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Business development manager, Mattieu Berlinguette, is our point of contact at Laurentide. He has been with the company for the past 15 years, where he looks after current clientele as well as prospecting into different markets and segments selling reliability solutions within Laurentide’s Eastern Canadian territory.

When looking back at the engagement thus far, Mattieu is glad to say “it’s been over [his] expectations…and [he’s] looking forward to the next steps.” Tyler has been able to solve the key challenges Laurentide faced, including the drying up of their traditional channels due to COVID, their lack of prospecting man power, and their difficulty penetrating new markets, all while generating enough pipeline to put ROI just on the horizon. And while the work he’s doing is currently focused on the reliability solutions business unit, Mattieu knows that “in the next coming weeks, as [Laurentide] close more business, it’ll prove the recipe and hopefully [Predictable Revenue] will be able to generate that for other business units as well..other initiatives…and we can continue to grow the relationship.”

Before Predictable Revenue

As is common in the Industrial space, before working with Predictable Revenue, Laurentide relied heavily on traditional, in person channels to generate opportunities. Mattieu and his colleagues participated in trade shows, held solo events, and attended various meet and greets to meet new potential clients. Once most of those dried up as a result of COVID-19, there was no chance that Mattieu himself was going to be able to take on a full time prospecting role to pick up the slack. “[He] was dealing directly with customers so [he] didn’t have a lot of time in the week to be able to do that. [He] needed some help to do that leg work. Doing all of that manually was very time consuming.”

“The business needed to find a way to grow in spite of losing their traditional, face-to-face channels (also driven by COVID ramifications). ”

The Problem

One of Mattieu’s goals as a business development manager was to expand into different verticals. However, their internal structure means account managers and key account managers are often busy with current customers. This, coupled with the fact that they had exhausted all of the in person events in their territory and weren’t sure where to find new contacts, meant that targeting a “different vertical from [their] historical clientele indeed was quite difficult.”

When it came to biting the bullet and seeking outside help, there were a few catalysts that hit at the same time for Mattieu and Laurentide. Firstly, they hired a new marketing manager who, in creating new initiatives, made apparent the need for more manpower on the business development front. Secondly, Laurentide needed to come up with some ideas on how to expand into new markets. Finally, the business needed to find a way to grow in spite of losing their traditional, face-to-face channels (also driven by COVID ramifications). 

ROI is coming fast. Laurentide has been able to build a pipeline that’s in and around 10-15x the actual cost doing this exercise. If they close a third of what they have in the pipeline they can cover the cost of the project.

Our Solution

According to Mattieu, “The Emerson Impact Partner Network is a tight knit community,” within which “there are a few key players that have very large reliability groups,” like Laurentide. When brainstorming with another company in the Network and discussing “how [the two companies] were having success – which industries, what’s working, what’s not working,” Mattieu learned that their fellow Emerson partner was “able to dig into that life sciences vertical industry” with the help of Predictable Revenue. Life sciences was one of the markets Mattieu was hoping to penetrate, so this was a big green flag for him. Since “[they’re] in the same situation, with similar contacts,” Mattieu decided Laurentide should “try to leverage [Predictable Revenue’s expertise].”

Tyler Krenbrink, Laurentide’s Account Strategist, is also the strategist behind Caltrol’s success, and since he already understood the reliability sales business “[Laurentide] were able to get up on [their] feet and get running fairly quickly.” Tyler took Mattieu through workshops to define ICP, identify promising industry segments, and create strong, tailored messaging. Mattieu says, “It’s been very positive and has actually been a learning experience as well. Tyler took the time with us to build the script, look at the type of personas we wanted to go after…and with that we were also able to focus on different segmented markets that we wanted to go after. [Tyler] really took the time, step by step, to go through each of those different initiatives.” 

