implementing data-supported approaches and tools to drive results all the more. They’ve worked together to experiment and test, then reinvest in those initiatives that prove successful.
“I remember when we used other providers, we would maybe get five leads in a good year, from our website,” Mario recalls. “Now, we can get more than twice that in a single month! And they’re qualified leads…leads we tend to have a very high close rate on.”
In his insistence on mutual accountability and transparent sharing of data and information, Curtis recommended integrating CallRail into the company’s lead-generation efforts, as a way to track inbound leads by customized phone number. Mario reports that this single effort alone was “game changing.” Prior to creating this digital accounting of inbound lead source tied to closed sales, Mario concedes that lead tracking was not being done with absolute rigor or certainty. Now, both Collideascope and Mario’s team can visualize, at any given moment, where a Web lead came from, who initiated it, and where the lead lives in the company’s sales pipeline.
"When we finally decided to do an analysis of our lead tracking, we gasped when learning that we forfeited as much as $250,000 in revenue in just four days! Once we put Curtis’s process in place, we saw a 40% increase in qualified lead retention, almost overnight."
Mario D'Aquila
It’s a common phenomenon,” Curtis observes, “surprising as it sounds. Companies aren’t really tracking leads throughout their entire lifespan — if at all — so they have no idea whether their marketing is working. It’s all just a gut feel. But not for us. We are data nerds. We want access to all of the data we can get our hands on, so we know what’s working, redirect where things aren’t, and optimize campaigns that not just support ROI, but activities that visibly drive ROI.
“They solved our lead-gen problem,” Mario notes. “But we don’t stop just because something worked. It’s a journey. We keep learning, we keep improving. And we’re not slowing down now. Four years ago, it’s like we were a caveman who hadn’t even discovered the wheel yet. Now we’re driving a sophisticated automobile at 65 miles an hour. It’s a night and day difference from where we started to where we are today!”