How One Manufacturing Company Generated Over $6.5 MM in Sales Via LinkedIn

How do you go from being an old school manufacturing company,

doing things the “old fashioned” way,

to one that breaks into long term, multi-million dollar contracts with international corporations?

Cohen Architectural Woodworking (CAW) was hungry to answer that question.

And the way they achieved it, certainly was not by doing more of the same “old fashioned” sales and marketing.  

In business since 1975, the Cohen family has maintained a phenomenal reputation among its client base.  But, historically most of these clients were only placing orders for special projects.

While many of these were large projects and quite profitable, the seemingly never ending revenue roller coaster that comes along with being a “job shop” just wasn’t something CAW wanted to do forever.

Instead, they wanted to focus almost exclusively on national accounts.

The kind of major corporate clients that would name CAW as the single source vendor responsible for providing all casework for their new and remodel locations.  By locking down contracts that prove repeat business for years to come it could allow the Cohens to streamline their operations and lower overhead.

Fewer clients, but much larger volume.  Much less chaos, much more efficiency.

Only problem, the traditional ways of selling weren’t generating results.  CAW’s sales team just wasn’t getting the traction needed to forge the relationships with the buyers and key decision makers in the construction management departments.

More times than not, the question was “How do we even get started trying to reach these people?”

Realizing that the old ways wouldn’t work, the Cohen management team turned to us at LinkedSelling.  Having had a long working relationship with our founder Josh Turner, they trusted that even though all this LinkedIn stuff seemed a bit foreign, we knew our stuff and could deliver a scalable campaign to reach these high-end corporate decision makers.

How Their Campaign Was Structured

Let’s start with the end in mind, and then I’ll walk you through the specifics of how we achieved it.

It’s tried and true.  When we position our clients as leaders in their space, and position you in front of literally thousands of prospects over and over and over again…the response rate when we go for a phone call or other “call to action” averages about 30%.  (Download our process diagram here.)

These are prospects who, taking the old fashioned approach, wouldn’t give you the time of day.  But when we work them through a systematic relationship building process, 30% will be happy to talk to you.

For Cohen Architectural Woodworking, we achieved this in two ways.

First, we built and quickly grew a LinkedIn group catering to their ideal prospects.  Not a group about woodworking, but an industry focused group that their PROSPECTS would actually enjoy and care about enough to opt-in, and stay opted-in for a long time.  The group has grown from zero to over 9,000 members.

The LinkedIn group allows us to keep the CAW name in front of thousands of prospects over and over again. They see Ben Cohen (VP of Sales) and CAW as leaders in the space.  The top-of-mind awareness it builds is massive.

And when we leverage this leadership status to reach out and talk business, it works exceptionally well (30% of the time).

Second, we developed several thousand direct connections (highly targeted prospects) via Ben Cohen’s LinkedIn account.  For these 1st degree connections, we expose them to daily status updates and other communications, most importantly our lead gen messaging campaigns.

Working the most “high value prospects” through personal messaging campaigns results in a predictable volume of leads.  The end result is a steady stream of sales opportunities.  Some of these conversations result in quick business, some are more introductory…but either way, the value of getting a foot in the door with this many qualified prospects is very substantial.

Over time, we nurture both of these databases (group + direct connections) to position CAW as one of the good guys.  Not somebody always talking about themselves, because that just doesn’t work.

Instead we position relevant and balanced content in front of prospects in a way that isn’t intrusive or annoying.  That’s why, after working prospects through the system, approximately 30% agree to a phone call.

But what kind of manpower did Cohen have to allocate to the management of this campaign?  

About 2 hours per month of coordination with their LinkedSelling Account Manager, and the time needed to schedule and field calls with prospects who wanted to talk.  The entire campaign is managed by our team.  We literally take it all the way to the point where prospects agree to a phone call and then hand it off.

What have the results been?  

• Over $6.5 million in revenue generated and counting, directly attributed to relationships developed within the LinkedIn campaign’s first few months.
• Positioned the CAW brand as a leader in their industry.
• Maintained a top of mind campaign in front of thousands of prospects.
• Generating a steady stream of calls with highly targeted prospects, for CAW’s sales team.

Hear the story straight from Ben Cohen himself:

If this sounds like it makes sense for your business, we’d love to schedule a call and explore what kind of approach would generate the best results for you.

Fill out the form below, and we’ll reach out to set up a time!

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