Predictable Revenue’s process is very collaborative. Mattieu “shared with Tyler some of the solutions we’d like to offer, how to position it, where and how we had success with our [existing] customers…so giving him that background.” Tyler, in turn, makes sure to be transparent with what he’s doing currently, and how he’s looking to optimize. “When [they are] progressing, [Mattieu is] seeing the number of touchpoints, the number of contacts, and the reply rate that [Laurentide] have” for all active campaigns, and “as [they] are moving forward [they] are looking at the different metrics, adjusting the messaging.”

Mattieu mentioned that working with Tyler is like “having a consultant on the team that’s actually participating in doing some of the work as well.”

An added bonus to working with Tyler is that he is bilingual. “Having somebody as well that [can] speak both French and English is a huge plus for [Laurentide] because their market is bilingual so that’s an extra challenge that [they] had to work with.” 

The Result

Since beginning their engagement with Predictable Revenue, Laurentide have seen success in many areas.

First, the speed with which Tyler was able to bring in pipeline exceeded their expectations. “Initially [they] talked about getting a 60 day window before getting [their] first leads. It actually started within the first month, so that’s been very positive.”

Second, something Mattieu felt was a top priority before coming on board with Predictable Revenue was “being able to find the right contacts, find the right script… and being able to leverage that to have those initial conversations.” They’ve seen nothing but good things in this area. “Even the number of meetings is more than [Mattieu] can currently handle so [he’s] postponing some of [them].”

Third, Mattieu and Laurentide were really looking to gain market share in some new verticals. Predictable Revenue provided them that opportunity. “For example, life sciences is not something that Laurentide would typically be involved in, so being able to build those contacts and being able to have those conversations is leading into some good opportunities and generating some revenue for [them] as well.”

Fourth, and probably most importantly, ROI is coming fast. Laurentide has “been able to build a pipeline that’s in and around 10-15x the actual cost doing this exercise. If [they] close a third of what [they] have in the pipeline [they] can cover the cost of the project.” As for Mattieu’s confidence that he will, in fact, close that pipeline, he says he is “very confident. [He’d] say 100%!”

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Keith needed help with top of funnel. Pharmacy Stars is a small organization, and Keith didn’t have the resources to find, hire, train, and manage an SDR, let alone validate repeatable targeting and messaging, document it, and have that SDR execute against it.

Predictable Revenue took all that on, and then some. Patricia Simms, a Senior Account Strategist at Predictable Revenue honed Pharmacy Stars’ targeting, crafted specific messaging for each potential buyer persona, executed on the outreach, follow-up and appointment setting, and created a steady flow of quality opportunities for Pharmacy Stars, many of which are on track to close. “[The outreach] is going to be fruitful for us. At the end of the day, we will have a massive ROI, once we close even one of these deals. And many are progressing exactly like the deals we expect to close.”

“There was nothing bad about the delivery, the service…Patricia 20/10, she’s fantastic.”

Before Predictable Revenue

Before turning to Predictable Revenue, Pharmacy Stars had a couple of the elements key to a successful business development program in place. Still, Keith wasn’t seeing the results he wanted. They had their product offering anchored in a clear ideal customer profile.

They had over four hundred customers, a handful of great testimonials, and the marketing team had created all the collateral an SDR could need to succeed. But they didn’t have a dedicated person, or clear process to take full advantage of these resources. Opportunities past and present were a result of “sporadic SDR work by [Keith himself], which was one contributor but a low contributor,” or thanks to the team’s follow up with participants of educational webinars put on by the marketing team.

“Didn’t have the labour. Didn’t want to take the time, money, effort to train and maintain them. That was the number one problem. Number two was coming up with a good script.”

The Problem

“The problem, at the highest level, is that we needed more deals coming through our pipeline.”  Pharmacy Stars is a small organization. Keith and Susan didn’t want to take the time to look for, hire, and then train someone to perform the SDR function and generate new business. Keith needed to focus on closing deals, after all. And since Pharmacy Stars had never had someone dedicated to the SDR role (all of the prospecting had been done ad hoc), there was no formal program or playbook in place. This made crafting effective scripts and documenting them, let alone scaling them, a difficult task. “Didn’t have the labour. Didn’t want to take the time, money, effort to train and maintain them. That was the number one problem. Number two was coming up with a good script.”

