Client’s challenges
As a coast-to-coast video production, 7Wonders Cinema was pretty content with its share of warm leads and referrals. Their business was up and running, but they wanted more. 7Wonders started looking for lead generation services for their media production agency to boost sales opportunities and create new marketing and sales channels. Here’s a list of challenges the Belkins team revealed when getting familiar with this case.
- Lack of warm leads – expanding 7Wonders Cinema globally required robust sales pipelines. The client found out that they were running out of warm referrals and connections that used to be enough for their two offices in Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Now when they opened new branches outside of the US, there’s been a dramatic need to increase their marketing and sales channels to find opportunities to get in more doors.
- Insufficient digital presence – social media platforms can be a constant lead prospecting source when handled correctly. 7Wonders Cinema’s digital presence did not match up to its ambitions to scale up. In particular, the company’s LinkedIn account was underperforming while the platform is a ready-made lead database.
- Narrow ICP – the customer profile has worked for the US market. Expanding globally required some changes to the company’s ICP to explore businesses where video content marketing would work for.
- Underperforming email outbound – 7Wonders Cinema had no trouble with their cold email strategy with their previous vendors. However, once they became aware of their desire to enter new markets, they realized they didn’t have the capabilities to do that. 7Wonders Cinema lacked the infrastructure to scale its cold email outreach.
What we did
1) Laying the groundwork
Scaling sales takes time. The very first month was really slow, with the Belkins team generating only one meeting. As we began developing both inbound and outbound at the same time, we needed time to spin up 7Wonders’ content-making machine.
First, we had a dig at social. The Belkins team focused on developing the client’s LinkedIn account. Taking it gradually, we began doing content promotion and sending out connection requests to relevant decision-makers. At the same time, we started cold email outreach too.
To make this discovery stage effective, we redefined the company’s ICP. We began looking at companies that already used video content in the past, so they could turn to this marketing method again.
These efforts brought us 750 leads and 3-5 scheduled meetings (with at least 1-2 meetings being from LinkedIn leads).
2) Scaling up sales outbound
Working on the ICP and personas, we better understood what 7Wonders customers are looking for. After identifying urgent needs for outbound leads, we continued scaling up content marketing and email outreach.
Having started 7Wonders Cinema’s outbound sales with one rep, the Belkins team added one more SDR to the project, thus making it possible to bring 3,000 leads per month. This way, we were scheduling 25 meetings per month for the 7Wonders team.
3) Email outbound
Cold email outreach was one of the working marketing strategies Belkins routinely have used for lead generation. To scale 7Wonders Cinema’s sales outreach, we warmed up 14 email boxes and used email deliverability software. Having high-performing email outreach requires certain steps. However, once you get a knack for email deliverability and spam issues, what’s left is just to write an engaging email copy and do your share of personalization.
4) Sales tech stack
When Belkins takes on a new client, they make sure that the client’s sales tech stack has all the tools needed to scale up. That’s why aligning our views on sales software is our first step when we start cooperating with a new partner. With 7Wonders Cinema, we took over their CRM operations to manage post-call follow-ups and inbound traffic through the submission forms on the website. It helped us bring in more meetings.
Also, we offered 7Wonders a Hubspot package to handle all inbound leads. As an inbound marketing and sales platform, HubSpot is highly useful as one place to manage all the activities of marketing and sales teams.
Finally, we introduced Folderly, an email performance solution developed by Belkins allowing the team to take control over almost any email deliverability issue like spam, inbox warming-up, email audits, DNS settings, sender score, etc.
