Why ABM Works: Two Client Stories

Client Story One

1. Situation

The client is a 30-year old mid-sized software solutions vendor in the Mortgage Industry. While it was a dominant player with high name recognition in its industry, the client was primarily perceived as a solution provider to smaller banks and brokerage firms that did under 600 loans per year.

At the same time, the industry was becoming highly consolidated as significant new legislations were forcing smaller lenders and brokers out of business or into acquisition by larger lenders.

Though the client attended a number of conferences and sent tens of thousands of emails each month, its sales grew by under 5% each year.

Clearly, the client needed to improve its effectiveness at marketing and selling to larger lenders in order to continue growing in a highly regulated environment.

2. What Was Needed

What the CEO told us he needed was the ability to effectively communicate that his company was “enterprise ready” to meet the needs of larger lenders making 6,000 loans per month or more—a ten-fold increase in the size of companies targeted.

While the company’s current marketing programs worked at selling to smaller institutions, they were too product feature-oriented to address the issues that senior level decision makers at larger institutions grapple with—issues of lowering operating costs and risks; improving asset utilization; and increasing market share.

What was needed was the means to discuss these issues with authority and demonstrate the ability to address them better than any other alternative—as well as to engage all stakeholders simultaneously time using Account Based Marketing.

3. What we did for them

We started by developing a deep understanding the mortgage industry, which involved focusing on what has changed in the past few years and how these changes impact the business of mortgage lending—the costs, compliance risks, changing consumer/borrower behavior, new non-bank competitors, and more.

Our findings were transformed into a compelling white paper that clearly outlined the new risks and opportunities in the industry, and then explained how a digital mortgage platform addresses the high costs and risks of the old, broken paper-based lending business process.

We then showed how a digital mortgage platform delivers five unmatchable ROIs: reducing loan origination costs by 35%; improving line of credit utilization by 300%; reducing operational risk by 80%; reducing loan fallout rates by 50%; and increasing market reach by 90%. These were all issues that senior executives were measured and rewarded on.

From there, we designed highly targeted email and call campaigns targeting COOs, CFOs, CIOs, and Chief Compliance officers of large mortgage lenders.

4. The Results

Within the first 120 days of the campaign, the white paper was downloaded by 269 executives within large mortgage lending institutions, resulting in meetings with lenders that made anywhere from 6,000 to 15,000 loans per year.

The campaign generated a sales funnel of $1.9 million/year in recurring revenue, plus another 50% or more in upsell opportunities after the second year.

Assuming a closing ratio of 25%, the four-month campaign yielded a return of 792% ROI for the first year, with a new business acquisition cost of 12.6%, and an average three year acquisition cost of under 3.1%.

Client Story Two

1. Situation

The Client provided tools for CEOs of mid-market companies to help them consistently achieve their growth priorities such as new product launches, new market entries, hiring top executives and more.

While the Client consistently won business that came from referrals and its own network, it had little success generating business from any outbound campaign.

2. What Was Needed

The Founder told us that they needed a way to target Private Equity funded mid-market companies as the CEOs of such companies were under great pressure to perform and achieve planned targets.

And, while the company was generating thousands of inbound leads through its landing pages, these leads went nowhere. The leads that came in were too low level since they were primarily downloading “how-to” type of content, while the company’s targeted audience was clearly the C-suite: CEOs, COOs, CFO, and Chiefs of Strategy.

At the center of the issue was their messaging. CEOs continually were telling them they already had a project management tool and to talk to their Project Management team. The Client was battling this positioning problem of not being confused with a project management software, rather than articulating what they were.

And while referrals gave them the time to do a demo and thereby show why their solution was different, they had no way of articulating the value of their solution to generate quality leads from their outbound campaigns.

Until the Client found a way to make its outbound campaigns successful at generating the quality and quantity of leads they needed, they were certain that they could not meet their revenue goals of growing 50% each year.

3. What we did for them

We decided the best way to understand the unique value proposition of the product was to hear about it from their customers.

After watching a number of testimonial videos and reading what their customers said about them, it became clear to us that what they provided was an Intelligent Work Platform that enabled CEOs to get all of their employees in every department to work as one team.

From this message, we created a white paper showing the challenges that mid-market CEOs face, the solution, and how our Client’s product automates the ability for a CEO to see where the bottlenecks were in order for them to move quickly to change course so that all the company’s core objectives are achieved.

We then developed videos, case studies, and a nurture email campaign targeting CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and Chief Strategy Officers of PE backed mid-market companies.

4. The Results

Here were some of the key results that we saw within the first 60 days of the project:

Email Metrics	Of about 3,119 emails that were delivered, there were 117 downloads of the white paper. This in itself was significant because nearly half of those that opened the email downloaded the white paper.
Demos and Trials	About 14 demos were booked in the first three weeks of the campaign with C-suite leads that came directly from the campaign.
Sales	The Client closed two deals from the campaign within the first 60 days, both coming from leads generated by the campaign.