The Client

The Client manufactures and distributes industrial supplies such as decorative stainless steel sheets and other ornamental products used in interior fit-out projects. The company’s headquarters is located in Hong Kong, and it carries out the bulk of its manufacturing operations in Guangzhou, China.

The Challenge

Since 1988, the Client has been providing custom decorative building materials throughout Southeast Asia and Australia. Its products include colored stainless steel, decorative glass films, elevator decoration modules, and stainless steel fabrication. The company primarily sells to architects, designers, contractors, property developers, construction suppliers, and other industrial vendors in the region.

The Client says it relies on two key advantages to attract customers and set its products apart from competitors:

1. First is its broad sales and service network across the region, which enables prompt supply and delivery.

2. Second, the Client focuses on design customizability, so that products are tailor-made according to each customer’s specifications.

Before the campaign, the Client’s sales development model placed much of the prospecting and lead qualification burden on sales reps.

Sales was responsible for finding potential customers and booking introductory appointments with prospects, without much in the way of prior screening. Under this setup, the Client estimated that reps were spending less than a third of their time actually talking to prospects, which dragged down both sales productivity and the quality of the customer’s buying experience.

Accordingly, the company has been planning to reassign lead generation and appointment setting responsibilities to its marketing team, but this department is mostly staffed by creatives who are already on tight schedules churning out product materials and sales collaterals.

It was clear that the Client needed to outsource prospecting and lead qualification. But since the company was selling highly-customized products across different geographic markets, the Client wanted to partner with an agency that had both industry knowledge and regional experience.

The Callbox Solution

After a thorough selection process, the Client chose Callbox as its outsourcing partner. Callbox had an extensive project portfolio of APAC campaigns carried out on behalf of manufacturers and industrial suppliers, including campaigns that covered the Client’s target countries.

Callbox and the Client worked out a three-month appointment setting campaign with the main goal of handing off qualified leads and appointments to the Client’s sales teams based in Australia, the Philippines, and Singapore.

Appointment Setting

Callbox compiled the campaign contact list based on the location, SIC codes, job titles, and annual revenues specified by the Client.
The call script introduced the Client’s decorative steel sheet products, and included probing questions that determined fit and need.
Contacts who agreed to a face-to-face or a phone meeting were handed off as qualified appointments. The Callbox team also identified and updated key decision makers and other prospect information.

Email Marketing

The Callbox team prepared cold email templates that served as initial touch points before reaching out to prospects via phone.
The campaign also used targeted send-outs to distribute other marketing materials to contacts who wanted to know more about the Client’s products.
Email automation schemes were created using the Lead Nurture tool, Callbox Pipeline’s built-in drag-and-drop marketing automation platform.

Results

The campaign ran for a total of three months (or 66 business days), with the first two months focusing on prospects in Australia, the Philippines and Singapore. During the third month, the campaign widened the target areas to include Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand.

Because Callbox follows a multi-touch, multi-channel appointment setting strategy, the first couple of weeks in this campaign are spent introducing the Client and warming up promising contacts through emails. Most appointments are generated after this initial phase, as shown in the monthly breakdown below (although the early outreach stage is repeated during the third month for the prospects in the additional target areas):

Month 1: 14 qualified appointments
Month 2: 22 qualified appointments
Month 3: 12 qualified appointments

With the Client’s reps spending more time talking to qualified prospects, the company believes it can increase its lead-to-opportunity rate to 75% and its opportunity-to-close rate to 50%. Using these benchmarks, the Client expects to potentially convert 18 of the Callbox-generated appointments into new customers this year.

HK-Based Industrial Supplier Widens Market Lead with Callbox’s Help

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