With over eight years of experience in the IT consulting and professional services space, the Client now ranks as one of the most trusted service providers in the industry and has successfully partnered with companies like Citrix Systems, AppSense, Blue Coat, and Apple (mobility).

The Client started out in 2009 as a white-label supplier of IT services to vendors and resellers. These companies would subcontract the Client to perform services on their behalf, often without the end customers knowing about the Client’s involvement. In 2014, the company refocused toward directly providing services to enterprises and organizations.

This move presented a bit of a branding conundrum for the company. The main challenge was finding a way to embed its extensive experience as an IT subcontractor for specific VDI, cloud services, and security verticals in the value proposition for its new business model.

For that reason, the Client undertook a massive marketing program that simultaneously focused on branding and customer acquisition. The customer acquisition plan highlighted nurturing leads in-house with the Client’s marketing team while delegating top-of-funnel prospecting activities to a third-party agency.

The Client chose Callbox as its outsourced marketing partner due to a number of factors, with the main one being the “consultative fit” that Callbox’s marketing solutions offered. The Client pointed out that taking a consultative approach to a project (rather than a purely engineering perspective) was their key differentiator and that Callbox was also able to demonstrate this by being more of a marketing advisor than a marketing agency. Given the Client’s marketing goals, the challenge is two-fold:

• Finding and identifying qualified opportunities for the Client’s customer acquisition efforts
• Generating awareness about the Client’s different IT consulting and professional services

Both the Callbox team and the Client agree that an integrated appointment setting campaign best meets the latter’s requirements. The campaign primarily consists of phone-based conversations enhanced with email and social media touch points.

In addition, the campaign timeline is divided into weekly or biweekly segments, with each segment focusing exclusively on a specific solution that the Client offers. These include BlueCoat, Zscaler, Radware, Apple, and CheckPoint—along with general consultancy services, business analyst services, and other IT project services. Other key campaign activities are as follows:

1. Prior to the start of the campaign, the Callbox team compiled and profiled the prospect list comprised of IT managers, CIOs, and CTOs from companies headquartered or operating in Australia and New Zealand.
2. Since the campaign is made up of different phases, the Callbox team prepares campaign materials for each stage. These are sent to the Client for review and approval.
3. Call scripts are based on a list of eight probing questions given by the Client. Each script gauges a prospect’s need and fit for a specific IT product or solution.

At time of writing, the campaign has completed three
months’ worth of multi-channel appointment setting activities and is already at the final week of its fourth month.

Like most of Callbox’s integrated appointment setting projects, the early stages of the Client’s campaign primarily revolved around email activities for warming up prospects and refining the campaign focus. Open rates for the bulk send-outs reached 10.2%, 11.4%, and 23.0% for the first, second, and third months, respectively. The campaign was also able to maintain hard bounces and unsubscribes within acceptable limits.

Since the campaign calendar is subdivided into weekly or biweekly segments that focus on a particular IT solution, the overall monthly appointment setting results tend not to follow a definite trend.

The campaign, so far, has generated the followingmonthly outcomes:

• First month: 14 appointments
• Second month: 8 appointments
• Third month: 7 appointments and 3 leads completed

The campaign is still ongoing and, so far, it has delivered 29 appointments. Since these appointments have been qualified using a highly targeted set of parameters, the Client expects to move 80% of these appointments further down the funnel as sales-qualified Leads (SQLs). In addition, the company has a track record of closing 30% to 40% of SQLs after 6 months in the pipeline. This means that the Client can
potentially generate up to 9 new customers from this leg of the campaign.