Problems
We needed to get quality leads on a regular basis, to make a deep analysis of our industry, and to build an ICP.
Prior to contacting Belkins, the client faced the following challenges:
- Need for qualified appointments. To keep growing, Whitespots needed more appointments than they were scheduling. Achieving that goal meant reimagining the company’s inbound and outbound sales channels.
- Niche expansion. The client set their sights on several market niches that looked like they would be good for business. Whitespots required in-depth research and analysis for certainty.
- No previous outreach experience. Having been relatively new to the concept of B2B outreach, the client needed a hand to kick things off — from creating materials and case studies to crafting B2B templates and managing responses.
- Limited workforce. Being a small business, Whitespots was unable to assign in-house experts to email outreach and market research without putting them under too much pressure due to other tasks that also required undivided attention.
What we did
Belkins did a really deep analysis of our industry and helped us to define our ICP and Target Audience. They also provide us with an appointment setting consulting.
1) Creating an Ideal Customer Profile
With all the client’s goals taken into account, we started working on a proper Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). This process is a must for everyone who is only getting started with their business or wants to add a new market to their customer database.
It enables them to map out the key differences between markets, the pain points of each industry, and make sense of the possible needs and goals their potential buyers may be pursuing.
The client’s new ICP targeted a large variety of FinTech areas (cryptocurrency exchanges, payment apps, Forex brokers), as well as industries like Banking and IT & Services (SaaS-developers, analytics platforms, ad services).
How to know if the market is good for you?
To find the right market, you must have the right idea about your own services. Ask yourself, “What are the core problems that my services can fix?”. After this, see what industries may be experiencing these problems. For example, cybersecurity is highly relevant for every company that processes and stores financial data and private client data. So, in addition to combing through industries that are relevant to your area (IT, Software Development, etc), you can also focus on the businesses that have websites and provide options to purchase products online.
2) Working on materials
Prior to starting outreach campaigns, we made sure that there are enough inbound materials to nurture and engage clients with.
Why is it important?
Your potential B2B sales leads, buyers, want to be sure that they’re choosing the right vendor. After all, they’ll be entrusting their business data and assets to you. So, your future customers would want to know, how good you are at problem-solving, how much you know about the pain points of their industry, how you work with clients, etc. You want to make sure they learn from the materials made by you. Therefore, you must write as many case studies, articles, blog posts, onboarding materials as possible, giving your prospects an idea about your brand’s mission and capabilities.
This step was probably the trickiest. Since we were to engage new markets, we needed completely new materials and case studies. Some of them had to be done from scratch.
The client’s team worked in sync with our copywriters and template writers to make sure that the content is fresh, relevant, and corresponds to the Whitespots brand style.
3) Setting up campaigns
With new materials ready, we moved on to developing email outreach campaigns. The process involved:
- Mapping correct time slots. Timing matters a lot in B2B outreach. So, we had to outline the right time slots by taking a good look at the schedules of the titles we were targeting and locating the best moments for sending messages.
- Choosing the right pace. Next, we worked on the email cadence in order to know how many emails we can send in a week. We went for a traditional cadence that lasted for 4 weeks and consisted of 4-5 emails.
- Preparing templates. After knowing when to send, we picked the most appropriate templates, including all the A/B testing we agreed to do. Every email campaign must consist of at least 4 emails — it must start with an introduction and end with the “final call” offer in case your recipient didn’t respond for too long.
Why is it important?
The “final call” template pursues two goals - to motivate the prospect to reach out or to back away from a conversation gracefully. The final email acknowledges the prospect’s busyness and offers to either respond with “not interested” or ask to follow up later. It grants you a better understanding of your recipients and lets you determine which recipients can be removed from the sending list.
- Brainstorming on sales objections. We worked together with the client’s team to discuss what kind of sales objections they usually get and how they work around them. In addition, we outlined possible sales objections and the ways of dealing with them. This way, we created several sales scenarios to make sure that the clients’ experts can effortlessly respond to B2B outside sales objections.
- Checking domain settings. With templates, content, approach, and scripts done, we started working on domain health and Sender Score. We had to make sure that Whitespots’ sender reputation was high enough to launch outreach campaigns. Since the client didn’t do much outreach prior to contacting us, we only had to tune in email monitoring tools, run a couple of checks, warm up the client’s mailboxes, and establish the right formatting.
4) Kicking off outreach
After all the preparations, we finally were able to launch outreach campaigns. From that point, our goal was to send emails, monitor the open rate, analyze responses, and communicate with prospects, guiding them through every stage of our sales pipeline.
Each week, we sent detailed reports on our activity and responses to the client. The prospects that reached the narrow end of the sales funnel, were handed over to the client for closing.
At that stage, staying in touch with the client constantly was essential to the end result. We had to make sure that we were on the same page and our client understood what we did and why. This part went smoothly thanks to 24/7 availability and regular meetings.
