Lead Generation in Facility Management: How to sign Fortune 500

This Lead Generation campaign perfectly showcases how the proper TA defining and messaging can attract leads from market leaders and convert companies from Fortune 500 into your hot leads. That’s when we have the limits of 100 max connection invites per week on LinkedIn, and mass outreach isn’t an option.

You can see how establishing connections with the right prospects using specific segmentation and personalization delivers desired results in a much more efficient way than most of the market campaigns out there.

They understand that the companies they work for rely on their equipment and the safety of the place itself. Clients need everything to work correctly to have their sales going on. So we have to do our job fast and efficiently for their clients’ most significant benefit. 

For this campaign, Paragon wanted to attract new potential clients, huge companies with a network of warehouses across the US (10K+ headcount), and companies growing fast. It’s quite a challenge for many to attract prominent players on the market. Especially when these players are from the classic industries (Consumer Goods, Logistics and Supply Chain) where established connections and referrals still solve a lot. Our client wanted to expand his client base with companies from Fortune500, and for this, he needed the help of experts. 

A classic approach to lead generation would be to connect with as many people as possible and hope that some will convert. But with LinkedIn limits, it’s not an option. Besides, this approach brings reputational risk. We had a limited market which we don’t want to burn through but rather establish long-term relationships. So we needed to act and take a new approach.

Our solution was to focus on quality outreach vs. quantity. And we were sure that it was going to work. Wondering why we were so confident? First of all, as data-based marketers, we did research and found that 90% of top decision-makers don’t respond to cold outreach. 

On the other hand, our client already had some work experience with some companies, so it was a no-brainer to start leveraging it.

Our manual approach to prospecting helped a lot in this case. We went beyond LinkedIn filters (titles, headcount, location, etc.), created tiny segments, and hyper-personalized our messages to match the needs of our TA. Still, it’s easier said than done, so let’s check the elements of this campaign below.

Our detailed strategy was to:

Analyze the market signals from our accounts to find context with our audience;

Divide the target audience into segments based on the shared context we found on the previous stage as well as one generated by our client’s activities in the past;

When it came to the communication with prospects, we emphasized the already existing experience of our client with large companies and implemented name dropping tactics during the preparation of the scripts (saying who specifically our client works with to build a rapport and give credibility)

Using the filters and keywords that identify the target audience, we were able to find thousands of prospects on LinkedIn that matched the client’s description of a perfect lead.

In addition to segmenting our TA by titles, industries, companies’ size, we also filtered out those who, in the opinion of our experienced lead generation managers, had the slightest chance of accepting us as friends. We paid attention to profiles that do not show activity on LinkedIn, which most likely do not connect with people outside their network. This would not be possible if it were not for our manual approach to selecting leads and their qualifications.

This has helped us maximize our chances of conversion, which is very important given how few “shots” we have now with the current limits.

So we had the segmented and carefully filtered TA. One more thing to do – to polish the client’s LinkedIn profile to perfection, make it All-Star. We wanted to make it look credible and trustworthy for the people who would check the client’s profile before accepting the invite to connect. We were also working on filling it in with the valuable content that would help create a leader type of persona from our client. It will help to establish authority, showcase expertise, and simply build the brand. Considering that we were targeting such a high-end audience, it was critical to building ground for our successful communication with those prospects.

And it was worth the efforts.

And thanks to the content that we were preparing for our client’s profile and interaction with prospects’ newsfeed, the client’s LinkedIn Social Selling Index (SSI) rank was raised to 62. It’s 3x times higher than the average for the industry and 1.5x more elevated than the network  (Fortune500 network for a second) average. It means that we managed to build the client’s brand and increased his chances for successful sales on LinkedIn.

Once we kicked off the campaign and had a chance to analyze the market, we realized that our target audience is quite busy. So we hypothesized that a straightforward approach would be the best to save prospects’ time. 

To prove this hypothesis, we run the A/B test with our message script. We’ve created two versions of the messaging: 

Conversational/content sharing script 

Straightforward/offering the service right away script

These scripts were personalized for a separate target audience (specific pain points, solutions, etc.). So we could let people know that we know what exactly they need. 

We’ve got more replies and interested leads with the straightforward script, so we continued with this approach. Even more, one of the leads shot us the offer straight in LinkedIn’s inbox. How cool is that? 

Still, there was a challenge we had to overcome. You see, when you meet a person in a coffee shop, let’s say, and you know that you want to work with them in the future, you don’t come over saying, “Hi, buy my service.” You start conversations, asking, “Hi, how are you.” In case you do say – “Buy from me” right away – please, stop:)  

So we knew that we wanted to talk business at the beginning of the conversations, but we didn’t want to sound weird, “salesy,” and spammy. No one likes that. 

Since we started the campaign, we’ve seen an increase in numbers week by week. 

The conversations we were starting engaged the prospects right from the first messages, which means what we were saying and how we were saying was exciting and appealing for our TA. 

You can see how many responses we’ve received to each message at the start of this campaign :

We also managed to talk to the prospects from large companies and even made them the majority of our audience. It’s not easy to cut through the noise when it comes to the people from such corporations. We’re sure you know that. They receive more messages, more emails, just more of everything. It’s their habit to ignore, delete, close without reading or checking what they received.  

Our approach that combines automation and personalization brought these types of leads to our client AND made them the most engaged and interested audience means that the process was correct.

This campaign is an excellent example of how combining high-quality content with the proper TA defining and message approach can bring high-ticket connections from the most significant world companies like Fortune 500 and generate 19 leads within the 1st month of the campaign. 

For the 1st month of the campaign, we achieved a 52% reply rate, connecting the client with 100 qualified prospects (yes, 100 prospects from Fortune 500 companies within the very first month!). 

Our prospects are credible professionals who receive dozens of invites daily – this rate is a huge success.