Helping Illuminis generate high quality sales opportunities

The brief

Working with people who create great technology is one of the highlights of Shortlist’s work, especially ones as innovative and passionate as the team at Illuminis. When we first met, owners Paul and Moira couldn’t wait to tell us all about their exciting product — a unique, all-in-one package of business intelligence software called Octelas.

This software empowers teams to make the right decision at the right time — a shared approach that Shortlist uses to generate high-quality leads, too. This perfect match began when Illuminis was on the hunt for a reliable lead generation partner to help them spread awareness of Octelas and bring more qualified opportunities to the business.

Our solution

While Illuminis’ lead generation strengths lie within the passion they bring to face-to-face sales meetings and referrals, they didn’t know how to get more leads or follow those leads up.

When Illuminis found us, they had no pipeline and no real lead generation process to help rectify that. Our objective was to generate immediate, well-qualified sales opportunities and develop a pipeline of future opportunities.

Shortlist didn’t want to just give Illuminis a quick fix. They needed a process that not only generates opportunities now, but can be confidently replicated and consistently applied to win more new business in future.

Because of our years of experience, we were able to tailor our tried and tested methodology to meet the unique needs of Illuminis. Our team acted not only as sales professionals to source, follow up, qualify, and pass over opportunities, but as a resource to support with the guidance and implementation of their new lead generation process, too.

The ‘understand’ phase

We helped Illuminis realise that to generate more leads, they needed to better understand their target markets, find out their unique challenges within the UK, gain a clean database of key companies and contacts, and generate more of an awareness of Illuminis within their chosen markets.

But we’ve got to walk before we run! Shortlist began with the most important part of any lead generation campaign — gaining a detailed understanding of their business and current processes. This set-up stage is vital because it helps us to represent our client’s brand, understand their target market, and confidently communicate their key messaging.

From this, the Shortlist team committed to a training date to learn all about Illuminis’ software so they could effectively act as an extension of Illuminis’ business. We also took the time to speak to their previous customers and lost accounts to create a win-loss analysis identifying Octelas’ unique USPs, and where improvements are needed within Illuminis’ previous sales process.

HubSpot CRM

When it came to targeting, Illuminis had no previous CRM of accounts and contacts, so we built a new database from scratch using HubSpot.

By setting them up with HubSpot, we can now integrate all sales and marketing activity, give Illuminis full visibility of how leads are progressing, send emails, and regularly report how their website and campaigns are performing to improve the successes of our targeting and activities.

Data

We then filled their new CRM with 4000 new company accounts and their most-relevant contacts — MDs, Owners, and Opps Directors. As a testament to the quality of this data, Illuminis are currently getting a 98.5% delivery rate for the emails we send through their new CRM.

Activity

Once the target was set, Shortlist created a clear roadmap of activity and communication, detailing:

Targeted email campaigns to reach their ideal prospects
Social engagement on LinkedIn to increase awareness within their target
Outbound prospecting to ensure their target accounts were high quality
Inbound follow-up to take lukewarm enquiries to a sales-qualified lead
Website conversion rate optimisation (CRO) to increase inbound leads.

CRO

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising a website or landing page experience to help improve the probability of the visitor converting into an inbound lead. For this, we:

Implemented and monitored HubSpot’s instant chat on their website to capture time-restrained leads
Set up IP tracking from our partner Leadfeeder to see which businesses were visiting their website
Provided support on inbound content and website tweaks to help engage their ideal customers
Integrated HubSpot forms so they could see all prospect activity in one place within their new CRM.

Due to these changes, Illuminis are now finding that more inbound leads are starting to come in, which are followed up and qualified via phone communication within 15 minutes to maximise their likelihood of conversion. This has taken the hassle away from Illuminis so they can concentrate their efforts on only the most-qualified, sales-ready leads that we hand over.

The result

As well as having built a strong ongoing relationship with Illuminis, Shortlist have delivered a repeatable and effective lead generation model that helps them understand, engage and convert high quality leads.

Within just six months Shortlist has generated 199 marketing-qualified leads to nurture, 21 sales-qualified leads for their pipeline, and six new opportunities so far. Here’s a quote from Illuminis’ founder, Paul North:

“We very much appreciate the team’s dedication, organisation and skill. We truly believe that, in Shortlist, we have found the ideal partner — rather than just another supplier — to support our business growth.”