Problems
Despite the decent organic growth, the Born & Bred team knew that it wasn’t enough if they wanted to operate on a larger scale and increase their number of clients. They knew that more businesses could benefit from their offer, but in order for those businesses to learn about it, Born & Bred had to be more visible, more available to more brands across the world. That was something traditional marketing couldn’t do.
After this, the Born & Bred team outlined two main needs:
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More effective business development. To conquer new heights, the client needed to overlook the process of targeting, prospecting and nurturing clients, reveal the areas of improvement and apply the changes necessary for increasing the potential of Born & Bred. This procedure required some perspective from third-party experts.
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Assistance with pre-sales heavy lifting. Born & Bred had a relatively small team (15 persons). While the team was able to handle the sales process, covering it together with the pre-sales processes became more complicated due to the increase in clients. Realizing that they were understaffed to manage both sales and pre-sales with the same efficiency, the team of Born & Bred started looking for outsourced professionals who could cover pre-sales for them.
With an extensive expertise in generating qualified leads for marketing agencies, our team found appropriate solutions to tackle these issues. So Born & Bred chose Belkins as an acquisition partner, who could provide valuable sales development strategy and give a hand with developing brand awareness via email marketing and other channels.
1. Research and segmentation. As a Marketing & Advertising agency, the client had a large and very detailed Ideal Customer Profil (ICP). Our goal was to organize the client’s ICP in a way that would let us determine the most valuable prospects and craft an appealing message for them. Our researchers received all information from the client and started working on studying the industries and niches that could deliver the most loyal and long-term customers.
After taking a good look at the client’s ICP, we proceeded with segmenting it and singling out the most promising directions.
Since the client’s ICP was rather large, we started testing different segments to see which one works the best. We ran several testing email campaigns to check the responsiveness of each segment and assessed the end results. Ultimately, startups proved to be the most successful direction to follow - and they also provided us with a major personalization opportunity because a lot of start-ups across the United States received funding from the venture capitalists who previously funded the startups that already used the services of Born & Bred.
Pursuing this opportunity, we built a list of the existing Born & Bred clients that were funded by several venture capitalists. Then, we compiled a list of all the venture capitalists involved with the customers of Born & Bred.
It allowed us to study their portfolio and gain a significant amount high-value relevant leads thatallowed us to instantly outline the touching points for pre-sales communication and create appealing personalized sales offers.
2. Customized email campaigns. Using the data gleaned from our findings, our template writers crafted messages appealing to the intended audience and highlighting the key benefits of Born & Bred. We reached out to startups operating in B2B Technology, Law Education, Printing, Packaging, Food & Beverages and even startups invested in medical cannabis distribution. It’s worth nothing that the latter was one of the most successful campaigns since Born & Bred previously worked on creating a brand identity for Eaze, a company specialized in delivering medical cannabis, so the prospects were instantly eager to discuss the opportunities and potential synergy during a call with a sales representative.
3. Appointment scheduling. After we managed to pinpoint the most responsive industry and started sending emails, we were able to keep our KPIs to 100%. The process of communication was very dynamic and our weekly performance looked the following way:
Since we handed all nurtured prospects over to Kyle Merwin (Born & Bred Co-Founder and Strategy Director) for closing, we had to make sure that the client had the time in his busy schedule to process and convert those prospects. To make it happen, we stayed in touch with Kyle, discussing our latest steps and successes, informing him about the prospects that got close to the narrow end of the sales funnel and worked on including them to his working schedule.
4. LinkedIn influencer marketing. In addition to email marketing, Born & Bred started building their presence on LinkedIn, sharing insights and developing informative posts from Kyle Merwin. Belkins assisted with developing visuals for Born & Bred posts and creating a schedule that allowed to increase engagement and get as many interested readers as possible.
We also used LinkedIn InMails to connect with prospects who shared the same platform and interacted with the client’s posts, but our primary goal was to continue building brand awareness for Born & Bred and showcasing their experience and credibility to potential customers.
