Client Profile
The client is a leading garage door components manufacturer targeting original equipment manufacturers, and distribution, reseller, and installer sales channels.
Business Situation
In early 2024, the client sought to accelerate its growth and improve its lead generation and pipeline management processes. While the company’s sales team was proficient within its current market segments, it was looking to break into a new segment – equipment wholesale distributors and dealers, which requires not only learning a new segment but also being able to make quick adjustments to the process.
The current sales team focused predominantly on the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) key account management and sales support activities within the current customer base. This focus left little time and dedicated capacity to focus on sustainable new account development and hunting activities.
Leadership believed there was a need for customer diversification to identify smaller to medium sized garage door hardware opportunities specifically within the wholesale distributor and dealer networks.
Targeted Prospects
Athena assisted the hardware manufacturer in identifying and targeting new opportunities within the new market segment, as well as garage door OEMs and distribution, reseller, and installer sales channels. The client’s sales team had been generating prospect lists based on their knowledge of the region, their participation in industry events, and their monitoring of the industry, and sometimes received leads from other suppliers. So in addition to lacking dedicated capacity, creating targeted lists for a new segment that met specific qualification criteria was beyond its skill set.
Athena’s research team identified companies that met specific criteria for size, spending potential, and a need for custom hardware as defined by the client as its ideal customer. The team also determined the key decision-makers and influencers and obtained their contact information. As Athena’s team learned more about the market, they adjusted the qualification requirements for prospects to ensure that the right type of opportunities would be available. This focused prospecting significantly increased efficiency by minimizing the time spent on unsuitable companies.
The team was reaching contacts on the phone at a rate far exceeding what they typically encounter for metal component manufacturers and fabricators, requiring new companies and contacts to be added to the list monthly.
Pipeline Management
Like many manufacturers, the client maintained its prospect lists on a spreadsheet. Athena introduced Pipedrive CRM to optimize pipeline management, which offered visibility and metrics on prospect movement and the number of touches for conversion. The CRM also stored prospect email exchanges and call recordings of Athena’s initial introductions, aiding the manufacturer’s sales team in understanding the interactions.
Increasing Market Awareness
Before working with Athena, the manufacturer’s website struggled with limited visibility, receiving minimal impressions and a few submissions of primarily poor quality each month. Another Website developer had recently created it, but it was not SEO optimized. Athena implemented a comprehensive SEO strategy, which included consistent monthly blogs, to improve its online presence and drive relevant traffic. Athena’s team followed up with inbound submissions to help move them to conversion. As a result, impressions grew by approximately 571%, significantly expanding reach. Keywords ranking within Google’s top 5 positions increased by 60%, while those within the top 10 positions (first page) saw an impressive 212% increase, contributing to a steady upward trend in organic traffic. Most notably, monthly submissions exceeded initial projections by 658%, with qualified submissions surpassing expectations by 900%, demonstrating the effectiveness of Athena’s targeted content and optimization efforts.
The Results
Beating Projections and Delivering Value
Athena projected that in the first year, they would generate 35 leads from inbound and outbound channels—a lead is a prospect who meets the target market profile and is interested in scheduling a meeting. However, they beat that projection by more than 48 percent. These meetings resulted in two closures valued at over $400,000 and two others nearing closure valued at about $1.25 million. Through lead generation for custom hardware manufacturers, Athena exceeded all projected goals.