ABM Strategy Drove 10K Leads & $3.65mm Rev in 3 Months

When a startup launched a product that represented a true leap forward in the technology of direct mail analytics, it was quickly acquired by one of the largest consulting firms in the world.

But while the product was high caliber, it soon became clear that the newly acquired startup lacked the kind of demand generation strategy that would enable them to scale.

The product was designed with large, consumer-facing businesses in mind, creating a relatively small target market, and a high price point. It was as if they were selling a secret weapon in the ongoing war for direct mail dominance.

As a result, the startup only maintained a small sales staff with no in-house marketing support. The company’s sales team thought in terms of winning individual clients, focusing almost all of their resources on prospect research, cold calling, and outbound prospecting. From their perspective, a broader online marketing strategy just wasn’t a good investment because they already knew who their prospects were.

Soon after the startup was acquired, however, it became clear that this highly targeted approach wasn’t viable at scale. Their sales team was growing quickly, and the lack of a consistent marketing-sourced pipeline was starting to become a serious issue. The company needed more than just a little help with its marketing — it needed a completely new marketing strategy, built from the ground up.

That’s when Opascope was brought in.

Given the unusually specific market that the startup was trying to reach, Opascope knew that many marketing “best practices” wouldn’t be effective. Instead, we created a new strategy to make the best use of the startup’s budget and resources.

When it comes to lead generation, even the best sales team can only do so much. Historically, the startup’s sales team spent a lot of their time manually searching LinkedIn and other sources to find potential customers. Even after they had identified a target account, they still had to invest additional time tracking down contact information just to send an email or make a cold call. This kind of system just can’t scale.

Opascope’s challenge was to find a way to identify contacts at the target accounts but on a much larger scale. Experience has taught us that purchasing lists of leads from vendors didn’t work. By the time someone’s contact information is available through most vendors, it’s already out of date.

Instead, Opascope decided that it would be more useful to automate the research that the reps were already doing. We developed a process to automatically look for prospects at scale using many of the same concepts that the sales reps had used. This allowed us to quickly find contacts in the right industry, had the right job titles, fit the buyer persona, and matched other core indicators for a strong prospect. The list generated was then sent on to the sales team, creating substantial time savings. In a matter of just a few months, Opascope identified 10,000 high-quality prospects.

The startup was in an entirely new technology category. Its most likely customers weren’t looking for an analytics solution dedicated to direct mail, because they had no idea it even existed. The most likely place to find those potential customers was on social media, forums, and other channels. By looking for conversations involving related products or similar solutions, Opascope was then able to identify those people by job title, company, and other factors.

We could then match the information that we had about these individuals using job titles, company data, and other details. This allowed us to identify prospects who were likely making a buying decision at that time but had no awareness of the product.

The leads generated by this approach proved to be extremely high-quality, as we had a high degree of certainty about their interest. After all, Opascope only had their details because they were interested in, and talking about, the exact problems this particular product was designed to solve.

Using this approach, Opascope generated roughly 20% of new leads and 25% of overall new opportunities for the company.

Opascope knew that a standard online ad buy wouldn’t achieve the results that the startup needed. Instead, Opascope created a marketing program based on hyper-targeted advertising buys.

Combining both co-promotion and newsletter display ads, 65% of new leads came in from niche advertising campaigns. Thanks to the targeted nature of these buys, the leads generated by this method were of exceptional quality. Those leads would come to represent 60% of total opportunities as well.

Once we got people to the site, we needed to hold their interest. To do so, we repurposed high-value reports from the parent company to create gated content that could be used alongside new landing pages.

Opascope is highly experienced in conversion rate optimization, resulting in a strong intuitive sense of what works — and what doesn’t — when it comes to organizations looking to rapidly scale their results. This allowed us to create high-converting landing pages right out of the gate.

These new landing pages had a 21% conversion rate, which is almost unheard of in the B2B space.

Opascope also developed an email sequence that allowed the sales team to follow up with the lead immediately with additional pieces of insightful, relevant content.

• Over 10,000 High-Quality Leads
• $3.65mm in Closed Won Revenue

In the end, these strategies brought in thousands of high-value, high-converting leads, turning six figures in advertising spend into millions in closed-won deals within the first several months.