How did a Torrance, CA-based shipping company boost their sales pipeline by using B2B lead generation and inside sales practices?
About Client
This client is a shipping company that helps with inbound, outbound and drop shipments. They pride themselves on efficient, cost-effective services for customers looking to ship around the world.
Business Problem
They were looking for a lead generation agency that could provide B2B leads for a host of their services, which included expedite LTL and truckload shipments, LTL rescues, volume shipments, international and domestic air expedite, first and last mile service, MABD and OTIF compliance and MRO transportation.
They first tried a cold calling service to generate leads, but they did not get the desired results they were looking for.
They also invested in outbound outreach such as direct mail campaigns and sending brochures to prospect companies, but they couldn’t generate any promising leads.
As a smaller company, our client also struggled to compete with competitors that had an extra edge due to larger marketing budgets.
Our Plan
We met with the company’s executives to better understand their problem and expectations. This was our first time serving a shipping company. We proposed a B2B lead generation email marketing program focusing on contact discovery and campaigning.
As part of the program, we would develop an email marketing campaign with multiple touchpoints that focused on a set of services in the initial months. We’d then gradually expand to include more of their services as well.
We started with contact discovery for the account and put together a sizeable list of contacts that were ready to get into the campaigning engine.
We designed a mix of rich-text and infographic email campaigns to market their LTL and truckload services to small and mid-size companies.
For brand building, we asked them to wait for up to two months to see favorable results as contacts may start looking for services once our emails hit their inboxes. Our email campaigns did the exact thing we had planned. Suddenly, the right audience was browsing solutions on their website, and they started receiving a good number of contact requests as well. We increased both their inbound and outbound flow of leads.
For the appointments (HOT leads), we assigned a lead identifier who read all the responses and nurtured the ones which were neutral or positive. Client calls were then scheduled with these prospects.
Results
In the first month, we generated four quality leads through our email marketing program. The first two of these leads were interested in truckload shipments and transport management systems.
Following the first month, the campaign started showing even more promising results. In the second month, we were able to generate 7 HOT leads. Our client also received a number of inbound enquiries through our direct email marketing for FTL and other services.
The client’s web traffic also increased due to the email marketing we were doing. Suddenly, they were recording a good number of followers, which solved another problem for them as well.
On average, the client received around 4 or 5 leads every month, and they were very satisfied that we could meet and exceed their sales pipeline expectations.
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