EI Experience
When COVID19 closed borders and businesses in early 2020, Vancouver-based training firm, EI Experience was hit harder than most.
The company provides leadership development and emotional intelligence training for corporations. They offered live, in-person workshops & retreats for large enterprises throughout Canada and the US. Speaking engagements and conferences and events were the company’s primary marketing channel.
With borders closed, planes grounded, and all in-person gatherings cancelled until further notice, EI Experience lost its entire revenue stream overnight.
The Challenges
Company founder Carolyn Stern had pivoted her program delivery to an online model and was achieving spectacular results for a handful of clients.
Leaders desperately needed help with crisis leadership skills, but getting the word out was proving very difficult – especially in a world that was reeling from a sudden, and complete, redefinition of the world of work.
At the start of the pandemic, Carolyn had been forced to lay off many of her staff so she was also working round the clock just to keep up. She came to us for help putting a system in place to attract more training leads to the business, reigniting her sales pipeline so that she could begin to rebuild her business.
Results We Achieved
The Bottom Line
Redefine the Value Proposition
Carolyn can clearly articulate the value of her training programs, positioning them as a need to have for her ideal customer profiles. We then worked with Carolyn to reimagine EI Experience’s training menu as an ongoing leadership development journey, redesigning key aspects of the experience to create links – turning a collection of independent workshops into a complete training program.
Establish Thought Leadership
We worked with Carolyn on a thought leadership plan that included publishing her first book – an effort that resulted in TV appearances across Canada and the US, as well as articles in dozens of publications, including Inc., Forbes and CEO Magazine. The increased visibility opened doors to bigger clients & bigger deals.
Optimized online Presence
A complete audit of the online presence for EI Experience uncovered several opportunities to optimize messaging and layouts, improving conversion rates on the company’s websites and landing pages. Additional recommendations were provided to expand the company’s visibility and increase buyer engagement across social media, through email, and across other online and offline channels.
Fully Trained Team
Once the action plan was clearly mapped out, we worked with Carolyn to recruit key marketing roles within her organization, leveraging hiring grants and wage subsidies to offset the initial investment in growing her team.
Once hired, we provided training in marketing program management, and mentored the team through the onboarding process. We also delivered business development and sales process training for the client management team.
How We Solved It
Thriving Through Change
EI Experience engaged 33Dolphins to both develop the marketing strategy, and support their growing team through the initial implementation and optimization phases of the execution.
By re-imaging how to communicate about their existing programs, workshops and retreats, the team at EI Experience was able to not only triple revenues in year one, but also integrate a train-the-trainer and licensing model that set the stage for even more dramatic growth in year two.
We began by scaling back on the amount of marketing “activity” within the organization, establish clear goals and objectives for each marketing channel that were specific to the audiences they served. This refined focus simplified content planning and allowed for easy priorization of activities during very busy times. eliminating the curse of start/stop marketing.
We then developed detailed buyer personas for key decision makers within target markets, and developed specific messaging to address the needs and concerns of each persona profile.
These were then used to develop a comprehensive content calendar and a content-development process that empowered Carolyn’s young team to create the volume of content needed to fuel the program with minimal input from Carolyn, while also ensuring the content created remained at the quality and depth necessary to support her thought leadership position in the industry.
Finally a content distribution strategy was designed to ensure that Carolyn’s message was seen by the people who had the power to engage her for training. This include both online and offline tactics, as well as measurement strategies to ensure results were tracked and reported.
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