Branding, design, development, and promotional services company sees 200% ROI with Sapper’s B2B Lead Generation

Learn how marketer Square360 generated 200% ROI while working with Sapper Consulting. Because Sapper consistently provided quality leads that had both the need and budget, Square360 signed an additional two clients within their first year of working with Sapper.

The Challenge?

Marketer Square360 helps clients like Yale University – School of Management, Hubb.me, NJ211 Partnership and Konica Minolta Healthcare Americas compete in today’s digital-first economy with branding, design, development and promotional services.

Before Sapper, they signed zero new clients in over 3+ years while making a sizable investment in alternative lead generation partners. Square360 was not achieving ROI on their in-house sales staff and their team was kept busy with unvetted leads.

Square360’s founders knew they’d made the right lead generation decision when they signed their first new client in three long years just three months after committing to Sapper Consulting. By the end of Square360’s first year with Sapper, Square360 had signed an additional two clients because Sapper consistently booked meetings with prospects that had the need and the budget.

“That constant communication and willingness to switch gears, make changes and fine-tune our targeting, timing and content gave us results, which justified a longer-term commitment to Sapper”

Nancy Smullen, CEO

Why Sapper?

Sapper’s expertise and track record were crucial but Square360 needed something even more important from them – the opportunity to see if they delivered on their promises. Square360’s founders were justifiably skeptical about lead generation after a profoundly negative experience with a costly, multi-year contract that hadn’t produced even one quality meeting, let alone a new client. Fortunately for Square360, Sapper knows their B2B lead generation process works and the initial short-term contract let Square360 experience the results for themselves. Sapper’s proven process soon delivered meetings with qualified leads, resulting in new business for Square360.

When Sapper asked what Square360’s “ideal/dream” client looked like, Square360 got specific. The founders knew small- to mid-size companies that were ready to break out nationally were the best fit. At this stage in their business evolution, most of the prospects’ companies would have the budget, but few, if any, would have the in-house resources they needed to take their marketing to the next level. Of course, Sapper had to connect with the right people at the right companies; but to take it from that initial connection to an actual meeting, they also had to catch and keep prospects’ interest. Because Sapper understood Square360’s target markets, they were able to accurately represent their sectors and stories through content.

“We had prospects that didn’t need our services write back just to tell us it was the best lead generation they’d ever seen – they definitely appreciated different and interesting.”

Nancy Smullen, CEO

200% ROI

Square360’s virtual meetings with Sapper prospects always go well because they’ve been carefully qualified and Square360 has been thoroughly prepared. Once the meeting has been confirmed, Square360’s Sapper account manager makes sure the founders see the entire email thread between Sapper and the prospect. The founders know what’s been said, what to expect and where to focus when talking to the decision-makers.

The founders now look forward to regular meetings with decision-makers whose companies are ready to take their marketing to the next level. And best of all, Nancy, Brian and George are now working with new, interesting clients that can grow with them.

Sapper delivered a 200% return on our investment in our first year together because they know quality leads always trump volume and a systematic process produces measurable results. Thanks to Sapper, we’re getting a lot more princes and kissing far fewer frogs.”

Nancy Smullen, CEO

Video Transcript

I started working with Sapper about eight months ago and there’s a lot of things I like about it.

First of all, it’s a turnkey solution when you’re a growing business like ours. Your biggest consideration is time, and often prospecting is the thing that you always mean to spend more time on and never quite are able to.

I really appreciated that working with Sapper allows us to offload the heavy lifting of that, where appointments just appear magically on your calendar and you’re able to focus on other

business elements and then tack in at the time when you can speak directly to those prospects and allow Sapper to do all the work upstream.

It takes a little bit of time, the partnership with Sapper, in developing your approach to market and how these email sequences are going to work takes a little bit of time, but once you find the attraction you know there’s really pretty quickly a regular flow of deals or at least prospective clients every week.

For us, that’s landed a couple of medium and a couple of large deals as well that are clients to this day, months later, and it manifests as recurring revenue.

Everybody in the marketing space can understand sort of project work versus ongoing engagements, and Sapper has been a really good resource for us to drive some of those ongoing engagements that help us grow.

One of the problems that we’ve had with other providers in the past, marketing providers of one sort or another, is they either can’t deliver, or they can deliver on a lot of quantity, but not a lot of quality. Sapper seems to do a very good job of dialing in both hitting our goals for quantity but making sure that they’re spending enough time in the back and forth with these prospects that the quality is there. People are coming to these calls knowing that we’re having a discussion about marketing, it’s framed correctly, so I’ve been really happy with the intersection of quality and quantity as far as leads go.

A real key in email marketing is pattern interrupts, finding ways to get attention in an otherwise very noisy channel. Our account manager brings both a lot of originality in her thinking and innovation I’d say, as far as how to do email sequences in a way that cuts through that noise. Like every business owner, we get pitched marketing services of one sort or another a lot. We often joke it can be hard to market marketing services since that’s what we do.

Sapper is also a client. They used their own sequences, their own approach, to get the meeting with me. From there, it was a description of how their process is different that got us to take a shot at it. I think our Sapper team was committed to taking more than one approach, that understanding that shifts in market dynamics mean that the same messaging doesn’t always resonate and that you have to speak to people’s pain and people’s problems if you want them to pay attention. This is part of that innovative iteration. They are constantly trying new things bringing new ideas, until we were able to find the combination of messaging and value propositions that resonated enough to pique interest, again, in a very noisy channel of email.

I thought that their approach showed real potential because it wasn’t the same old marketing emails that you can spot a mile away.

It seemed more personal; it seemed to emphasize a classic sales concept, which is creating a buying atmosphere if a prospect feels it’s okay to say no. So I felt that the conversational tone of the email sequences and the directness of it, doesn’t waste anybody’s time and cuts right to “hey is this the right time? Should we have a discussion?” that yielded more responses, more opens, basically all the KPIs we would care about, and I think that was material to success in initially finding what our formula was.

Branding, design, development, and promotional services company sees 200% ROI with Sapper’s B2B Lead Generation

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