The Client
Industry: Cybersecurity
Company Size: 1600 employees
Founded by mathematicians and cyber defense experts, this InsideUp client is at the forefront of threat detection and autonomous response innovation, for which it has won two prestigious awards.
With a ground-breaking approach to cyber-threats that leverages AI and ML technology, the firm’s security suite identifies and disrupts threats before they have a chance to surface.
Although largely unrecognized beyond a select clientele, it is the secret weapon that critical national infrastructures and organizations rely on for protection against novel attacks.
The Challenge: Identifying Quality Opportunities in a New Market
Being a secret weapon has its drawbacks. Despite the firm’s established presence in the global market, it needed to overcome the challenges of targeting a new demographic and quickly get itself on the radar of US-based enterprises.
The company needed to elevate conversations beyond techno-babble and speak in terms of business results — how they reduce the risk from the ransomware attacks that have been plaguing sectors like the local government, higher education, and healthcare.
Of course, COVID-19 limited any opportunity for in-person discussions with decision-makers. With conventions and trade shows off the table, the company was struggling to overcome low conversion rates based on mediocre interest produced by mega-scale, topic-based digital marketing services and other forms of paid media.
Consequently, their sales team had to deal with low-likelihood contacts that consumed valuable time and resources but yielded nothing.
InsideUp — Efficient Growth with Every Interaction
The cyber-security company engaged demand generation specialists InsideUp to help them differentiate themselves in the market and connect with high-yield prospects.
The team at InsideUp focused on two main issues their client needed to address; 1) how to enter the lucrative US market and 2) how to overcome poor conversion performance by generating quality leads in addition to creating market awareness.
Conquering a New Demographic — Creating Awareness in the US
To identify targets in the company’s new market, InsideUp leveraged several processes that power their proprietary marketing automation platform: unique data sources, data profiling, predictive analytics, and data scoring.
Using its internal cadence system, InsideUp showcased the firm’s innovation and generated interest by distributing strategic assets like whitepapers, eBooks, videos, and other branded content across various channels (including personalized email, social media, and phone conversations).
In addition to its automated processes, InsideUp stacked the deck using domain-specific expertise and human touchpoints. This combination of automated processes and human intervention is what allows InsideUp to scale and generate leads at volume while maintaining lead quality.
Improving Conversion Rates by Ensuring Authentic Intent
For InsideUp, identifying prospects is only a starting point. Using a comprehensive verification process, they also identified which of the target prospects was currently in-market and most likely to purchase a cybersecurity solution. From that point on, the vendor’s sales teams would only spend time and energy on high-value efforts.
But, how would InsideUp ensure that every prospect met the client’s campaign requirements? The key is not only in their proprietary intent monitoring and custom data scorecards, but also in the human element that makes all the difference in the outcome of their automated data collection, profiling, and analysis efforts.
For this cybersecurity vendor — as with all of its clients — InsideUp employed highly-experienced, US-based solution consultants and trained them well. The InsideUp online training platform provided each consultant with the expertise to effectively engage with and properly qualify prospects for the complex cyber-security platform.
Additionally, before providing the client with any lead, InsideUp took the time to qualify each prospect’s interest by reviewing the last recorded phone conversation with the prospect.
A Measurable Success
In addition to raising awareness and putting the company on the cyber-security map in the US, InsideUp was able to supply the cybersecurity vendor’s sales teams with a 20% conversion rate on their leads to sales opportunities. The company was finally engaging with enough qualified stakeholders to drive new revenue.
Compared to its earlier lead and revenue generation efforts, the cyber-security vendor is finally seeing a return on its marketing investment — the sales pipeline attributed to InsideUp has resulted in a multiplier of over 10 times the company’s marketing line item spend.