“We are able to continue focusing on our customer support…building additional tools for our customers without having to worry about driving new leads into the pipeline.”

Our Solution

We tackled the Streckenbach’s biggest challenges head-on. Patricia Simms, a Senior Account Strategist at Predictable Revenue took the reins as sequence designer, messaging crafter, market fit expert, account manager and SDR for Pharmacy Stars. “That was really solving that issue of having the hire, train, supervise doing the work”

She started by diving deep into their ideal customer profile and breaking it down by the personas they were targeting and the value propositions that resonated most with each of them. Patricia then leveraged this information for both targeting and messaging. While Pharmacy Stars already had their ICP dialed, Keith remembers that “the process of storyboarding where [Patricia] laid out the personas and looked at the drivers for each persona…that was logical, it made sense, it was good.” “We liked it,” he said. “We thought it did a really nice job of honing in.” Keith describes the process of the persona breakdown, the examination of the drivers behind each, and crafting relevant messaging as “enlightening.” 

Patricia then began prospecting through Susan Streckenbach’s (co-founder and COO of Pharmacy Stars’) LinkedIn account. Again, Susan liked the streamlined nature of the process. “Setting up LinkedIn, since we already had Sales Nav, just shifting it to the account that was being used, that was easy, straightforward.”

“Then the two weeks check-ins were always…well I mean, everything is good.” Patricia continued to touch base with Keith and Susan every couple of weeks to keep them apprised of what was working and what wasn’t, how she was continuing to test, iterate, and optimise the LinkedIn campaigns, and so the two of them could discuss the quality of the meetings being booked for Keith. 

The Result

In Keith’s words, SLO is “doing exactly what [he] wanted.” While Pharmacy Stars is no longer doing any active outreach or inbound marketing, they are still building their pipeline at a steady pace. As a result of the meetings that Patricia has booked for Keith, Pharmacy Stars has dozens of opportunities with proposals out, and is on track to close “approaching $1 million in contracts.” And with driving new business taken care of, Susan, Keith and their  team can focus on what is truly important: customer support and building additional tools for Pharmacy Stars’ customers. “We are able to continue focusing on our customer support…building additional tools for our customers without having to worry about driving new leads into the pipeline.”

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We’ve never had a sales engine, specifically, we’ve never had a lead generation engine.  My struggle was that we were very very referral based.  We’d work with a client, do a good job and hope they’d know other companies we could help.”

The following is a transcription of a case-study call between Hassan (Xavor), Colleen (Xavor) and Collin (Predictable Revenue).  It’s longer than our normal case studies because we felt this format helped the story shine through. 

Collin – Thank you both for doing a case study with us, I’d like to start by talking about what you were doing before we started working together.

Hassan – We were waiting for Oracle to refer business to us and doing events with in different cities to drive traffic but we weren’t doing any sales development.

We are a consulting firm that’s been in business since 1995.  Back then, our founders had gotten together and raised a little money to help people build websites.  We built a lot of websites and eventually started helping clients integrate them into various business systems from Microsoft and Oracle.

We’ve never had a sales engine, specifically, we’ve never had a lead generation engine.  My struggle was that we were very very referral based, we’d work with a client, do a good job and hope they’d know other companies we could help.  A common source of new deals was employees of our customer moving to new companies and bringing us in.

I’ve been experimenting with various growth channels but I don’t have a background in sales or marketing – I’m an engineer by training – and experimented with a bunch of things.  One channel that’s always worked was getting referrals from Microsoft and Oracle. We just had to sit and wait.  I had very little confidence in our ability to generate business out of people that we don’t know.  They call us parasite partners because we wait for them to sell something and then we’re the parasites who do the implementation.

