Green Mobility Startup – Business Case: Implementing the business development plan and testing its offer on the market

Customer context: The client is a Lille startup marketing green mobility products (scooter and electric bike).

The Lille startup approached us to implement its business development plan in a simple, fast and efficient way.

The manager called us on a Wednesday morning ?Hello, I got your contact by XXX, I was told that you can accompany us to implement our business development plan. I would like to launch a prospecting campaign very quickly. Can we meet tomorrow to talk about it??

At this stage of its development, the company had produced an initial business development plan based on market assumptions. 

The client team had also just released its first product, ?the electric scooter?.

At our disposal: 

*1 month flat;

*A business development plan;

*A commercial resource.

Let's go for the market discovery!

OBJECTIVES of the support

• Evaluate the business development plan in order to update it;

• Find the first customers;

• Collect as many lessons as possible to prepare for commercial acceleration.

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PROSPECTING STRATEGY for this startup

1-Connection with the client team and understanding of the challenges of their startup

As described in the context section, our client insisted on the importance of responsiveness in order to launch a campaign just before the summer holidays and take advantage of one of the last moments of the year to sign new clients. .

We physically visited the client within 48 hours, in order to get to know him, understand his needs and present our know-how.

Following this first meeting, which is very important for the overall collaboration:

- We have connected to our client. We understood his vision, where he was in his roadmap and his current needs.

-We have drawn up a list of recommendations for the client to implement before prospecting in order to put the odds on our side.

-We have established a projected prospecting plan: Volume of emailing files by type of prospect, prospecting and commercial follow-up roadmap, workshops, etc. 

At this stage – and after some negotiations? – the client decides to commit to a first AKIDEL ?All-in-one? campaign.

2-Implementation of prerequisites and optimization of the digital base

During our discovery phase of the startup, we established various recommendations to be implemented by our client in order to optimize the returns of the prospecting campaign as much as possible.

The optimization recommendations made for the startup concerned:

*Website : 

-> Highlight the mission, the added value vis-à-vis the targets as well as the offers available;

-> Set up simple, precise and highly visible calls to action: color change, integration of new buttons?

*Setting up a Google My Business page – Google Maps

-> It is very important to have a very good ranking on Google. The reflex of a prospect X who receives an email from a person Y whom he does not know is to enter on Google the name of the issuer or that of the company contacting him. It is therefore absolutely necessary to be present and to inspire confidence.

-> After setting up the Google My Business page, it had to be branded so that it reflected the positioning and image of the company. 

-> The last step is to solicit its customers to add a review on it to set up the social proof which helps to establish trust with the market.

Following this, we have established a list of mandatory/recommended prerequisites to be put in place for the smooth running of the prospecting:

-> Setting up a prospecting domain name for the startup;

-> Redirection of the prospecting domain name to the official domain name of the client's website;

-> Creation of several prospecting emails on the French hosting provider OVH;

-> Warm up prospecting messaging;

-> Installation of tracking on the customer's website in order to record the detailed route of prospecting on the website following the emailing;

-> Setting up the foil base made up of our client's customers and competitors, so as not to contact them.

At this stage, everything is technically ready to prospect in good conditions, which encourage performance without damaging the customer's digital reputation.

We now move on to the marketing and commercial aspect of the campaign.

3- Writing the arguments and formalizing the texts to be used

Our clients often tell us: ?But you don't know our product or our industry, how are you going to write our campaign??

To which we respond that one of the main aspects of our work consists in asking the right questions to the right people in order to connect with the industry in question and to know how to find the right arguments to create a bond of trust between our client and its target.

Of course, while validating each point with our client so that the elements of language are consistent and that the writings produced conform to the values and personality of our interlocutor and his company.

In summary, this step is done in three steps:

1st time: connection with the client team and collection of information: ideally, we go directly to the client in order to really create the link to understand his vision, his context, his experience and his personality.

2nd time: our editors are responsible for transforming the raw material collected in step one into one or more email bodies (or LinkedIn messages) depending on the strategy defined with the client and the number of scenarios to be programmed as part of the campaign.

3rd time: validation and co-finalization of all documents with the client team. 

As soon as all the elements are validated by all the parties, the writings move on to the final phase: the correction.

4-Dissemination and first results

For this first campaign, we opted for mass mailing in order to quickly disseminate all prospecting scenarios, understand interactions with target prospects and then quickly iterate on winning scenarios that have shown positive results. (adequacy: target / email body / prospecting channel).

The strategy consisted of targeting 4 different targets and understanding which was the most receptive to our client's arguments.

From the first hours, the returns began to flow (travel on the website, prospect responses (positive/negative), clicks on specific URLs?).

This led us to the commercial activation and prospect follow-up phase.

5-The commercial activation phase 1 – Process and organization

This phase consists of putting in place three essential building blocks for efficient prospect follow-up:

a-Activation rules 

The first essential point to frame is the logic of the scoring of the prospect file to be configured according to the interactions of the prospect with the outbound actions.

Then, we will talk about activation frequency: how often should I contact this prospect and what delay should be established between the different activation actions?

