B2B telemarketing in the Swiss property sector:+30 prospects interested in making an appointment
Abacus turned to devlo and its telemarketers to promote their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for real estate agencies in Switzerland that offer rental management.
Throughout two prospecting campaigns, our team of Lead Generation Specialists and Sales Development Representatives (telemarketers) identified, generated and prospected more than 500 pre-qualified companies matching the Ideal Customer Profiles of our client.
We received more than 362 replies, both by emails and through cold calls (representing 69% of replies). In total, 31 qualified leads have expressed their interest to meet our clients during a sales demo.
This case study presents:
- our client’s testimonial
- the challenges our client was facing
- the solutions our telemarketing team provided
- telemarketing
- the results obtained by our prospecting campaigns
- key points to remember for obtaining qualified leads
of interest
of responses
of interest
of responses
Category
Lead Generation, Telemarketing, Lead Qualification, Appointment setting
Services
ERP solution for Swiss real estate agencies offering rental management services
Time before First Meetings
12 days
Campaign Language(s)
French
The Client’s testimonial
We need to build trust with our clients. To do that, we also need access to the decision-makers and, at the same time, reassurance about the new functionalities. I recommend devlo because they really understood what we were doing. They immersed themselves in the culture of our company and our products, and they kept an eye on the competition. Being local to French-speaking Switzerland also meant we had the right language and the right approach with our prospects. It went really well, and I really appreciated the fact that devlo took an interest in the structure of our products and really understood the context we were in.
The customer targets that we decided on together were well worked out. Then, the script was very well produced, which enabled us to make phone calls that were very close to the reality we had in the field. We've had good results, and we've already managed to organise meetings with our customers. It enabled us to make presentations very quickly, and then we've had a considerable number of prospects who are now listed and for whom we've sent documentation.
I found the client approach - that is, being able to offer packages with clearly defined services and scope - very appealing from the outset, as it enabled me to define my campaign clearly with a set budget. This is an area where I really appreciated working with devlo because we had dashboards, so we knew exactly how the prospecting was progressing in real time. We had a session to understand the figures, to understand what went well and what didn't go so well, so we were able to take stock of the campaign. I was very satisfied in that respect.
About our client
Abacus is the market leader in Switzerland: more than 100,000 companies use its software solution
Ideal Customer Profiles
Director, General Manager, CEO, in real estate companies located in French-speaking Switzerland (Suisse romande)
Client’s Challenges
Our client faced different lead generation and growth challenges, such as:
- Not enough booked meetings for their internal sales team
- Incomplete overview of their total addressable market (TAM) and therefore difficulty in implementing a prospecting strategy tailored to its size and full potential
- Difficulty in precisely targeting estate agencies perfectly aligned to their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). For example, one of the qualification criteria was to select agencies with property management needs, excluding property brokerage agencies (which do not have rental management needs)
- Lack of time and resources to update their CRM contact records
- Lack of time and resources to accurately identify the most relevant lead who is the decision-maker responsible for IT solutions
- Lack of time and resources to contact leads and invite them to major industry events/tradeshows and encourage them to visit their booth
- Last but not least, the challenge of staying top of mind in their target market, so that when these potential clients are thinking of changing their solution, they think of our customer’s solution
The Solutions
It's not easy to choose an external sales team expert in sales prospecting to outsource the acquisition of new customers.
Our team addressed our client's challenges in 4 stages:
- strategic launch set-up
- Lead generation
- Email and telephone telemarketing
- Appointment setting
Details of each stage are given below:
-
In terms of strategic launch set-up, our team:
- Obtained secondary domain names (to protect the main domain from being flagged as spam)
- Set up the DNS for these secondary domain names to improve the email deliverability
- Warmed up the prospecting email addresses of these secondary domain names to improve deliverability
-
In terms of lead generation (in parallel to the strategic launch set-up), our Lead Generation team:
- identified +1’600 potential real estate companies in French-speaking Switzerland one company by one, our team visited their company website, LinkedIn company page, etc. to manually qualify or disqualify them. The goal was to ensure each selected company matched the Ideal Customer Profile of our client. From these 1’600 companies, our team shorlisted 300 companies
-
In each of these companies, they identified the most relevant decision-maker
- They found and validated their contact details
- They generated personlized information useful to customized our cold emails and cold call scripts to increase the quality of our prospecting approach. This is a very important step in differentiating our cold outreach from the dozens of other messages our prospects receive every day
- When a lead didn’t respond during our first campaign, we identified the second most relevant decision-maker and contacted them during the second campaign
-
Following this, in terms of email and telephone telemarketing, our team of Sales Development Representatives contacted these leads through a multichannel sales sequence. Multichannel campaigns consist of a serie of touches of outbound emails and phone calls. Our favourite solution is lemlist, and our sales development agency is one of the best agencies certified on Outboud-Experts in using this tool. Our multichannel outreach sequence is made of:
- 4 emails
- 3 cold calls
- (also LinkedIn messages, but not in these campaigns)
- In terms of appointment setting, our team booked meetings and qualified interested prospects following our client’ qualification process. They booked these sales demos directly in our Client’s agenda using his meeting scheduling link, and shared by email to our client the brief of qualification call.
Our results
Out of the 500+ prospects contacted:
- 6% of them were interested in meeting with our client
- 69% of of them responded to our emails and phone calls
- We didn’t track the email open rate in order to increase our email deliverability. But since 69% of the prospects responded, the email open rate is probably around 75% to 80%.
Key takeaways
In many industries, contracts often lock the customer into a single supplier for several years. From a prospecting point of view, this means that we contact the prospect at the wrong time, either just after the prospect has signed and made a multi-year commitment, or during the term of the contract.
To overcome this timing problem, our teams ask prospects when their contract ends so that we (or our customer) can get back in touch with them before it expires and organize a demo.
These prospects can then compare their current solution and perhaps change supplier. The aim is not to miss this opportunity again.
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