LGE, Panasonic, ADT, Google, AMD, Dell, ASUS, Phillips, Microsoft, Lenovo, Therabody, Lutron, AT&T, Amazon, Nvidia.

What do all of these companies have in common? Answer: they all positively responded to the outbound efforts run during a collaboration between T-ROC and The Kiln.

T-ROC is a 9,000 person revenue optimization business that offer a variety of services ranging all the way from Mystery Shopping to IT solutions. They’ve worked with most of the bigger names in the industry, such as Walmart, Samsung, Cricket and more.

Before T-ROC started working with The Kiln, they were using what Director of Marketing Cynthia Barbarito called a “shotgun approach”.

“We were pretty much blasting messaging out to everybody we could”, she stated. “We started realizing that we didn’t know who our target was, or how to reach out to them in an effective way.”

This led them down the path of exploring possible alternatives to the current outreach approach they had been using before. The company had been allocating legions of sales reps to different parts of the business, without a centralized strategy in their top of funnel.

“I was like, we need to start running an awareness campaign here, just to get people knowing who T-ROC is and what they offer.”

When they began their engagement with The Kiln, their main focus was on a specific offering- their Best Buy in-store revenue optimization. There was a 300-company list of businesses operating in Best Buy, and the goal was to get as many of them to bite on their high-ticket offer as they could.

Here were the steps we took to getting them positive responses from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, and more:

1. Email Deliverability

T-ROC’s current email infrastructure was preventing the team from sending a meaningful amount of delivered emails to their clients. With 300 companies in the initial TAM of the campaign, it was absolutely imperative to get emails set up correctly.

The first thing necessary to tackle was getting new accounts set up, which Gurmohit Ghuman, The Kiln’s deliverability expert, assisted with. This immediately increased open rates to around 50-60%, which allowed for campaigns that would actually send.

2. High-level campaign strategy

The general idea of an nurture campaign is to act essentially as an ad network to a company’s target audience. However, in T-ROC’s case, we decided to act as a sort of hybrid. That is, let the prospect be aware that our intent was to sell our services to them down the line, but make the friction to getting on a call much lower.

To do this, we structured the campaign to say, “hey, here are our services, we know you’re related to this decision in the company, we’re not trying to sell you anything immediately but we’re super interested in getting to know you and your company’s problems”.

While this was disguised as an awareness/nurture campaign, the results were far from it- they were high intent leads interested in T-ROC’s services.

3. Outbound automation for relevance

In order to effectively connect with prospects in a hybrid campaign like this, we needed to automate personalization that didn’t seem disingenuous or “fake”.

How did we do this? With an intent signal waterfall that searched for a relevant fact about the prospect to connect with them about.

We searched for the following things:

• Did the prospect recently post about something interesting and notable?

• Was the prospect recently hired or promoted?

• Has the company growth 5% YoY?

• Is there notable news worth mentioning?

Depending on which of these questions the prospect could answer “yes” to, we wrote a custom intro line addressing the trigger. For the news example, we sent:

“Hope all has been well! Have been following {{companyName}}’s progress closely and recently saw its news on {{news}}”

We sent a few other light personalizations as well, but mostly focused on making the copy flow smoothly and sound natural.

4. Taking it Multi-Channel

When we started our first campaign, we saw a few positive responses stream in from larger companies like LG and Asus, but not enough for it to be considered a big win. This is when we decided to test LinkedIn outreach concurrently with the existing email campaigns.

We edited our email copy to be more LinkedIn-friendly, connected the campaign to HeyReach, and after a few days of running it, we knew we had a winner. Positive responses were rolling in at 3-4x the rate of the email campaign, and we were getting contacted from executives at some of the largest companies in the world, directly interested in hearing more about T-ROC’s offerings in Best Buy.

5. Scaling

Once we had copy we were confident in scaling, we did just that. We increased email volume, added more LinkedIn accounts to scale outreach there, and started iterating on the copy for different use cases, like smaller deal sizes and higher intent campaigns such as website visitors.

Overall, this project emphasized testing different channels, creating nurture-based personalizations that were actually relevant, and connecting with prospects in a way that varied from the norm to stand out.