Callbox Taps Ontario Auto Dealership Market for IT Sales Opportunities
The Client
The Client provides CRM, website, and digital solutions for automobile dealerships. The company works with dealers of all sizes that are looking to optimize their customer-facing, back office, and IT workflows. The Client operates out of Ontario and primarily sells to dealerships representing major automotive brands all over the province.
The Challenge
The Client specializes in IT solutions for automotive dealerships designed to streamline sales, marketing, and customer support processes. These solutions include end-to-end ecommerce portal, reputation management services, lead generation services, website conversion optimization tools, and fully integrated CRM platform. The Client targets both franchised and independent dealerships throughout the province of Ontario.
In order to sell to this market, the Client employs a small sales team that performs both marketing and sales responsibilities. The team assigns prospecting activities to an inside sales rep who carries out much of the research and initial contact.
Meanwhile, in-person and phone follow-ups are delegated to the rest of the team. The company’s average sales cycle ranges between 3 to 6 months.
The Client already does business with a sizeable number of dealerships primarily in the Greater Toronto Area and other regions in the province. The company wants to expand its reach into other Ontario locations.
To achieve its growth objectives, the Client thinks it needs to outsource part of its marketing efforts, particularly lead generation and appointment setting, so that their sales team can focus on nurturing and follow-up.
The Callbox Solution
The Client partnered with Callbox after a thorough vendor selection process, citing Callbox’s long-term experience in complex-sale IT solutions as the main deciding factor. Callbox then developed a 3-month multi-touch, multichannel appointment setting program that would perform much of the prospecting work currently done by the Client’’s sales team.
The campaign plan consists of targeted one-on-one outreach with CIOs, IT managers, and IT directors from auto dealerships in Ontario (except those located in Ottawa), via live conversations enhanced with email and social media touch points.
Appointment Setting
- The Callbox team compiled the list of prospects to be targeted in the campaign based on the Client’s specifications as well as analysis of its ideal customer profile.
- The Callbox team also prepared the call script which included probing questions to qualify the prospect and set a follow-up meeting. The team closely consulted with the Client for review and approval of the script.
- Contacts who agreed to a scheduled face-to-face or phone meeting with a Client’s rep were labeled as qualified appointments.
Email Marketing
- The Callbox team crafted and tested two email templates used in the campaign: the introduction email (which warmed up prospects for upcoming campaign touchpoints) and targeted send-out emails (which were sent in response to requests for information).
- The campaign team followed email marketing best practices, such as segmentation and personalization using various attributes for each target auto dealer and prospect.
- The campaign’s email specialists handled prompt response and other actions based on prospects’ activity.
Social Media
- The team used LinkedIn to engage positive contacts from the call and email channels.
- The Callbox team also enhanced prospect information by appending data gathered from contacts’ LinkedIn profiles and activity.
- The team’s social media specialist performed tasks such as joining groups, handling InMails, building new connections, and other activities to boost the Client’s visibility and branding on the platform.
Results
The three-month (66-day) appointment setting campaign helped the Client increased the number of sales appointments in its pipeline. As is typical for Callbox’s multi-touch, multi-channel campaigns, most of these appointments were recorded only after the first two weeks. During the campaign’s opening phase, the Callbox team focused on the email outreach and LinkedIn activities. For the entire campaign, the team was able to generate the following social media results:
• Connections made: 173
• Groups joined: 173
• InMails received: 32
A monthly breakdown of results from the appointment setting activities is as follows:
• 1st month: 24 qualified appointments
• 2nd month: 16 qualified appointments
• 3rd month: 17 qualified appointments
By the end of the campaign, the Callbox team handed off a total of 57 qualified appointments to the Client’s reps. The Client estimates that 80% of these will become sales qualified leads (SQLs) and, based on past sales performance, the reps can close about half to around two-thirds of SQLs. That means the Client can potentially close 23 to 30 new auto dealerships from this campaign in the next six months.