Successful Sales Development Campaigns

In presenting a seminar to Olympic shooters, Lanny Bassham was asked, “Mr. Bassham, in the 1978 World Championships, you shot a 598/600 to win a medal. What happened with those two nines?”

Lanny answered, “Do you really want to know? Do you really want to know how I got nines? That will not help you. You don’t want to know how I got two nines. What you should be asking is how I got fifty-eight tens. Besides, I can’t remember how I got the nines. I do not reinforce bad shots by remembering them.”

This is what Lanny calls the Principle of Reinforcement and what he teaches not only to World Champion athletes, but also Fortune 500 corporations, business owners, the United States Secret Service, the US Navy Seals, and Olympic teams all over the world.

You can use the same principle for your business growth to help answer question like these:

• How can you keep your pipeline full? 
• How can you facilitate growth and avoiding flatlining for months at a time?
• How can you keep your team motivated, innovative, and open to adapting and moving quickly -even when the pressure is high?
• How can you find the best resources to help you meet your goals?

Look at your wins, and if it helps, take a look at others’ wins too. 

He says that too often people take a look at an event or circumstance that went wrong. And then they look at that, and say, ok, what went wrong here? 

While there might be value in that, Lanny insists that’s a mistake. Instead, he says that you must realize that the more you “think about, talk about, and write about something happening, the more you improve the probability of that thing happening.”

His argument: Focus on your wins. 

That’s exactly what we’ve done here with some of our top client sales development campaigns. When we asked our account managers what they believe contributed most to the success of each campaign, we identified some recurring factors:

1. Priority on Building Trust & Relationships
2. Relevance to Your Market
3. Partnership Mentality
4. Established Sales Process In Place

This was a pretty insightful exercise for us. It might help your company reach your goals as well. Let’s dive in...

Success Factor #1: Priority on Building Trust & Relationships

We’ve found that clients who understand the importance of building real trust and relationships with the right kinds of clients tend to get better results from our campaigns.

Know How To Build Relationships & Turn Conversations With Anyone Into Potential Referrals

Take the company DragonSpears for example. DragonSpears is a custom software development company located in Chicago. With a laser focus on building high functioning software teams and writing clean code for the Cloud era, they needed some help.

Their Co-Founder and CEO, Patrick Emmons, was looking for new channels to strengthen their outbound sales process. Like many other software development and consulting companies, DragonSpears exists in a very competitive environment. They were looking to stand out above the competition, especially on their local scene in Chicago.

Beyond simply targeting prospects with outbound messaging campaigns, DragonSpears was aiming to become true thought leaders. They were looking to build trust with their prospects in order to help their sales teams close more deals. 

Using our unique approach to outbound lead generation and sales development approach we recommended for their industry and proposed budget, DragonSpears saw consistent appointments on their sales calendar. Of these prospects, they were able to close a $1MM deal. 

Why the Win: 

Reflecting deeper into why their campaigns worked, our account manager reports that Patrick and his team were knowledgeable of the LinkedSelling multichannel process and “he knew how to build relationships & turn conversations with anyone into potential referrals.” He also found ways to add even more value to his audience via in-person events (pre-COVID) and other creative ideas, building trust and a personal connection with potential clients.

Develop & Leverage Trust With Your Audience Via Name Recognition

Another example is the Purple Guys. Thanks to our work with them, they were able to book 95 quality sales appointments in six months.

Success Factor #2: Relevance to Your Market

Focus Your Offering On Trends And How Those Trends Are Affecting Specific Industries

EBCO is a client who delivers world class quality manufacturing, repair and rebuild services, from heavy metal fabrication, heavy machining, and turnkey assembly, to light precision fabrication and precision sheet metal fabrication. They’ve been in business since 1956! That’s 64 years of business! 

They came to us, like our others clients because they wanted a consistent lead flow. As a result, the outbound lead generation strategies we utilized on their behalf averaged 18 sales appointments per month over the course of 15 months!

Why the Win:

The account manager who worked directly with EBCO believes that one of the main reasons they saw so much success booking appointments was that “their offering focuses on trends and how those trends are affecting specific industries.” Their prospects were open to having conversations with them because it was a unique offering that they wanted to hear about. In other words, their offer was relevant to their audience. 

Relevancy makes such a huge difference when you’re trying to get quality prospects on the phone. This is again why it’s imperative that you understand your audience; you must know what they want, what interests them, what drives them, what they need, and what they’ll respond to.

Success Factor #3: Partnership Mentality

We’ve found that we can help clients get better results when both of us approach the multichannel outbound campaigns as partners - not as a solely vendor/client relationship.

One of our core company values is “Linked”. To us, this signifies that we truly approach every project as a partner, equally invested in helping you meet your goals. We believe that our wins and losses are felt collectively. And regardless of the relationship, we work together to push all who are around us to get the best results possible. 

One example of how a partnership mentality has benefited our clients is seen through our work with Avela precisely because they understood how a partnership mentality makes a difference.

Trust Our Expertise; We’ve Got Your Back

Avela is a China and Asia Pacific sourcing company. As they say, “Landing your goods in your loading dock!” 

Thanks to a true partnership mentality between us, we were able to deliver sales appointment numbers that were consistently high month after month, with high prospect engagement overall. 

Why the Win: 

The partnership mentality is a true credit to the success of our work together. As the LinkedSelling account manager explains, 

“The team at Avela is very patient, respects the LinkedSelling process & doesn't overthink or micromanage every step. They have a true partnership mentality, trust our expertise, and that we’ve got their back.

