“SmartLeads is driving us to get better in so many ways. The effort is really paying off for us.”
- Cameron Johnson, CEO, QMSC
Challenges:
Results:
QMSC is a growing company with a Software-as-a-Service platform that helps drive supplier performance for industrial manufacturing companies. The platform connects organizations to their suppliers to enable more transparency, more collaboration, and better joint problem solving. Automation in the platform puts clarity around the manufacturer/supplier partnership to help improve supplier performance and create better business outcomes.
The ideal prospects for QMSC’s platform are companies with numerous suppliers where they track quality issues via spreadsheets and email in a manual process. There are, quite literally, millions of companies like that around the world.
A major challenge for QMSC is identifying and reaching out to those prospective customers with an attractive sales pitch and business proposition. The company doesn’t have an in-house sales development team to do the necessary work to develop and reach out to qualified leads.
The venture capital fund Golden Section Ventures (GSV) invested in QMSC. A managing partner at GSV suggested to QMSC CEO Cameron Johnson that engaging with SmartLeads could be a good solution to expand sales development capabilities.
SmartLeads provides a B2B Lead Generation service that increases business development productivity 2x to 3x times. This service is powered by intelligent software with language comprehension capabilities, which allows SmartLeads to automate creation and micro-segmentation of a contact database. Then SmartLeads does the follow-on omnichannel outreach to find sales leads with high potential using its integrated software platform.
Johnson contacted SmartLeads to discuss potential engagement in February of 2022. “When I had my initial conversations with SmartLeads, the discussion was all about QMSC’s business, the go to market approach we should take and the outcome we would get if we worked with them,” says Johnson. “It wasn’t about how awesome they are. Instead, we focused on my needs and practical solutions to getting results. Frankly, that’s how I sell, so I saw a lot of alignment between our sales methodologies.”
To get up to speed on QMSC’s business offerings and target customers, SmartLeads set up workshops with Johnson to deep dive into QMSC’s ideal customer profiles and buyer personas. “They asked some sharp questions, like ‘What are your current customers successfully using your software for?’ They really wanted to understand the value proposition of the QMSC product and what makes QMSC customers successful,” says Johnson.
“To properly manage outreach campaigns, we regularly touch base and do the necessary tweaks and adjustments,” says Johnson. “We’ve added some industries and personas who we are reaching out to. We have a true partnership in this effort. SmartLeads not only takes my feedback, but they also push back and make suggestions. They bring a real wealth of experience and expertise.”
“At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how much revenue we are adding to the business, and SmartLeads is helping us do that. Our sales cycle is long, but SmartLeads helped us build a strong pipeline in a short period of time that will eventually convert into a lot of business.” – Cameron Johnson, CEO
SmartLeads built a contact database based on the industries, company types, and business titles provided by QMSC. The data was sourced from multiple third party databases and thoroughly filtered using language comprehension technology to review the background of each individual and ensure selection of people with relevant decision-making responsibilities. This proprietary technology is what makes SmartLeads so successful in building an accurate contact database and generating high-quality leads that convert.
The initial contact database for QMSC had nearly 12,000 companies and more than 41,000 prospective buyers. Top 288 target accounts were identified for account-based marketing initiatives.
Email and LinkedIn outreach campaigns started in March 2022. Emails were targeted at over 20,000 top priority recipients and over a period of 5 months a total of 60,000+ emails were sent. Over 8,200 emails were opened. These emails resulted in 5,400 visits to QMSC website.
LinkedIn connection invitations were sent to 3,500 people and 800 of them connected with QMSC representatives.
SmartLeads began cold calling prospects in June 2022 and in just 2 months generated great results. The team approached 455 companies, made 1,575 dials, left 536 voice messages, scheduled 9 meetings, and planned an additional 5 meetings for later.
The email, LinkedIn and cold calling outreach campaigns generated 36 leads. Of those, 12 came from cold calling only in the last two months. Over the 5 month period, email channel generated 15 leads and LinkedIn outreach resulted in 9 leads.
These 36 leads resulted already in 7 business opportunities with over $300,000 ARR that are expected to close before the end of the year. There are still 8 meetings to take place and they may result in a couple more opportunities.
“What SmartLeads does well is get us in front of people. Our pipeline has grown significantly with qualified leads which we know will convert into revenue.” – Cameron Johnson, CEO
Beyond lead generation, SmartLeads helped QMSC with better overall product marketing. “SmartLeads guided us to create some videos for our website, for example, to explain more about our product offering,” says Johnson. “They saw a weakness in our marketing and helped us put out some good thought leadership pieces. They had a team to help us with the content and it was an incredible value. SmartLeads is driving us to get better in so many ways.”
All in all, QMSC views SmartLeads as a strategic partner who came in with a standardized set of processes and technology to run the lead generation engine. “We’re in a journey together,” says Johnson. “It’s a very collaborative relationship that is really paying off. It has been an evolution to get to where we are now. This wasn’t a ‘two-weeks-and-we’re-done’ project. It has taken time to collect the initial learnings, then improve on it to get to a better-quality level and clarity in who we are targeting. The results are starting to pop, and I know we will get much more back in revenue than the investment we made in SmartLeads.
”Johnson adds that bringing in SmartLeads has been much more cost efficient than trying to build an internal sales development team. “I could do it internally but it would take time to get people up to speed and, by the time they are ramped up, I’d worry about turnover. I’d rather invest into SmartLeads who came in with an experienced team, well defined process, and integrated tools suite to become successful in a short period of time.”.
