How Verkkoasema booked 3 x more meetings by tapping into real-time company data

Key takeaways

• Verkkoasema provides a wide range of services from search engine and social media marketing, digital sales data analytics, website design & development to content production and web software solutions.
• Verkkoasema wanted to grow their business, but their outbound sales process–especially sales prospecting–did not bring the desired results.
• With the help of Vainu, Verkkoasema has significantly improved their sales prospecting and lead generation processes.
• Verkkoasema has also taken the first steps of tapping into real-time data in their inbound sales process.
  
  

The company

Verkkoasema had a challenge: They wanted to grow their business, but the existing outbound sales process, especially prospecting, did not bring the desired results. The primary motivation to start searching for a new solution was to book more meetings with potential customers.

According to Jyrki Sundström, Verkkoasema CTO & Partner, their prospecting process used to be very laborious: "Basically, there wasn't a clear process. We bought prospects lists here and there and tried to do active prospecting and booking, but it was too difficult and occupied way too much of our time. We knew that waiting aggressively for offer requests wasn't the path to success, as things don't work that way. We started to use an outsourced booking agency but still didn't get enough sales-qualified leads out of the prospects we sourced for them. We needed to find a new solution."

Results

More time for customer work through efficient prospecting and lead generation

Verkkoasema implemented Vainu at the end of 2018. With Vainu, Verkkoasema first streamlined the way they do sales prospecting, and they can now finish the work that took up to 5 hours per week with a click of a button. The process from prospecting to booking is now straightforward: "We have a well-defined ideal customer profile. For the time being, it includes companies of a certain size in a specific industry that are already using a marketing automation tool but haven't quite yet stepped up their game in digital marketing," explains Sundström and continues. "Vainu has made sales prospecting easy, and it doesn't feel exhausting anymore. It's extremely straightforward to download prospect lists from Vainu for the booking agency. The agency books us on average eight meetings a week with a call-to-meeting hit rate of 25–30% whereas, before Vainu, the amount of booked meetings was from one to two weekly." Sundström goes on to tell that one person in Verkkoasema's sales team saves up to 1,5–2 months of work every year with the help of Vainu.

Another important use case for Vainu in Verkkoasema is lead generation. Verkkoasema has set triggers for different events signaling growth for the following groups: their former and current clients, as well as their current prospects. "We have also been using a tool called Zapier to route new accounts originated from some of our campaigns to a Vainu target group, where the accounts can quickly be sorted and qualified for sales. This way, we stay updated on the latest changes in these organizations, which may open up new opportunities for us to start discussions,"  Sundström elaborates.

Data-driven ideal customer profile and advanced lead scoring

For Verkkoasema, revising their sales prospecting process and lead generation wasn't enough. Besides more efficient prospecting and lead generation, another essential factor when choosing Vainu was easy access to Vainu's data through Vainu API. "With one click of a button, we can get all the basic company information to our CRM from Vainu," Sundström describes. Getting access to up-to-date company data in real-time opened up a significant number of new opportunities to tap into company data in their inbound sales processes as well. The third use case for Vainu is still a process in the making–like companies' inbound sales process should be; regularly revisited and modified.

The starting point culminated in one question: How can we better capitalize on our inbound leads? "Let's say someone downloads our eBook, and we get the name of the person's company. From Vainu, we can get all the information we need to build a picture, whether the account fits our ICP or not. The lead will automatically go to the booking agency for the first outreach if it matches our criteria. This kind of lead scoring system is currently in the making to take our inbound sales process to the next level," explains Sundström. He elaborates how they currently route inbound leads automatically to their CRM. However, the lead quality being too bad has led to the situation where people aren't motivated to grasp those opportunities as they're too often a miss rather than a hit. This is where Vainu's data can help them.

When asked to conclude the most significant benefits of implementing Vainu, Sundström highlights three things, the first one being integrateability. "When data moves automatically between different systems without manual work, it does not only make our work easier but improves our sales results." To finish, Sundström describes how they have been able to specify their ICP and how they have started to track their sales KPIs systematically after implementing Vainu.