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Data Capture Company gets 650X return on telemarketing campaign by mining untapped prospects

SITUATION: An industry-leading, multi-billion dollar data capture company found some initial success selling their scanning product to a new market segment: medical device OEMs.

To take advantage of this new opportunity, the company’s sales team started spending time trying to find the OEMs with the right profile, and identifying decision-makers within those target companies receptive to their message.

Massini Group interviewed a number of the highest performing sales executives targeting the new market segment. The objective of these interviews was to characterize the ideal prospect, and to determine to what extent, if any, the sales team was methodically identifying targets.

The conventional wisdom among the team was:

1. There are 100’s of accounts in the space and, as of the date of the interviews, the sales team was working with fifty of them;
2. The sales team collectively knew the vast majority of the market;
3. Internal data (from CRM, ERP) captured the knowledge of the sales team;
4. Well known industry association lists and public device registration sources would fill in any gaps.

ASSIGNMENT: The strategic goal of the sales operations team was, as always, to meet or exceed sales goals, this time by growing revenue from the new market segment. Massini Group was tasked with assuring that the sales team had visibility to all of the members of this new, high priority segment – namely medical device manufacturers that could embed the clients technology. Massini Group broke its challenge into the following parts:

1. Consolidate all of data known to the client;
2. Formalize the ideal target at both the company and contact level;
3. Use business reference data to quantify and specifically identify the total available market;
4. Acquire a comprehensive marketing universe and match all known data to it;
5. Identify gaps in the current market visibility and coverage for marketing and sales focus.

KEY STRATEGY: Massini Group built a comprehensive marketing universe based upon assembling a complete set of business reference data. Then, through a highly accurate multi-layer matching algorithm, Massini Group associated every piece of data that the client had with the universe, thereby identifying sales force blind spots as well as deficiencies in commercially available list sources.

ENGINEERED PROCESSES: The client had most of the ingredients for successful entry into the market – a technologically leading product, an accomplished sales force and proven, albeit limited, success in the vertical segment. However, they did suffer from a common misconception, i.e., that an experienced sales force and marketing team guarantees inherent knowledge of the scope and span of a market.

Using its proprietary Dialogue Strategy^SM methodology, Massini Group cross referenced client knowledge with third party sources of business reference data, to significantly improve the reach and efficiency of the effort. Specific steps included:

1. Using structured interview methods to extract the knowledge of the sales teams with very limited expenditure of their time; this approach assured their recognition of the output as driven by their approach and guaranteed acceptance of the result as aligned with their goals.
   
   
2. Locating and employing the best available sources of detailed data related to companies and contacts in combination with less specific sources of general business information. This enabled creation of a singular and powerful source of targets for the marketing and sales teams in the form of a comprehensive marketing universe.
   
   
3. Application of a comprehensive codification scheme to assure detailed understanding of the data presently in the hands of the client’s sales and marketing teams.
   
   
4. Implementation of highly accurate and comprehensive proprietary matching algorithms to connect what the client already knew to the new sources of data.
   
   
5. Development of a unique view of the marketing universe that outlined the parts of the market that had not received any attention from either the sales or marketing teams.
   
   
6. Directing the telemarketing team used by the client to address the highest priority targets within the universe that had not previously been touched. Massini Group pointed out that the client’s prior knowledge of the medical device OEM market was sparse – just 867 of 9,686 available targets (9%). Further, by their own definition, they knew exactly the right contact in just 9 of those companies.

That left 8,819 companies for which the client had never inquired as to their interest in using the client’s products. Massini Group outlined a straightforward process to fill the gap – utilize existing outbound telemarketing resources to first inquire at the main switchboard about the correct contact to which they should address their communications. Then, as a second step, utilize skilled inside sales teams to reach out to the confirmed contact to make the pitch.

RESULTS: Ultimately, the true test of the process was the business benefit of the exercise, and it was significant. The client realized a net revenue increase equal to 650X, or 65,000% of the investment in the campaign. This increase occurred in the first eight weeks of the effort. This was made possible by:

1. Overcoming the common belief in sales that there are no untouched prospects;
2. Integrating the best thinking of the most successful sales executives, thereby assuring acceptance of the leads once they were generated;
3. Developing a comprehensive marketing universe to which all previous experience was linked, assuring that the campaign encountered no political resistance or turf wars because sales could see everything that marketing was doing;
4. Exposing the sales force to companies that had a pent up demand because they had never before been seriously contacted by the client company.

Although this was an extreme case, with prior company knowledge of the total available market at only 9%, Massini Group has pegged the average market visibility of leading companies across numerous technology, industrial and services industry segments at no more than 25%, unless they have undertaken an effort to methodically identify their total available market.

Explore the power of Complete Market Visibility with this in-depth white paper, Unlocking Sales Among Untapped Prospects.