Collin – Sounds like you had a good stable business, why bother doing more?

Hassan – A friend mentioned Predictable Revenue, Aaron’s book.  I read it and then forced Colleen [one of Xavor’s Account Executives], to read it or listen to it.  We wanted to use what we read to build our lead generation engine.

Initially, we were thinking of following the steps in the book and letting Colleen run with it. We had a few other AEs at the time and thought she could figure out the process and then hand it off to one of the other reps.

Then we found out about your Accelerate program and wanted to give it a try.  We liked that we wouldn’t have to take one of our best people away from closing and could pay someone who has already figured it out to run it for us.  It was that model backed by your own software and domain knowledge that we were interested in.

We thought that it would be great if Colleen didn’t have to worry about it.  We wouldn’t have to stumble through the mistakes ourselves and worry about sending emails and then figuring out what to say and what not to say.

Collin – How has working with Predictable Revenue impacted your business?

Hassan – Very positively.  Our relationship has given us the confidence that we can take a well defined market and a good product and work with you guys to get conversations with the right audience.

Some of the conversations you brought us didn’t have an Oracle product yet and we were able to bring those deals to them, that was huge and really elevated our position with them.

We’re a very engineering oriented company and, in the past, some of the products we built ended up with 0 customers.  Working with you has really changed my perspective on how I look at the business and my confidence level in trying to go after newer areas.  We recently built and launched a new product – xEngine – that I wouldn’t have previously invested in building because we wouldn’t have been able to find customers for it.  Now, I’m confident that your team will be able to get us in front of customers for it.

The product is going to live on it’s own and hopefully be it’s own revenue stream, maybe even it’s own entity one day.  Primarily this is because of our experience with your team.

All of you guys are amazing and it’s really changed our business.

Hassan – Colleen, how was it for you?

Colleen – For me, prospecting like this is something I didn’t have time for.  You’ve provided us with the bandwidth to maintain a constant stream of new prospects. Whether the prospect responds now or your team works them 6 times over a number of months, having that has been huge for us. It’s been very successful for us and it’s been very enjoyable working with you.

Collin – What was your first impression when we got started?

Hassan – With you, it was great.  I’ve worked with appointment setting companies, I’ve bought lists and contacts, and tried doing it myself. Everything was not that good as an experience.  We had tried many things over the years from a demand gen perspective that brought us sub-par results.

We’re also a Microsoft partner and they had hired some companies to give us these types of appointments around a specific domain. Their primary means was phone and then a follow up via email.  One company was even email only like you guys but it just didn’t work.

Most of these sales outsourcing companies have very old school boiler-room type salespeople and it’s a different experience to work with them.  I’m sure there are better companies out there but we never found them. We had very sub-par results so I was pretty skeptical when we first got started with you.

Our first impression with your team was really good.  They were very understanding and your approach was quite different.  Our account strategist was great and instilled a lot of confidence in your team and process.

Collin – We actually took longer than we hoped to help you close your first deal, how was that experience?

Hassan – We started with you in April of 2015 so it was 12 months before we closed our first deal with you guys. You introduced us to the company in May of 2015 and closed in April of 2016.

The first deal we closed took a while but we were happy the whole time with the results.

We understand that it’s hard to generate these types of meetings and we were pleasantly surprised by the fact that we were getting so many.  When we started seeing proposals and quotes, we knew that was a good sign.  Our sales cycles are long so we knew we wouldn’t see deals close right away.

Your Account Executive did a good job of setting the expectation that it was going to take a few months to build towards getting our first qualified appointments.  So we came in with this mindset and we actually started getting qualified handoffs sooner than we were expecting.

Colleen – I liked having your input throughout the campaign and always being on top of making sure we were improving our messaging.  Your team was always asking how we could tweak it and coming up with ideas. I’ve been really happy with the experience we’ve had. Our strategist has been great to work with, very responsive, and responsible which adds to our satisfaction going forward with you. Nothing but good things.

