Digitizing lead generation for family owned Canadian Agro business

DMT Corp partnered with a family-operated mill located in Ontario, Canada. With 75+ years of experience in the market they combined hands-on approach and new technologies to ensure they provide clients with consistent, all-natural, high-quality whole grain products.

The production facility uses classic milling techniques, stones and screens, to mill and grind the products. From private-labeled consumer packs, to large bags, totes, truckloads and containers - our client has it covered.

Our client looked for new ways to expand and generate new revenue. The company was mostly old-fashioned. Without a significant online presence, they relied mostly on word of mouth and networking events to drive new revenue. Hence, DMT stepped in as partner to assist with outbound lead generation efforts, as well as certain aspects of inbound marketing.

Our main goals were to:

1) Establish outbound pipeline;

2) Help define the ICP, test to determine the best fit;

3) Generate cold appointments;

4) Analyze website traffic to determine new potential clients and re-target existing ones.

Basically, we helped drive additional revenue and generate extra demand for sample requests.

• Non-digital landscape: We discovered that not only our client, but the majority of our Ideal Clients have little to no online presence. This made LinkedIn obsolete and made email outreach difficult as well as other efforts. Consequently, we had to apply multi-channel outreach - including phone calling, SMS, WhatsApp, social media, etc.
• Difficulty scaling: Due to a lack of online presence and marketing efforts there was a bottleneck in terms of how many clients could be brought by word of mouth and offline events. We were building email & digital infrastructure from the ground up, excluding an already pre-existing website.
• Hard to spark a convo: Majority prefers to stick with current providers due to potential risks and transition costs, as trust is everything in this vertical. A few iterations of messaging helped to determine the best pitch and optimal ICP to reach high conversions.
• Narrow geo requirements: Due to the nature of the business logistics is an issue and it is only reasonable to deliver to a few neighbouring states - Ontario, Quebec, New York & New Jersey. We had to assign additional lead research resources to establish a 100% manual and human-driven lead research process - this allowed us to identify every possible lead.
• Long sales process: It was hard to provide ROI from the get go, as a potential deal had to go through a bunch of steps, including sample delivery, evaluation, communicating feedback, etc. Our SDR team supported client throughout this process.

Onboarding:

Onboarding had its challenges and opportunities. From one point of view - we had nothing to start with, from another - this was an almost blank canvas for us to paint on. Of course, the client already had a website. However, email, domain software, basic marketing materials, lead capture and outreach infrastructure were non-existent. Hence, the DMT team had to go through a number of tasks, but this allowed us to get a better understanding of our client and we had creative freedom to go in almost any direction.

Initial appointments were booked within the first few weeks, but we quickly encountered a lead research bottleneck; our team wasn’t able to find enough leads. We had to re-calibrate the process, assign an additional rep and finally ramp up our lead research quota to 50-60 individual leads per day. Mainly, this was achieved by expanding ICP niches and sourcing leads from various verticals, such as restaurants, local cafes, veterinary supplements and pet food, food manufacturers, bakeries, local shops and more.

Ongoing Project:

While we might have had issues with reaching out KPI of 12+ appointments per month (reached on some months, failed a few appointments short on others) - we provided strong opportunities, 8/10 proceeded to next steps and received samples for evaluation. 5/10 resulted in paid orders, generating enough ROI to sustain operations for the first quarter and beyond.

By the end of the second month of outreach, we had to start re-engaging with our original audience. The pet food and food manufacturing verticals responded the best, along with restaurants and bakeries as the runner ups. Other verticals didn’t provide enough traction, while these original ones were quickly exhausted due to geo requirements.

This re-engagement solution allowed us to keep going for 3 quarters (9 months) until the flow of appointments dried down completely. This resulted in multiple deals contributing to MRR, with at least 2/10 leads we brought becoming a repeated customer.

We decided that the best strategy would be relaunching reengagement in a half of the year, while leaving the SDR on handling inbound inquiries that were still generated throughout the outreach momentum and traffic increase.

Last but least, analyzing website visitors data allowed us to find a few extra sub-verticals to target and prioritize a few already existing leads due to them extensively interacting with the website.

Addressing Challenges:

Thankfully, our setup always allows for flexibility and we can onboard/offboard team members on per needed basis. So, we were able to push for more and assign a few extra team members during the first few months of the project to ensure we deliver and bring a few first big names to the table. Our team had to remain agile, bringing new professionals to take care of cold calling, inbound marketing or SMS campaigns when needed to boost conversions. Besides obviously addressing most of the main challenges - this allowed us to remain cost-effective and save our clients thousands of dollars.

Adjusting to the audience's workflow and best-resonating pitch allowed us to boost conversions, we personalized and used manual outreach for our top-fit leads. Hence ensuring a balance between automation and human touch when it comes to outreach.

Moreover, as for the lead research bottleneck - while obviously addressed by acquiring extra software and assigning extra personnel at no extra cost for the client; it was also addressed by coming up with irregular campaigns, for instance a more generic campaign targeted and general company mailboxes worked counter-intuitively well.

Eventually, we decided to part our ways, initiating the process from our end as we exhausted all possible avenues for immediate ROI generation and taught our clients how to handle the ongoing setup without our direct involvement.