Delivering sales ready leads — STOICA

Supporting the sales department of an automation company to increase sales qualified leads

Brief and goals

A company active in the tech automation space (RPA services) needed our help in supporting their sales function. Their sales team had recently been created and was growing at a steady pace so they needed a constant flow of leads for the team to have conversations with and convert into contracts.

We used inbound and outbound strategies to deliver 10-15 sales qualified leads monthly, leads that booked calls with the sales team. As our demand and lead generation efforts progressed, the conversations kept flowing and the sales team got more and more potential customers to try and close.

The client is a European based tech automation company, with over 1,000 employees and approximately €15 million yearly revenue. Working in the B2B sector, the company offers automation services (RPA consulting and implementation as well as complex software development services) to clients in the finance, insurance and retail space, from all across Europe.

Setting the context

As part of their efforts to expand their customer base, the client wanted to target new customers from Western Europe (the UK, Germany and Switzerland as main countries), in the industries they were already experienced in. They had all the infrastructure in place (experienced consultants, an expanding sales team, a partnership with a strong international RPA provider), but needed more support in the marketing function.

Their current marketing team focused exclusively on building the brand through attending IT events and didn’t have a clear objective on delivering leads. In order to reach their ambitious sales objectives, it was decided that the sales team should focus their efforts on closing, whilst an agency would focus on generating demand from the target market and audience acquisition.

The aim was to increase sales, with new contracts ranging from €20,000 to €100,000 contract value. Considering the time frame needed to close a deal (6 – 9 months in the tech space, given the customer profile and value of contract), the company wanted to achieve the results over a period of 1 year, with a steady increase in leads on a month to month basis.

The process

The first step in achieving results was the narrowing of focus. The company was working with multiple industries in different countries and usually talked about their vast experience in diverse fields. However, clients want to make sure you understand their specific problem, which is why 3 main customer personas were developed:

1. Digitalization executives in the banking industry
2. Technology and digitalization executives in the insurance industry
3. Technology officers in the retail industry

Following this, 3 landing pages were developed for each persona, detailing information about what the client can offer and presenting relevant case studies for that specific industry. The landing pages were then promoted in digital ads and organic social media posts, but also used in cold outreach campaigns.

It is important to note that marketing is a long term game, even more so in the B2B space. In order to see optimal results, there needs to be consistency. The leads were repeatedly exposed to the messaging of the clients and interest increased steadily, with more people filling in the web forms, engaging with the social media posts and reading the content.

Solution 

The marketing strategy included activities for inbound marketing (focused more on the long term) and outbound marketing (with a shorter term view).

The inbound marketing strategy for demand gen included:

• A content marketing plan to showcase thought leadership in each specific targeted industry, with a frequency of 1 long form, value packed article per month
• Videos that presented the team and their process when working with clients, to set rapport with the client even before the first conversation and promote their USPs
• Using relevant case studies that showed the experience the client had in each particular industry. The articles and case studies were also collated in whitepapers, that generated warm leads
• An organic social media plan, that addressed the needs of customers in all sales life cycle (awareness, consideration, conversion), with specific types of content aimed at each stage
• A digital ads plan, to promote the content generated and to bring back customers to the site through remarketing, but also to be top of mind for those searching for specific keywords and showing an active interest in automation
• A lead nurturing plan, to ensure that leads generated through all the efforts were kept warm until they were ready to convert, in which constant contact was ensured either through LinkedIn interactions or personalized emails.

The outbound marketing strategy for audience acquisition included:

• A LinkedIn cold outreach plan that expanded the network of key sales managers from the team and started conversations with target contacts. It also included nurturing activities for potential customers to help warm them up before starting any type of conversation.
• An email marketing sequence to generate meetings for the sales team.
• Lead gen ads, targeting the customer personas on LinkedIn.

Results

The campaign was evaluated on a week-by-week basis in the testing period, where frequent pivoting was required, and monthly after the tests generated results.

After the first 6 months, the campaign was generating:

• 130 – 150 monthly visits on landing pages, from ads mostly
• 1% conversion rate in form completion (1 – 2 forms filled in per month)
• 14% response rate from omnichannel cold outreach 
• 7% meetings set per month 

Then, after another 6 months (1 year since the project has started), the results were:

• 400 – 500 monthly visits on landing pages, from ads and organic traffic
• 3% conversion rate in form completion (12 – 15 forms filled in per month)
• 19% response rate from omnichannel cold outreach 
• 11% meetings set per month