Finally, we will set up a list of statuses to assign to the prospect according to his activation state in order to be able to identify himself in time and to carry out specific actions accordingly.

b-The distribution of roles 

Who does what by when? 

In general, we advise our customers to distribute the activation roles in this way:

Role 1: Objective -> Make the appointment;

Role 2: Objective -> Qualify the appointment and transform it into a client.

Depending on the customer context, the customer can assign both roles to the same person or to two different people.

Our client has therefore decided to mobilize two people from his team: Alternant growth and marketing for making appointments / Sales manager for the qualification and transformation of the appointment.

c-The channels and tools to use

Here, we will talk about CRM and commercial activation channels.

Regarding CRM, it is a purely subjective choice for each company. The choice will depend on the company's vision of its long-term customer and prospect management, the number of people interacting with the sales pipeline as well as ?technical and IT education? teams.

In the case of our client (startup) who is launching his market, we advised him not to take a CRM right away, since we could centralize all the results on the AKIDEL platform with a simple and precise follow-up, while having the possibility of exporting its files in .csv at any time.

Our primary objective being to generate around ten prospects/customers, we do not want to put our energy into other subjects right from the start.

In other client cases, we may make a recommendation quite the opposite of this. Each client is unique, in terms of their context and their vision, which should encourage us to think pragmatically and to make decisions in line with this.

The commercial activation channels that we recommend:

1-Phone

2-Email

3-LinkedIn

Depending on the interaction of the prospect, one or more of his channels will be intelligently mobilized over the short and medium term in order to ?nurture? the prospect and transform it into a concrete qualified interaction.

*Nurturer = A new word coined by the American marketing and sales industry to mean nurture the prospect and keep in touch intelligently over time.

6-The commercial activation phase 2 – Training and phoning

During the commercial activation phase (described above), we realized with our client that his commercial resource responsible for the activation of the prospect had some difficulties on the telephone channel.

No problem, we have mobilized our specialist partner on the subject ?Phone expert business?

After training for a few days on the subject and concrete work with him on the prospects resulting from the campaign, the client team could resume the rest of its activation with efficiency.

7-Analysis, restitution and definition of the acceleration plan

As with every campaign we run, the analysis and feedback phase is a very important step since from there, we can start a new iteration by exploiting all the lessons learned from the previous iteration.

The analysis is therefore carried out in three stages: 

a-Analysis of the commercial component

The goal is to understand the number and quality of positive interactions with targeted prospects.

How many positive answers? How many appointments made? How many journeys on the website and the duration of each journey? What is the total number of impressions?

We therefore know at this stage the level of interest and conversion of the campaign. We will consolidate this thanks to the second part.

b-Analysis of statistics and data

In this part, the objective is to analyze all the key indicators of the campaign: opening rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, rebound rate, detailed route on the website.

Each metric will give us important information on what has been done and what should be done.

For example, if our click rate is very high, we have journeys on the website, but we do not have a lot of concrete feedback from prospects, this can lead us to the following hypotheses: 

-Confidence is not strong enough to take action -> Marketing and product fit

-The purchase and interaction journey is not smooth -> Website

-The call to action is not highlighted and sufficiently argued -> CTA and conversion arguments in the body of the email and the website

c-Recommendations and follow-up 

From the business analysis and statistics, we made our client a list of recommendations for the next iteration, whether we do it together or not, by the way? 

1-What worked – to keep 

2-What did not work – to stop: 

3-Beginning of the action plan for the next campaign/iteration: 

In the case of our client, we advised him to focus on a single niche, the most commercially promising (companies with more than 100 employees – HR and CSR).

We also recorded the winning prospecting scenarios, that is to say, the email bodies that achieved the most performance in order to resume them directly for the next campaigns with a few minor adaptations.

And finally, we drew up a list of additional recommendations on the client?s digital component in order to improve overall performance: Redesign the website to move from a site with a single page to a multi-page site / Collect more social proof on the Google My Business card / Initiate communication on LinkedIn in order to bring legitimacy to the subject in question.

8-Joint action with a partner in the same sector and amplification of results

Following this first successful campaign, our client decided to take time to implement the lessons and recommendations of this first campaign.

3 months later, he contacted us again to launch 4 new campaigns starting from the recommendations and action plan section of the first campaign.

Race results: 

1,417 qualified prospects learned about our client's brand;

72 clickers and journeys on the startup's client website;

50 qualified direct responders.

PERFORMANCES & Results with this startup

+Initiation of the first qualified appointments;

+Update of the commercial development plan thanks to the market data collected;

+Sending of the first commercial proposals and signature of the first customers.

Final customer testimonial

CEO & founder of the startup

?In the space of 30 days, we were able to meet our market, update our business development plan following the first feedback from prospects, train our sales team, recruit new marketing resources and then launch 4 new marketing campaigns. prospecting focused on promising segments in the same year. 
This is exactly what our startup needed to meet our market quickly, find our target and then accelerate.  ?

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AKIDEL | B2B digital agency Lille – France

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