The Client Industry: Unified Communications
InsideUp Service: Pipeline Boost
This long-term client is a multinational company of over 2,500 employees offering solutions in contact center, cloud-based unified communications and communications platform-as-a-service. This public company (NASDAQ) with over $1.2 Billion in annual revenue was recently acquired by a worldwide leader in 5G wireless technology. Since it provides cloud-based voice, contact center, video, mobile, and unified communications solutions for businesses of all sizes, it must compete with larger on-premises solutions as well as smaller, more nimble cloud-based UC firms.
Their Challenge
An Efficient Way to Build Sales Pipeline Competition in the UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) ecosystem is intense. This client needed to rise above the noise and promote a value proposition that clearly differentiated it as a full-stack, single-source, communications technology provider. They also needed their pipe-to-spend ratios to exceed 5x because while smaller-sized deals might close faster, the total pipeline value generated from smaller deal sizes did not justify their total spending on event participation, paid search and display advertising. The brand also wanted to move up-market to increase the number of seats and ARR. However, reaching likely contacts in larger companies requires live phone conversations, not just product-led growth landing pages featuring free trials of their SaaS offerings. To complement its internal demand generation effort, this well-known cloud communications provider turned to InsideUp.
Our Approach
High Volume Prospect Generation with an Emphasis on Live Dialogue We began by providing our staff with generalized knowledge about unified communications and client-specific information. Using the client’s target specifications describing their Ideal Customer Profile, we wholistically identified the most likely accounts and contacts to target for this campaign. To get the ball rolling, the Pipeline Boost service first tapped its unique data sources using proprietary data profiling software to identify a significant volume of likely prospects seeking a UCaaS solution and evaluated them individually using a predefined data scorecard. A suppression list was used to avoid connecting with existing customers of the company. Our solution is based on using the client’s content to engage and nurture prospects who might not yet be either in-market or engaged with the client. Out-of-the-box predictive models in popular marketing technology platforms fail to provide a complete solution to address demand generation needs. Many give only account-based scoring and nothing at the individual decision-making level. Using our own in-house cadence system, we nurtured the prospects with the communications provider’s branded content. When prospects were ready for contact, our US-based team of experienced cloud communications solution consultants engaged each one directly to further verify their interest in the communications provider’s solution. Our representatives provided the client’s business development team with extensive notes on the status of each prospect, along with their expressed communications needs.
The Results
A Decade of Big Results with Pipeline Boost With 125,000 qualified prospects delivered by us over a ten-year period, this company achieved connect rate that averaged 67%, with an average 15% prospect-to-sales opportunity conversion rate, and average of $27 million in annual sales pipeline generated. This performance easily surpassed the client’s stated goal of exceeding a 5x return on their marketing spend.
