ecommbi delivers fully integrated ‘best of breed’ omnichannel eCommerce and Online solutions, leveraging decades of experience with customer-centric user journeys. Their enterprise scale platforms provide the all-important single customer, single product and single inventory views, with a focus on middleware and data management.

Lead generation blues

Because of the size and highly technical nature of their projects, ecommbi traditionally has a long sales cycle – it can take years to go from initial engagement to delivery. However, their adoption of emerging technologies has generated a new market and a shorter sales cycle. “We are now taking on more mid-tier projects,” says Glen Moody, ecommbi General Manager. “The projects are smaller but faster, so we need to keep our sales pipeline well populated.”

Glen says the business considered and abandoned several potential sales models, including hiring salespeople to focus on pipeline building. “The people we found who had strong lead generation skills didn’t have the grasp of technology we needed. And the ones with great technical sales skills didn’t have the cold calling experience or initial contact skills. It was a real issue for us.”

Here’s Hot Leads!

To fill the gap in their lead generation process, Glen engaged Hot Leads. “We had worked with them before, and knew they had the skills and experience to set up and manage campaigns, segment and mine the data, and critically, have robust conversations with the targets that we had identified as hot prospects.”

“We had 170 specific businesses that we wanted to target with two solutions using a technical sales approach. After going through our marketing strategy and collateral with Hot Leads’ consultant, she quickly understood what we wanted to achieve. So when we kicked off the initial programme, we got good results from the outset. And as our solutions are reasonably technical, every conversation with us or one of our prospects enabled her to refine her approach further and generate even more leads.

“Our Hot Leads’ consultant now probably knows more about sales in our business than 90% of the people who work here, which is a powerful thing. Using Hot Leads has been extremely cost effective because of the high value of each sale. Our ROI is much better than if we’d had to find, hire, and train an in-house lead generation resource.”

Smooth operator

ecommbi has two business units so frequently runs multiple and simultaneous campaigns, often with sub-campaigns inside of longer-term ones.

“There is some complexity in what we do, and we often pivot from one campaign to another,” says Glen, “but Hot Leads are very responsive, and manage our requirements smoothly. For one campaign, we only wanted to reach six senior IT executives at some of New Zealand’s largest enterprises. Our Hot Leads’ consultant contacted and talked to all of them on the same day – so a 100% success rate.

“The other thing we appreciate is the ability to turn our lead generation activities on and off at any time. Using Hot Leads’ services gives us real flexibility in being able to control our sales. We are careful never to over-commit our ability to deliver, as that can damage our reputation.”

Completing the sales cycle

“Using Hot Leads has completed the last piece of our sales process puzzle,” says Glen. “We struggled for eight years to get it right, and their lead generation services have ticked all the boxes. Hot Leads perform consistently and effectively and have become an ongoing part of our business strategy.”