The Client is a fast-growing Singapore-based FinTech company with more than six years of experience partnering with enterprise businesses in Southeast Asia. The company operates a cloud-based platform that helps large enterprises improve cash flows and tap into a pool of working capital through a full menu of supply chain financing options:

• Reverse factoring
• Invoice financing
• Inventory financing
• Payable extension
• Payable discounting
• Supplier payments

Last year, the company started implementing an ABM program to help them better identify high-priority accounts in their target markets. With half a decade’s worth of customer data under their belt, the Client was able to reliably determine some key qualities about their most promising target accounts:

• Accounts with the highest lifetime values (LTVs) tended to come from manufacturing, retail, and wholesale trade industries.
• Top accounts also were more likely to have been processing invoices manually or through a legacy system prior to switching over to the Client’s platform.
• Nearly all won deals involved reaching out to three different decision-maker segments: managers in charge of procurement and invoicing, stakeholders concerned about company’s cost management and financial performance, and technical managers who want a secure and reliable platform.

The Client’s ABM program also specifies the need to outsource their top-of-funnel activities, including prospect research and initial outreach.

By the company’s own estimate, a third-party agency will greatly augment the company’s understaffed internal team, which currently generates an average of nine discovery meetings per month. Plus, the Client also thinks outsourcing will free up a big chunk of sales and marketing agents’ schedules, giving them more time to follow up and work on promising deals.

But first, the Client had to find a marketing company with the right expertise and resources to help them:

• Scale up the search for accounts that closely resemble their top customers
• Connect with all three decision-maker groups that impact buying decisions
• Generate the right number of sales appointments to support their target pipeline growth

After reviewing proposals from several marketing providers, the Client signed up for Callbox’s account-based appointment setting service. The Client noted that the program met all their requirements, and that Callbox already had an extensive track record of success with FinTech companies in the APAC region.

From the outset, the Client made it very clear they wanted a long-term partnership. That’s why a pilot three-month campaign was first carried out to learn the best ways to move things forward. After the test campaign, Callbox and the Client went ahead with full implementation, which is still ongoing today.

Callbox’s account-based appointment setting campaigns consist of three main activities. Some of the key highlights include:

Account Research and Selection

Key firmographic qualities include: workforce of at least 500 employees; annual revenues of $50 million or more; engaged in manufacturing, retail, or wholesale trade in Singapore and Malaysia.

As for technographics, the Client’s top-tier accounts were companies that rely on either manual processes or on-premise software to handle procurement, invoicing, and cash flow management.

The Callbox team then prepared the target account list using a combination of Callbox’s in-house database and external data sources.

Account and Prospect Profiling

1. There were three decision-maker groups targeted in the campaign: end users (managers in charge of procurement and invoicing), economic buyers (CFOs, controllers, etc.), technical buyers (IT managers, IT directors, CTOs, CIOs, etc.).
2. The Client specified additional prospect characteristics to help the Callbox team pinpoint the right decision makers from each target account.
3. All contact details and information were screened by a database QA team and submitted to the Client for review before being used in the campaign.

Multi-touch, Multi-channel Outreach

The Callbox team followed a unique lead nurture path and personalized messaging strategy for each of the three decision-maker groups.

The lead nurture paths combined phone, email, and LinkedIn touches which were scheduled and executed using a dynamic outreach cadence.

Callbox’s own CRM platform, Pipeline, helped orchestrate the different outreach activities and kept the Client up-to-date on the campaign’s progress.

At time of writing, the campaign has now completed 10 months of appointment setting activities and is gearing up for the eleventh month. Throughout that time, the whole effort has consistently hit key objectives.

On a per-channel basis, the campaign recorded mostly better-than-expected results including:

• Phone: 37% decision maker reach rate
• Email: 29% open rate, 5% CTR, 8% reply rate
• LinkedIn: 42% InMail reply rates, 92 new connections

The campaign also performed very well in terms of account-based KPIs:

• Accounts touched: 4,978
• Average touches per account: 5.1
• Average contacts per account: 3.3

Overall, the entire campaign has booked a total of 181 discovery meetings (sales-qualified leads) for the Client so far. That works out to around 18 qualified appointments each month, which is twice what the Client’s in-house team could produce by themselves.

According to the Client, their reps can convert 20% of discovery meetings into proposals and turn 70% of proposals into new customers. With an average annual subscription revenue of $31,000 per customer, the Client can potentially close $785,000 in new annual recurring revenue from the appointments generated in this campaign.