I appreciate the initiation and how you’re always trying to improve the way you do things.

81

Sales Qualified Leads

15

Opportunities

9

Closed Deals ($406k)
how-to-write-cold-email-outbound-sales-predictable-revenue-ebook-book

Problem: How To Grow Sales Faster, Proactively?

A while back, 100% of Wpromote’s leads & sales were coming from inbound leads, with two salespeople handling them.

While the inbound leads were great, they didn’t want to have to wait around for people to come to them and they wanted to be able to proactively go after larger accounts.

Their CEO Mike Mothner and Chief Revenue Officer Mike Stone reached out to us for help in speeding up sales growth and controlling how much pipeline they generated.  They wanted to specialize their sales roles and build a “Cold Calling 2.0” outbound prospecting team.

100% Year-Over-Year Growth

By specializing their sales roles and focusing on a dedicated prospecting team, Wpromote’s been able take control over much of their sales growth, and they:

  • Grew outbound sales 100% year-over-year the past three years
  • Grew outbound sales from 0% to 75% of all sales
  • Have made the Inc. 500|5000 fastest-growing companies seven (!) years in a row

In 2015, Ricci, a School Experience Manager for eDynamic Learning, was being stood up on sales calls 63% of the time. Not surprisingly, her sales numbers were hurting – you can’t sell if you can’t get prospects on the phone.

eDynamic was using a cold calling company to book leads for them. Unfortunately, the cold calling agency wasn’t doing anything other than scheduling calls. They weren’t qualifying any of the prospects ahead of time.

To make matters more difficult, eDynamic sells into schools and school districts and relies on outbound sales as its primary revenue driver. Needless to say, something needed to change.

Enter Predictable Revenue.

When eDynamic switched to Predictable Revenue, attendance rates for sales calls doubled, the number of opportunities created from outbound soared by 440%, and revenue from outbound jumped by 40%. Not too bad.

Throughout this post, we’ll detail why eDynamic transitioned from a cold calling agency to Predictable Revenue and take a deep dive into their results before and after the switch.

The Challenge

When eDynamic started, its early growth came primarily from word of mouth and customer referrals. As the company grew, however, they needed to increase sales in order to hit their growth targets and turned to a cold calling agency to help them out. And the early results were impressive: eDynamic quickly scaled up to 40 meetings per month.

Unfortunately, the excitement didn’t last.

“The call center was making very introductory calls…basically, they’d confirm if the prospects were the principal or superintendent and book some time on our calendars. People didn’t know why they were speaking to us and we had a lot of no-shows and unqualified meetings as a result,” says Ricci.

“The cold callers were rewarded just for putting a meeting on our calendar. Prospects were being annoyed because they just kept calling with the same message. It’s possible to make a good call but there’s so much more work and investment required to do it really well. The cold callers weren’t making these investments, we could hear it on the call recordings. The conversations they were having weren’t being used to qualify the prospects, there was no sense of urgency, and there was no reason for them to get on the call. We spent more time rescheduling these meetings that nobody was going to show up for than actually talking to customers.”

Ricci and her team found that 63% – 63%! – of prospects weren’t showing up to meetings, which lead to even more work trying to reschedule the calls that the team knew would never end up happening. Sadly, things weren’t much better when prospects did show up; often they weren’t interested in their products or weren’t even involved in the decision to purchase software.

“It wasn’t resulting in pipeline growth, we weren’t getting the quality of prospect that we wanted, and it became a huge time waster,” adds Ricci.

After an entire year, Ricci’s team was frustrated by the lack results and needed to find something that would help her hit their growth targets. She decided to pull the plug on the cold calling agency and started looking for a partner that could help them achieve their goals.

440%

Total opportunity creation increased

260%

Conversion rate from call to opportunity increased

40%

Revenue from outbound increased

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