Client's Challenges
- B2B sales prospecting. Even if you don’t see a prospecting stall in your company, ensuring your sales pipeline is packed with fresh, quality leads is essential to increase your bottom line. MONA wished to make the most of its in-house sales team by outsourcing the back-breaking work of prospecting to a third-party expert.
- The client’s ICP & BPs. As a young company, MONA wanted to be confident it wouldn’t make a “rookie mistake” (prospecting without a comprehensive ICP). A detailed customer profile is the foundation of effective prospecting, so a lack of experience and knowledge can result in an inaccurate ICP or excessive details.
- Email deliverability. MONA had low deliverability because it turned out that the company name is a stop word in some languages. An irrelevant word in the email body wasn’t allowing MONA’s cold outreach attempts to find prospects effectively.
Solutions
Embracing the Art/Science Dualism of Sales
Being the professional lead generation agency for financial industry, Belkins team relied on the perfect combination of art and science in our sales prospecting approach. We know that the two elements – creativity and structure – are equally important, and we excel at both.
- Targeting the right audience. The Belkins team has been looking for the right-size targets for MONA. Large companies aren’t the best-fit niche for MONA because they have their merchant providers. First, we tried a lot of different industries, including wholesale, facilities, medical devices, transportation, retail, e-commerce, building materials, etc. 7,300+ prospects were added to the sale pipeline. Next, we tested multiple approaches, titles, and buyer personas to understand what works best.
- Cold calling. Then, two months in, MONA started a research package. Belkins professionals do lead research and put up lead lists, and then the MONA team would start to cold-call leads directly. That approach showed which titles responded better.
The most important thing was that Belkins found potential customers willing to cooperate with us. The guys carefully checked each lead. Thus, we got exceptional results. (Cristina Alvarez Barrett, CEO & President at Mona Payment Solutions)
Testing approaches
In email marketing, rejection isn’t as straightforward as face-to-face selling. You just don’t get the expected numbers. And there can be many reasons your email outreach campaigns fail to fly. Here, our analytic skills come in handy.
- Email outreach. We tweaked our email templates frequently, looking for catchy subject lines and customizing wording. Short templates turned out to work much better than the more detailed ones. So we decided to move further with the "short" option. And we achieved 50% email open rate on average.
- LinkedIn outreach. We have added a LinkedIn campaign to boost our traction and generate more appointments for MONA. So we got at least 70% LinkedIn campaign response rate.
We haven’t worked with any lead gen & email marketing companies before, and now we’re pleasantly surprised by the flexibility and fresh thinking of the Belkins team. (Cristina Alvarez Barrett, CEO & President at Mona Payment Solutions)
Results
Feeling for the delicate balance between discipline, intellect, creativity, and empathy, the Belkins team brings its top results.
- 59qualified appointments booked in 11 months;
- 9 deals closed;
- 15%sales closing rate from booked appointments;
- 0% — appointment "no-shows" rate;
- 7,300+ prospects;
- 50% avg. email open rate;
- 70% LinkedIn campaign response rate.
Challenges Belkins Encountered
- The most challenging moment was to figure out what the client does – how their credit and debit card payments work, how they calculate interest rates, and so on. Belkins’s learning curve was quite steep as we wanted to start booking appointments as fast as possible, yet we needed to educate ourselves more on the product and its features. However, the MONA team provided us with all the learning content and discussed with us on a regular basis to ensure they answered all our questions.
- Because of the client’s business specificity, we spent loads of time looking for ways to explain to prospects what the company does in simple words. We diligently tried various templates, and after gathering some stats, we finally found out what produces excellent results.
