Acquiring sales leads with billion dollar businesses

“ Truly helped us to speed up our experimentations while validating a new business globally. Their expertise in the growth hacking process helped us to make the most out of digital channels, enabling us to validate the business model of our new innovative service at scale. “

Fabien Fedy, Strategic designer, KONE innovation

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Growth objective

KONE has developed their service for construction site logistics for a long time. They had already identified several potential avenues where technology could help fix some of the biggest problems construction sites face. Especially in highrise construction projects, the delivery bottlenecks focus often around the use of lifts. Testing the global potential for a SaaS platform focused on monitoring and analyzing construction site logistics was the goal we set together.

The success metric was the volume and quality of sales leads. KONE wanted to see if they could attract quality sales leads through scalable tactics. The timeline was very tight – the KONE team needed to report on their learnings in just 3 months time. Everything needed to be done in a very lean way.

How we got there

There was one catch though – instead of a fully running SaaS platform, KONE only had some of its features ready, and they were being used by pilot projects around the world. Using the KONE brand also wasn’t an option, because the team wanted to test the potential for a spinoff brand, so we quickly set out to create a lean look and feel that would help us to do marketing. Hello Optirise!

Based on all the intel we had about the potential customers, we created several different communication concepts. At the end we settled on the 3 most interesting ones.

The tactics we decided to use was LinkedIn marketing and a simple landing page, coupled with some Linkedin-focused SDR sales outreach. For each of the 3 communication concepts, we created a simple marketing and sales funnel and used Linkedin’s rich targeting options to zero in on our narrow audience.

Every week we executed a growth sprint and analyzed the results together with the Kone team. We quickly found that even though we were able to generate traffic to the landing pages, the marketing funnel alone wasn’t enough to convince a C-level construction executive to convert proactively.

With this learning, we decided to focus our time on iterating developing the SDR sales outreach to support the marketing we were doing – suddenly we started seeing the first lead conversions! After we analyzed the first leads, we quickly realized they were actually really good quality. They represented some of the largest global construction companies in the world – just the kind of leads that we wanted to reach.

As the leads progressed through the first demo call with the KONE team, we were ecstatic – the sales outreach was definitely working and the meetings went very well. At the end of the 3 month sprint we had opened the door to 7 massive construction companies running businesses worth over 7% of the global construction market. The most potential leads were focused particularly on the European market, in particular Germany, France and the UK, which gave KONE the intel needed to focus their marketing and sales efforts in the future.

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