Our client is a leading UK transport and 3PL specialists providing a range of logistics, stock management, pick, pack, collect and pallet delivery services. With a turnover of over £11 million, they are also the northern gateway for a national palletised distribution network.

What they needed

Our client appointed a marketing agency to re-launch their brand and improve communications across the marketing mix. With limited internal sales resources, they needed to bridge the gap between the awareness generated by the marketing activity and the work of the sales team in closing business with qualified leads. Our ability to embed ourselves into their process – liaising with their appointed marketing agency and working directly with their sales team – was a key consideration when we were selected as their business development and telemarketing partner.

What we did

From the start, we worked closely with their marketing agency and sales team in the planning stage to understand how we could support their business development – meaning that our lead generation and telemarketing activity forms an integral part of the marketing plan.

Data Modelling

Initially, we carried out a data modelling exercise to profile a target database around the right market segments. For example, profit margins decrease as the distance of the prospect from their depot increases – and this needed to be reflected in the businesses targeted at the periphery of the target region. We also worked around their existing transport routes and key motorway corridors to refine the data further.

We were also highly selective when looking at the business sectors – we drilled down to the level of exact business activity, so that we could avoid those companies that might require ugly, hazardous or refrigerated freight as our client provides ambient, non-hazardous pallet distribution. The data modelling exercise provides a profiled, segmented database for email and telephone communications.

Integration with Marketing

We liaise directly with their agency to integrate our telemarketing into the wider marketing activity. For example, when email communications are cascaded out to their database, we use the opens and clicks to prioritise the data for calling. The contact information we gather – including decision maker email addresses – is then fed back into the database for further email marketing.

Our client operated within the Greater Manchester region under a separate brand, and one strand of the marketing activity was to unify these brand identities with a brand re-launch in this area. Our telemarketing activity supported this re-launch, and allowed us to gather first-hand customer feedback to evaluate brand perceptions and the effectiveness of the activity surrounding the re-launch.

Lead Generation & Nurturing

We work closely with our client to build and service a lead pipeline. When speaking to decision makers, we qualify the information required to evaluate the size of the opportunity available and the strength of the lead – for example, the volume and frequency of their requirements and current suppliers and costs. This allows us to progress each opportunity in the most appropriate way – whether this is a face-to-face meeting with a member of the sales team, a further telephone call, or an email quote.

Where it is not relevant to progress prospects in this way we schedule re-contact dates and continue to manage the pipeline until they are at the right stage to receive a quote or further contact from the sales team.

Integration with Sales

The sales team focusses primarily on a small number of key accounts and following up qualified leads, while we work with the majority of cold data, lost leads and lapsed customers – we therefore supplement their activity.

Using the intelligence we gather from prospects on their requirements, we are able to extrapolate projected annualised revenue figures, allowing our client to correctly prioritise leads and manage their end of the sales pipeline effectively. The annualised revenue figures are fed into their sales forecasting models to predict sales figures, and we then attend their weekly sales meetings.

We work as an extension of their internal team and are present for their weekly sales meeting to help monitor and track the sales pipeline, end-to-end. This is a two way, 360⁰ process; we share our findings on each lead we pass across and help recommend the best approach on follow up, and they feed back the quality and strength of each lead. This allows us to identify which market segments are proving most successful and adjust our approach accordingly.

What we achieved

By working closely with the internal team and with their marketing agency, we are able to bridge the gap between sales and marketing – ensuring the awareness generated through their marketing results in qualified leads – and ultimately closed business. As a direct result of our work, our client has closed business worth £1.3 million in annualised revenue – equivalent to a return of £80 for every £1 spent with us within the first twelve months alone. With an on-going sales pipeline of 269 leads there remains significant new business opportunities which continue to close as our relationship develops.

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