The Client

The Client provides managed IT and IT consulting services to manufacturing, industrial, food and beverage, and media organizations throughout the United States. The company specializes in IT support, advisory, cloud, procurement, and networking solutions.

The Challenge

Since 2014, Callbox has been a key partner in the Client’s customer acquisition program. The Client outsources much of its prospecting activities to Callbox and receives the bulk of its outbound leads and appointments from Callbox campaigns carried out regularly throughout the year.

During the campaign for the second half of 2018, Callbox implemented an account-based appointment setting strategy. This was in support of the Client’s recent adoption of an ABM approach for acquiring new business.

With ABM, the Client aims to capture high-value deals by engaging multiple contacts in an organization. According to the Client, they’ve observed that IT buying decisions now have to pass through different layers of decision makers. Oftentimes this means reps need to speak to multiple roles within the target company just to get their foot in the door.

The Client wanted Callbox to help them initiate this process, so that their reps can focus on moving the sales conversation forward. As a result, Callbox’s role grew to include market research, account selection, account profiling, and targeted outreach.

The Callbox Solution

Callbox and the Client worked out a detailed plan for a six-month account-based appointment setting campaign. The plan applied Callbox’s proven multi-touch, multi-channel outreach capabilities to connect with multiple relevant IT purchase stakeholders in the target accounts. The campaign consisted of three main activities:

Account Research and Selection

Callbox helped analyze and refine the Client’s ideal customer profile (ICP) that served as basis for identifying which companies to include as target accounts.
The Client indicated specific industries, annual revenues, employee size, technologies in use, and other business characteristics that their best-fit accounts had.
Callbox then compiled a list of potential accounts to target, which was reviewed and accepted by the Client.

Account and Prospect Profiling

The Client provided buyer persona profiles of prospects they want the outbound campaign to engage. The profiles consisted of detailed demographic and firmographic descriptions.
Two buyer personas were designated as the campaign’s primary targets: mid-level IT managers and C-level IT decision makers.
The master contact list was segmented based on these two personas and further grouped according to industry, business size, and technologies in use.

Multi-touch, Multi-channel Outreach

The campaign combined phone, email, LinkedIn, and PPC channels to maximize engagement with the target prospects.
The touches were carried out based on a combination of automated lead nurturing and interactions with live agents.
Messaging (used in scripts, email copies, page content, ad copies, etc.) was tailored according to the buyer personas and contact segments.

Results

The six-month campaign met all the key objectives set for each level of the project: individual channels, main activities, and overall campaign.

In terms of individual outreach channels used in the campaign, the Callbox team delivered the following results:

Phone: 32% decision maker reach rate
Email: 38.3% open rates, 9% CTRs, 5.5% reply rates
LinkedIn: 30% InMail reply rate, 201 new connection
PPC: 2.9% CTR

The three main account-based campaign activities produced the following:

Accounts touched: 7,909
Average touches per account: 19.2
Average contacts per account: 3.5

Overall, the six-month campaign produced a total of 89 qualified appointments (sales-qualified leads) and 134 marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).

Since the qualified appointments represented best-fit, highly-interested opportunities, the Client expected to convert the bulk of these into new accounts, though they did not specify their forecast.

The Client continues to have Callbox as a marketing partner. Currently, Callbox is running a new six-month account-based appointment setting campaign for the Client

Account-Based Appointment Setting Puts Business IT Firm in Front of Best-Fit Customers

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