Last updated February 8, 2019
In its most general sense, a service-level agreement (“SLA”) is a commitment from a vendor to its customers. GoConvert’s SLA documents the ways we service our customers and outlines the deliverables to which they are entitled.
Our primary customer service goal involves adding value as quickly and often as possible. Even before a customer converts, and then, during the first phases of fulfilment, we put downward pressure on “Time to Value (TTV).” Then over time, as a customer’s ongoing, circular engagement begins, we put upward pressure on the frequency with which we deliver insights and, ultimately, growth.
Customer Lifecycle
The GoConvert customer lifecycle proceeds along a linear track toward the ongoing, circular engagement illustrated below:
1. Goal Setting
TTV: < 1 day
First, we help customer prospects use the GoConvert performance calculator to set specific goals. We use budgets (BUM), relationship values, and the real-time performance data of the GoConvert customer network to generate achievable ROI, revenue, and new relationship targets.
2. Onboarding
After we define our goals, we prepare agreements for customer prospects. These include campaign notes, the goals we plan to meet, an overview of the generic GoConvert service lifecycle (steps 3+ below), and a billing schedule. A customer’s first payment is always due when his/her agreement is signed.
3. Deep Dive
TTV: < 10 days
Working closely with the customer, GoConvert takes a “deep dive” into his/her CRM, social media accounts, Google Analytics data, and any other relevant relationship resources. The results of this all-important first step allow us to build an actionable, location- and demographic-driven model of the audience we’re targeting. And it means that, by the second week of our relationship, the customer has a better, more complete picture of his/her ideal customer, teammate, &c. than s/he has ever had before.
4. Strategy
TTV: < 7 days
Using our deep dive audience insights, we help customers build holistic awareness, lead generation, and nurturing strategies. This allows us to make more informed, more effective decisions about the customer’s marketing efforts. And as long as the customer works with us, GoConvert will always use these top-level audience insights as the wellspring that informs all downstream marketing activities.
5. Lead Generation Tool
TTV: 7-30 days
Next, we work with the customer to build a lead generation resource that aligns with his/her audience’s unique interests, needs, and challenges. Examples would include landing pages, ROI calculators, trip planners, interactive brochures, and application utilities. This tool allows the customer to convert raw awareness into kinetic leads and actionable audience insights.
6. Paid Advertising
TTV: < 7 Days
With our lead generation resource in place, we plan and execute a paid, digital advertising campaign on the customer’s behalf. This campaign uses a “special sauce” of awareness-generating resources (below), and we use whichever resources are likely to perform well with the customer’s audience and most effectively drive traffic to his/her lead generation tool.
7. Learning and Fine-Tuning
TTV: Ongoing
As lead and campaign data begin flowing, we relentlessly measure, analyze, report, and fine-tune. This allows us to continually:
Budgets Under Management (BUM)
GoConvert thinks marketing and sales should be less DIY and more like financial services. Unlike traditional marketing agencies, we focus less on awareness and creative and more on trends and abstractions, on data generation and interpretation, on engagement and audiences. Like a financial advisor, we combine application resources with professional knowledge capital to help our customers reach their goals.
As a result, our pricing model is a bit different.
We don’t charge fees for ad buys. That’s because we don’t make money from fees, and all ad buys are included. Instead, we make money when we spend our customers’ budgets wisely, when we help them grow, when we help them maximize the ROI of their marketing spending.
“When I pay you, what’s included?”
GoConvert is all-inclusive. Let us manage your marketing budget, and we’ll provide 100% of the following:
“How do you spend the money I give you? How does GoConvert make money?”
It’s our responsibility to use customer budgets to deliver the goals we define in our proposal. We commit to spending up to 110% of a customer’s total BUM, assuming the entire amount is delivered to us, to achieving these goals. If we reach the goal(s) before we’ve spent the entire BUM, as a result of smart spending, we’ll use whatever remains (usually ~20%) to pay our team, develop and maintain our application, and cover other business costs.
For example, let’s assume we have a $1,000 BUM and our goal is to secure three new customers and $3,000 worth of new business for XYZ Corporation. Let’s then assume we’re able to do that for $800. The remaining $200 is our margin. Not only does this allow us to assume 100% of the campaign risk, this pricing model keeps GoConvert’s success closely tied to that of its customers. We’re all in this together, and we win when you win.
Payments
While we do occasionally accept full BUM’s up front, GoConvert generally breaks total BUM’s into monthly or quarterly payments. The first payment is due when the first customer agreement is signed. The others are due Net 30.
If, for some reason, the customer is unable to make all his/her payments, GoConvert commits to spending 50% of what’s has been paid to achieving the customer’s goals via digital ad spending. For example, XYZ Corporation has committed to a BUM of $1,000. Before being acquired, they make payments totaling $300. GoConvert would therefore be responsible for spending $150 on paid ads that help achieve the goals outlined in XYZ’s original customer agreement.
Audiences vs. Relationships
GoConvert’s wants to help customers build net-new, revenue-generating relationships. As we outline in our glossary, any contact we inherit from you (as a result of our deep dive process) becomes an “Audience” contact inside our application.
By default, no audience-stage contacts are included in our application’s dashboard reports or graphs. Those reflect kinetic marketing activity, lead flows, and revenue generating relationships.
If an audience-stage contact submits a lead form as a result of our outreach activity, our application will promote him/her to a “Relationship”-stage contact. At that point, we also begin including the contact in dashboard reports and graphs. While contacts who follow this lifecycle aren’t net new, GoConvert has helped him/her re-engage with our customer. Since there’s analytical and financial value in this re-engagement, we think it’s fair and useful for our data to reflect it.