It’s no secret that making B2B sales in the telecommunications industry is a real challenge. You’re working in a super competitive market, conducting complex sales with multiple buyers inside each account, and that’s just for the people who already have a foot in the door.
Our client came to us with a simple challenge, to help them book demo meetings with key people inside accounts with which they did not have an existing connection.
One of the primary issues with creating connections with large telco companies is the expense, in terms of both time and money.
Smaller companies have fewer resources to devote to the usual routine of researching accounts, identifying key people, reaching out to make contact, and then the multiple follow-ups needed to book a meeting.
Our artificial-intelligence-driven (AI) technology and expertise overcame these challenges in just two weeks, resulting in multiple demo meetings for our client with the biggest international telco companies.
The client profile
A small high-tech Canadian company with around 40 employees that specializes in supplying a market-leading economically scalable DIY SD-WAN software platform. The company has optimized its tech offerings to provide large telco companies with a tangible opportunity to offer new services. They have a stable of satisfied existing customers and a range of proven business cases. What our client lacked was the connection with a large-scale telco company that would provide them with a number of game changing benefits, including a significant boost to their revenue, a sustainable stream of revenue for the future, and the credibility that will help to attract other customers at different scales.
What We Delivered in 2 Months
During the project, we were able to achieve the following for our client:
Measured as # of replies received across Email and LinkedIn
Measured as number of qualified meetings booked with our solutions
Measured as new connections with right contacts inside target accounts
Estimated revenue opportunity from active conversations
How We Did It?
Account Research & Selection
The first step of any effective business development is to begin by building a database of the right companies. It enable our clients to focus their resources (time & budget) on accounts with highest chance of becoming a customer.
Then, it is critical to collect actionable intelligence that we could use to create a super-personalized outreach campaign.
We ran several highly-targeted campaigns for our client. One of the key one was to target top 20 largest Telco companies. For this campaign, we identified the key decision-makers and influencers before doing a deep dive into those companies to collect intelligence and prepare outreach campaigns.
Sales Messages Preperation
Getting demo meetings with high-profile buyers is a combination of authentic and personalized messaging across a range of platforms, coupled with persistence and consistency in business development activities.
This combination allows companies of all scales to successfully engage with key stakeholders within valuable target accounts in a remarkably short period of time.
How we deliver authentic and personalized messaging?
1) Conciseness
When it comes to B2B marketing, brevity is king. The critical decision-makers reading your messages don’t have time to scroll through to find your primary sales thrust. It needs to be bold, upfront, and each email or LinkedIn message should be no more than 100 words.
2) Personalization
Our research shows that personalization can increase your reply rate by 760%, but personalizing a message is more than just using a first name or dropping a company name. You need to demonstrate that you’ve researched your target and are presenting a business case or pitch that is highly relevant to their specific needs.
3) Conversational
There is a good chance that your target read thousands of stilted generic sales messages every day, and ignores every one of them. To stand out from the crowd, you need to properly engage them with an authentic and conversational tone and a clear and valuable message.
4) Authenticity and human tone
People are surprisingly sensitive to what has been written by a human and what is AI-generated. If you are using AI personalization in your lead gen, then it needs to be able to accurately replicate an authentic human tone.
Our Secret Sauce: Personize
Using Personize, our platform, we generated content for the messaging campaigns that derived the required levels of personalization from the data cache we built during our research phase.
All of the messages generated had an authentic conversational tone indistinguishable from a human writer and concisely made the case for our client.
Rather than resting on our laurels, we ran continuous A/B testing of our messaging as well as optimizing our social profile to perfect the level of personalization.
To keep the client in the loop, we ran weekly tactical meetings with our client’s executives and sales team where we reviewed the overall connectivity (% of people inside target accounts connecting to our client), the initial responses to our campaign, and then, if required, repositioned based on that data.
Effective Use of Automation Tools
Using our innovative marketing and sales automation technologies allows our clients to create the consistency and personalization in their messaging that is so important to getting the attention of critical decision-makers.
The use of LinkedIn automation and email automation also offers the opportunity to be persistent, sending multiple personalized messages without devoting a huge amount of time and resources that smaller companies might just not have.
Once we had that information, we were able to build two complementary outreach plans that were suited to different audiences.
LinkedIn Outreach Plans with Two Social Selling Tactics
1) Executive to Executive
Using LinkedIn, we were able to connect on an Executive to Executive level using concise, respectful, but genuinely engaging messaging to generate leads.
2) Expert to Expert
With this plan, we used technical language to establish the salesperson as an expert and thought leader in the right technical fields before initiating the conversation.
