“We have been able to take our mission to the next level.”

Something was missing

A few years ago, Giovanni Gonzalez hit a wall with his business. His company, Mindful Performance Blueprint, wasn't growing, and Giovanni didn't know what he was doing wrong. He was selling his consulting services, but that didn’t seem to be enough.

While the fate of his business was up in the air, he kept fighting. His passion for the company's mission — empowering Hispanic-owned businesses — gave him the fuel to keep pushing forward.

Giovanni searched high and low for solutions. He enrolled in marketing courses to learn everything he could, attended events, networked and kept consulting. However, despite his efforts, growth continued to elude him.

“I couldn't really expand," Giovanni explains. “It was just really me. My revenues were maybe just below six figures. ... And it was okay given that I loved what I did.”

A lifeline before losing it all

When COVID-19 shut the world down, it had the potential to make a bad situation worse for Giovanni. Fortunately, it did the opposite. The pandemic forced him to rethink the way he was doing business. Like so many others, he had to figure out how to keep his company going using solely a digital presence — something he’d never done before.

“It was during the pandemic that I no longer could grow my business in a traditional way,” recalls Giovanni. Without in-person events to network at, the CEO realized what he needed was a way to capture, nurture and convert leads online. He needed a database full of his clients’ information that he could easily access and use to stay in touch with them.

As he was brainstorming, Giovanni remembered a small business CRM and marketing automation platform he learned about at an event in Florida a few years prior.

That solution was Keap, and it would turn out to be the answer he’d been looking for, the one that could help him stay afloat during the pandemic, achieve massive growth and serve more of the community he loves.

“Being good at what you do and marketing what you’re good at are two different things”

Reflecting on his time before Keap, Giovanni remembers where he started: “I only had a cell phone with contacts, and I didn't have a database. I didn't know the power of a database.”

He first focused on storing and organizing his contact list. Instead of jockeying between his cellphone and a spreadsheet, Giovanni used Keap’s small business CRM to store all the information he had about clients and prospects. It turned out to be a gamechanger for him. “Just having one place to have my customers, my prospects, the information about them, was an unbelievable opportunity for me to capitalize on my strategies,” says Giovanni.

Marketing automation came next. “I started to understand that there is an entire lifecycle that one needs to be responsible for,” Giovanni says. “And when I did, that is when my entire life and my entire business took a complete turn.”

Keap’s Lifecycle Automation framework helped Giovanni craft a customer journey personalized to his business. Once that was done, it wasn’t long before he was building out automations. Giovanni began using the software to:

• Segment contacts based on their interests and stage in the customer journey
• Craft lead-nurturing campaigns through automated texts and emails
• Embed lead-capture forms across the company website
• Automatically send invoices and process payments
• Use Keap’s templates to build custom landing pages

Giovanni went from manually communicating with his target audience from a cell phone contact list, to automating every step of his customer journey.

“With Keap, we use everything,” he explains. “We send emails, texts, invoices and proposals. We create our pipeline, we do landing pages, we collect the information, and then we do all the follow-ups with a sequence. So we basically use Keap for every corner of our business.”

Reaping the benefits of automation

Not only did Giovanni’s automation efforts save him time in the long run, but they also saved his business and helped scale it to new heights. Every aspect of his business was growing thanks to the automations he’d built.

The first area to bring results was arguably the most important to Giovanni, the one that helped him build relationships and maintain connections: His email campaigns and database.

“For many years, I would send an email, and we would only have a 3% open rate…I would do high-fives if I had a 15% open rate.” Giovanni recalls. “Now I know that if I segment better, people want to hear more about what we do. We understand what people want and how they think, so our open rates now are about 70%-75%.”

While his email open rates skyrocketed, he also watched his contact database grow to over 40,000, but that was only the beginning of his success story.

With access to more people after the pandemic, Giovanni returned to his roots of in-person networking in a powerful new way. He started holding his own conferences with the help of marketing automation, using the software to promote the events and capture lead information from attendees. So far, Giovanni has held three in-person conferences, each with hundreds in attendance.

The connections Giovanni has made and maintained through automation have helped him serve more people, triple his staff, and increase his revenue from under $100k to half a million and counting. But Giovanni’s greatest joy comes from consulting and helping business owners achieve the same success he has. In fact, he’s helped many entrepreneurs grow their businesses to above $1 million in revenue.

It’s this type of work that keeps Giovanni going — and now, as a Keap Certified Partner, he’s doing more of it than ever before.

Kicking it up a notch with the Keap Partner Program

When Giovanni first started using Keap, it helped him identify the gaps in his business and gave him the tools he needed to fill them. After witnessing the growth that came from using the software, he wanted to help his customers experience the benefits of automation as well. That’s when Giovanni decided to take the next step in growing his business and serving his clients by becoming a Keap Certified Partner.

With the partner program, Giovanni is able to reach more people with his consulting services, teach them how to use Keap, watch them profit the way he has and generate additional revenue for his own business.

The partner program was a no-brainer for Giovanni because he already considered Keap to be so much more than a tool. For him, it has always been a partnership. Now, as he works with clients, he teaches them how Keap can be their partner too.

“The marketplace is saturated with education around marketing, but I found, with Keap, that was the only place where it gives you a 360 degree appreciation of what it really takes to grow your business,” Giovanni explains.

Giovanni has come a long way, and his dedication to his mission is stronger than ever. The most exciting part? He has the tool kit to continue growing his business, reaching more people and taking the mission that started it all to the next level.