Success Story: MOD-PAC Compresses Average Sales Cycles and Increases Sales Throughput With Athena SWC

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Client Profile

MOD-PAC Corporation (NASDAQ:MPAC) is a high value-add manufacturer of on demand print services, providing products and services in two product categories: custom folding cartons and personalized print. MOD-PAC focuses on branded and private label consumer products in the food and food service, healthcare, medical and automotive industries.

Business Situation

Generating new accounts in the highly competitive custom folding carton industry is no small task. MOD-PAC was looking for a process that could repeatedly develop and inject new and sustainable account opportunities into active sales cycles.

They also had a need to research and understand which industry segments would produce the best opportunity and potential profitability for their product and service offerings within the custom folding carton division.

Creating greater market awareness designed to introduce prospects in these market segments to MOD-PAC and to educate them regarding the company’s value-added offering has long been an initiative for MOD-PAC.

"At MOD-PAC, we have worked and continue to work with Athena SWC on several lead generation projects for our business since mid 2010. The Athena team is very disciplined in their approach to complex and longer sales cycle time markets. Their approach is organized with specific goals, along with great reporting and follow up.”
– David Lupp, COO and CFO
"The Athena team executes a highly targeted and measurable process methodology for developing, building and qualifying new prospect relationships. MOD-PAC leveraged Athena’s RAMP marketing process in 2010 to assist with new business development efforts and it has proven to be highly effective in filling our sales pipeline with qualified opportunities. We have a number of active sales cycles which we anticipate closing more business in the near future as result of Athena’s work. MODPAC has experienced good potential with this process methodology and we plan to extend our relationship with Athena in the near future.”
– Daniel Keane, President/CEO

Teaming with Athena

MOD-PAC partnered with Athena SWC, a leading provider of business-to-business (B2B) marketing demand solutions with proven experience in target market profiling, compelling offer development, and marketing value-add solutions. Athena’s processes compress traditional sales cycles and significantly increase sales team productivity.

Athena developed a comprehensive marketing campaign that introduced MOD-PAC’s on-time delivery guarantee offer to select targeted industry segments. The campaign featured their new risk-based offer through educationally-based webcasts as a platform to increase market awareness, build relationships with potential customers, and move qualified opportunities along at an accelerated rate to compress MODPAC’s average sales cycle.

Athena executed their synchronized Relationship Acquisition and Management Process (RAMP) to research and target the most qualified prospects and industry markets for MOD-PAC’s delivery guarantee, generate prospect attendance for these individual educational webcasts, qualify each lead opportunity based upon sales qualification criteria, and move each opportunity along in the request for quote (RFQ) process for MOD-PAC’s sales team.

In addition to scheduling webcasts and RFQ meetings with qualified leads, prospects that were not ready to engage in an educational presentation but expressed significant interest in future contact were entered into Athena’s nurture process. The nurture process provides permission-based touches to key decision-makers and centers of influence. It includes educationally-based materials designed to assist the potential buyers during their evaluation and decision-making process.

The Results

MOD-PAC Corporation Case Study Results

Within five to six months of the campaign’s inception, MOD-PAC solidified a $150,000 annual agreement, with a 10-year average customer lifecycle. The process methodology enabled an average twelve- to eighteen-month sales cycle to be compressed by over 40%. In addition, Athena’s campaign efforts and nurture process resulted in a significant increase of over 40 new prospect opportunities directly injected into MOD-PAC’s sales cycles with multi-million dollar sales pipeline value.