DMT Business Development Helps Recruiting Firm Build Outbound Funnel from the Ground Up

LeFort Talent Group is a recruiting firm with over 20 years of experience, specializing in animation, video games, VFX, marketing, and digital entertainment. LFTG places high-level talent in roles like VFX Supervisor, Head of Production, and Lead Animator for the top-tier studios and creative companies across Canada, the US, and Europe.

Lefort Talent Group wanted to bring in new recruiting projects for his business by scaling biz dev with an external sales team. So, DMT Business Development joined the effort and helped build the outbound channel from the ground up, focusing primarily on email and LinkedIn outreach. The project was focused on bringing in new clients from the digital entertainment, animation studios, and game development industries.

LeFort Talent Group faced a couple of challenges with their business development efforts:

• Mid-Large bizs outreach. The target audience for LFTG is mid-to-large media and entertainment production companies which makes it quite a challenge to get recipients attention.
• Creative recruitment is a crowded space. LFTG needed a scalable solution to break through the noise and grab attention with a relevant business offering. That meant researching prospects’ pain points, understanding their context, and finding personalization triggers to make outreach more effective.
• Each vertical - be it animation, gaming, or VFX - has different pain points and hiring cycles. Outreach couldn’t be one-size-fits-all; it had to speak the language of the role and industry.
• As a boutique firm, LeFort didn’t have the in-house sales team to run consistent, multi-channel outbound campaigns at scale.

The project began with evaluating the market, Ideal Customer Profile, and developing the right strategies for the outreach to kick off. Started with the role and industry segmentation - eventually created personalized challenge-oriented campaigns for each role we were after.

Our team also needed to implement a multi-level system for filtering out irrelevant lead research data and focusing on the right personalization points and alerts.

After that, we began generating the data needed for outreach, ensuring a high level of alignment with LeFort’s Ideal Customer Profile. By approaching the market from multiple angles, our approach allowed us to identify people in need of LeFort’s exact services.

Once the research was in place, our team focused on generating around 2,000 prospects a month. That database was then processed with campaigns through email and LinkedIn, structured in a single sequence where email was the primary channel, and LinkedIn served as the follow-up.

The email outreach was continuously refined, involving A/B testing for the best subject lines, email copy, and LinkedIn messages. We also monitored how specific industries, like filmmaking, gaming, and animation, responded to our messages to identify the best-performing ones. We started with a 3% response rate on average, gradually increasing it to 9% through the course of A/B tests.

The LinkedIn channel evolved into a separate lead generation funnel, serving both as an active lead channel and a passive one. We used it to produce content and build the network. We started generating around three posts a week, boosting their presence by sharing new content, expanding their network through direct outreach, and improving LinkedIn Profile SSI score.

Over the course of one quarter, LeFort Talent Group's outbound funnel was established, leading to relevant conversations and, eventually, new clients.

The team managed to build a database of 6000+ relevant industry professionals in film making, gaming, and digital media per quarter.

Our efforts delivered around 18-25 appointments per quarter, allowing LeFort Talent Group to extend their services to giants like New Worlds Interactive, Squeeze and many others.

On the LinkedIn side, by growing the client’s already large (~10,000 connections) network, we successfully started making relevant connections, which helped us book new sales meetings.

• Generated database of 6000+ relevant prospects per quarter;
• Set around 18-25 appointments per quarter;
• Increased lead-to-deal conversion by 23%;