Avela also has a very niche target, so being able and open to working with us to optimize and adapt again and again, helped a lot.”

Those clients who share this mindset with us tend to get the best results as well. Here are a few more examples starting with Microshare…

Be Sure You Understand the Process

Microshare is a company that originally focused on helping businesses find cost-saving opportunities by using technology to harness and share previously hidden insights on client operations and real estate portfolios. Since the pandemic, they’ve provided an offer via their “Clean = Safe” Smart Facilities solutions that has allowed some of the world’s largest firms to reopen safely. 

Microshare was a delight to work with and through our partnership, we were able to consistently deliver 10 appointments a month over a 10 month period targeting facilities executives at large corporations.  

Why the Win: 

Even though their offering is immediately relevant, especially in today’s business environment, we credit the success of their campaigns to 1) the fact that they had an innovative offering for their clients, and 2) they understood everything we were doing and why. 

This trust allowed us to be creative, to push the boundaries, and to deliver results, consistently keeping their pipeline full.

Be Engaged in the Process

Offering supply chain services and software technology, IndustryStar had a problem; they needed to fill their pipeline with more leads. They tried almost everything to do that - including creating webinars, direct email campaigns, newsletters, white papers, blogs for thought leadership, and attending trade shows to find new opportunities.

Through these efforts they were generating some leads, but the investment in time and money was beginning to provide diminishing returns. And their control over their lead quality left something to be desired.

When targeting C-suite executives in the manufacturing and consumer products sector, it can be a challenge to reach the actual decision-maker. The time had come to quit devoting resources to strategies that returned diminishing results AND took up large amounts of time and energy.

Why the Win: 

As their account manager explains, “IndustryStar is probably one of the most invested clients we’ve worked with. CEO, William Crane, was very engaged in our process, which is why I think it was such a great partnership. He always gave extremely helpful and detailed feedback to us so our prospecting and messaging was always on point. We also worked with him to segment his prospects into different groups so that they could get very targeted messages.”

Without a partnership mentality, we wouldn’t have been able to optimize our results and continue delivering high quality prospects consistently.

Provide Feedback So We Can Refine Our Process

Critical Mission Consulting is a consultancy that empowers business leaders with accurate situational awareness by providing complete communications, financial and legal solutions. Through our work together, in just 5 months’ time, we’ve helped them book 91 total sales appointments. 

They also have a few deals in the pipeline and they have signed on several referral partners as well.

Why the Win: 

Straight from the account manager, “This is another client who's very invested in our process as well. They provide excellent feedback on any prospecting I do so that we can refine it very well. Also, their product offering is solid (PGI Insurance) and it's something that people are interested in.”

As you can see, a partnership mentality really makes a difference in how well campaigns are organized and executed. We’ve got your back, but we need your help - and your insight and expertise as well in order to truly understand, connect with, target and nurture your ideal prospects.

Sales Factor #4: Established Sales Process In Place

As an outbound lead generation and sales development agency, we use a multichannel outbound system to deliver a full pipeline of quality sales opportunities for our clients. From there, our clients are responsible for getting the most out of those opportunities as possible. 

One company that exemplifies how having an established sales process in place benefits your lead generation efforts is Strategic Energy Group.

Know The Value of Relentless Follow-Up

On a mission to provide environmentally responsible resource management that creates a competitive advantage for their clients, they’ve had excellent sales appointments numbers and have closed a $60k deal. 

Why the Win: 

Our team attributes their success to really having a true process in place for closing the prospects we provide. Hear it from our account manager, “Ed is a true real knuckledragger. Dude had relentless follow up on his leads and it was certainly the reason why the campaign was a big success. Ed understood the value of a phone call even if it wasn't apt to lead to a near-future sale. He also gave us a recorded testimonial and multiple sales references in his time.”

As you can see, we do our best to deliver sales opportunities on a consistent basis, but you’ve really got to go after them with an established sales process if you want to take advantage of all your leads like Ed at Strategic Energy Group did.

This is why we’ve found that those who are most successful in taking advantage of the prospects we deliver have a good sales process in place. 

Another example of clients who really understood this is Streamline Technologies...

Appreciate The Consistent Flow Of Leads

A very notable client is Streamline Technologies for whom we’ve delivered over 160 appointments in about 28 months and are still running.

Why the Win: 

We attribute a major part of their success, after we deliver the sales opportunities is that they really know how to follow-up and close the deal. From the account manager, 

“A long time client, Dan de Palma has been on for a long time and is a very understanding business development and sales professional. A real delight to work with, he understands the follow-up process and appreciates the consistent flow of leads and network building we provide.”

We Fill the Funnel, You Stick to Your Sales Process

Finally, Industry Newsletters also deserves a mention here because thanks to their great follow-up, they were able to build off our partnership together and really take advantage of the sales opportunities we provided. As a result, they saw consistently high appointment numbers and closed deals monthly. 

Why the Win:

“They have a very niche service we’re marketing and a niche target we're going after. I think a lot of the success of this campaign comes in partial because their services sell at a lower price point (each deal ranges 2k-7k/yr) and also due to our clients sales experience, and having a set sales process that she knows works for her. We are able to consistently fill their sales funnel with quality leads and Laurie sticks to her process of discovery call, demo, final decision call to close deals regularly.”

Conclusion

Hopefully these will help you take a look at your teams and see where you can implement these same principles. If you’d like some help knowing where to focus first, talk to a sales development expert on the LinkedSelling team. 

We’re here to help and can provide real insight into which sales development strategies will work for your business, industry, budget, and ROI expectations. Just click below to schedule an appointment.