In the competitive world of IT consulting, the ability to efficiently manage and scale outbound sales efforts can make or break a company’s success. IT consulting firms face the challenge of reaching potential clients who often require highly specialized services and solutions. Traditional sales methods, while effective to a certain extent, can be time-consuming, labor-intensive, and prone to human error.
This is where sales automation can play a transformative role. This case study explores how Diplomat sales automation helped a global IT consulting firm with offices in 3 countries and remote developers all over the globe automate its outbound sales process, leading to significant improvements in lead generation, sales productivity, and revenue growth.
The Challenge: Inefficiencies in Outbound Sales
The IT consulting firm in question was a mid-sized company with a strong reputation for providing customized solutions to its clients, particularly in web and non-gaming apps. However, like many businesses in the industry, the firm struggled with its outbound sales efforts. The sales team was responsible for identifying potential clients, reaching out to them, and nurturing leads through the sales pipeline. The team started their funnel with a classic setup of sales development representatives (SDRs) prospecting leads, setting up meetings for account executives (AEs) to jump on calls with and try to close. Especially with this firm, meetings must be qualified heavily, as AE calls frequently need sales engineers in attendance, increasing the cost of each meeting.
This process involved a substantial amount of manual work, including:
- Prospect Identification: Sales representatives spent hours researching potential clients, often using outdated methods like cold calling and manual data entry.
- Lead Nurturing: Following up with prospects was a time-consuming task, with sales reps needing to track each interaction manually and ensure timely follow-ups.
- Data Management: The CRM system was underutilized, with data entry being inconsistent and prone to errors, leading to missed opportunities and inefficiencies in tracking the sales process. Activity reviews show sales staff rarely logged activities, making strategic improvements and sales management even harder.
These challenges resulted in lower productivity, missed opportunities, and ultimately, poor revenue growth. The firm recognized the need for a more efficient approach to outbound sales and decided to explore sales automation as a solution.
The Solution: Growth from Diplomat Sales Automation
The firm selected Diplomat sales automation by Goliath Dynamics Inc., a leading provider of sales automation solutions designed to streamline and optimize outbound sales processes. Diplomat’s platform offered a suite of tools that addressed the firm’s pain points, including:
- Automated Prospecting – Diplomat’s AI-powered prospecting tool automatically identified and qualified potential clients based on predefined and evolving criteria. This eliminated the need for manual research and ensured that the sales team focused on high-potential leads.
- Automated Outreach – Diplomat’s platform included automated outbound emails that automatically personalized email sequences tailored to different segments of prospects. No manual definitions, no list management, no cadence sequencing. Prospects just received timely follow-ups without the need for manual intervention. The system also tracked email engagement, providing insights into which prospects were most likely to convert.
- Lead Scoring and Prioritization – Diplomat’s lead scoring system used machine learning to analyze prospect behavior and engagement levels. This enabled the sales team to prioritize leads based on their likelihood of converting, allowing reps to focus their efforts on the most promising opportunities.
- Integrations – Diplomat’s platform seamlessly integrated with the firm’s existing pipelines, automating data entry and ensuring that all prospect and lead information was accurately captured and updated in real-time. This integration reduced the risk of errors and allowed sales and executive management to have a complete view of the sales pipeline at all times.
The Results: Transforming Outbound Sales
The implementation of Diplomat sales automation had a profound impact on the IT consulting firm’s outbound sales efforts. Within the first week, they already saw new leads. Within a few months of adopting the platform, the firm saw significant improvements in several key areas of the sales funnel:
- Increased Lead Generation – Automated prospecting led to a substantial increase in the number of qualified leads entering the sales pipeline. Where AEs once spent a fair bit of time prospecting their own deals, their calendars are now consistently full with leads.
- Qualification in Writing – One key responsibility of an SDR is to qualify the prospect. Sometimes people cut corners, and SDRs set meetings for leads who aren’t yet qualified. This allows the SDR to inflate their meeting count, while pushing the qualification responsibility onto the AE, often lowering the meeting attendance rates. Diplomat gets lead qualification in writing.
- Improved Meeting Attendance – The industry benchmark for an SDR in B2B software is to set 15 meetings with qualified prospects per month, with an average of 12 leads successfully attending. Prior to Diplomat, this firm did not even know their SDRs’ rates of meetings set and meetings actually held by AEs. The firm did not yet even know they had some SDRs sandbagging the process, passing unqualified leads directly onto the AEs. Their meetings set per month was below industry benchmarks, and attended meetings rate was significantly below industry benchmarks. Diplomat sets more meetings per month than the firm’s entire SDR team was setting, and has now surpassed the 80% attendance rate by prospecting leads with significantly more diligence.
- Improved Sales Productivity – SDRs have had their positions completely automated. This allowed the firm to shift qualified SDRs into AE roles, managing a significantly larger volume of leads without sacrificing the quality of interactions.
- Improved, Unified Collateral – Let’s be honest… no one wants to maintain sales collateral, and even when it gets updated, those updates rarely make it out to all sales reps. For this firm, one common question during the sales cycle is about what technologies they do and do not support. Some of these questions are more suitable for a sales engineer later on in the funnel. But many of these questions can be answered up front, early in the qualification process (e.g. “Do you offer services maintaining apps written in Apache Cordova?”). Diplomat consistently identifies, gathers, and consolidates these questions so the firm can draft model answers, and then Diplomat consistently answers these kinds of questions much earlier in the cycle.
- Shortened Sales Cycle – The combination of automated lead nurturing, lead scoring, timely follow-ups, and more informed responses helped to significantly shorten the sales cycle. Prospects were moved through the pipeline more quickly, resulting in faster deal closures and improved cash flow for the firm.
- Revenue Growth – Ultimately, the improvements in lead generation, sales productivity, and data accuracy translated into tangible revenue growth. The firm has already closed over $250,000 of new business in their first few months of using Diplomat sales automation, a direct result of the automated outbound sales process.
Conclusion: A Success Story in Sales Automation
The case of this IT consulting firm demonstrates the transformative power of sales automation, particularly when applied to outbound sales. By partnering with Goliath Dynamics Inc. for Diplomat sales automation, the firm was able to overcome the inefficiencies that had previously hampered its growth. The results speak for themselves: increased lead generation, improved sales productivity, enhanced data accuracy, a shortened sales cycle, and significant revenue growth.
For B2B companies in the IT consulting space — or any industry where B2B outbound sales play a critical role — investing in sales automation can yield substantial benefits. By automating routine tasks, prioritizing high-value leads, and ensuring accurate data management, sales automation enables companies to focus on what matters most: building strong client relationships and driving business growth. This success story is a testament to the potential of sales automation to revolutionize outbound sales efforts and set the stage for sustained success.
Do you want to experience this kind of growth with sales automation? Apply for Diplomat today.
