How do you drive high conversion rates with C-level decision makers?
Could you advise others on how to generate 90 meetings and close deals worth $175k with one single LinkedIn campaign?
Johannes Hoech, CEO of Premonio, shared his B2B strategy for engaging and successfully converting C-level Executives in a webinar with a Dux-Soup audience. Watch the full webinar over on our YouTube channel, or for a summary of the highlights keep reading to find out how Johannes:
- Generates Go-to-Market LinkedIn strategies and monitors campaign success
- Uses a growth modelling tool to forecast revenue generation for clients
- Creates LinkedIn messaging to engage C-level decision makers
- Drives high C-level conversion rates using an integrated tech stack with Dux-Soup
If you’re new to Dux-Soup or are interested to see how it could benefit your business, you can get Dux-Soup Turbo free for 2 weeks. There’s no commitment and we don’t ask for credit card information - why not give it a go?
Ideal Customer Profiles
Johannes started with a clear piece of advice: a detailed focus on targeting and messaging has become more important than ever. He stated, “People are jaded and a lot less willing to engage in lengthy pitches and be sold to directly.”
Johannes shared the three elements at the core of the Ideal Customer Profile (ICPs) and messaging:
- Know who you are selling to
- Know why you are unique and different from your competitors
- Be able to express your value proposition to your targets in an emotionally compelling way
Taking accountability and action for each of these in the planning stage is essential for success.
Alongside those three, take the time to understand the customer’s journey and see it from their perspective, from the initial raw lead all the way through to a closed deal. Often the journey is more complicated and much longer than it needs to be, with customers passing through different departments who may not talk to each other. The more steps the customer takes, the more places there are for them to drop off.
Overhaul your messaging
To refine your messaging you need to tune into your future customers and map out your response when they ask, “What’s in it for me?”.
When dealing with executives, your answer can take two tracks and respond to either:
- The larger corporate goal e.g., we help you….accelerate time to market, or, lower your costs or increase customer satisfaction.
- The core anxiety of the executive e.g., how can I further my career, or how can I remain employed after the next board meeting.
It’s ok to be mildly provocative and thought-provoking with a prospective client. If you understand their problem and what their goals are, you can connect your company to their concerns and communicate your understanding in an emotionally captivating way.
While this might sound like MBA theory, Johannes is clear that the fundamental homework is being able to answer “Who is my customer?” and “Why would they want to buy from me?”.
With a solid ICP and messaging dialed into it, Johannes has found the conversion rates and the click-through rates can double and triple in number.
Model growth
Johannes shared the growth simulation model Premonio uses to forecast revenue generation for clients and to monitor campaign success.
In this model, goals are set for finance, customer service, sales and marketing all of which are aligned and integrated. They are regularly monitored on a monthly or weekly basis to see how they are achieved.
For example:
A company wants to grow by $5 million. For that to happen Sales needs to make xx calls per day, give xx demos a week, Marketing has to generate x amount of leads both inbound and outbound, and Customer Success has its set of activities to achieve too.
The departments need to be aligned on the goals. For example, if the sales team expects 50 leads out of Marketing and the Marketing budget only supports 20 leads, there is a mismatch. If the marketing team then says they need $1.5m and finance only allocates $600,000 to them, there is another problem.
Aligning goals removes the need for analytic apps in the tech stack to make sense of all the clicks, likes, calls etc. In this model, all the goals are mathematically linked to the dollar results.
For example: If 50 calls and 500 LinkedIn invites are sent out, how much money will be made 3 months later? And what are the measures that can be monitored to make sure goals are hit?
Johannes manages this system in a cloud app, but it can easily be captured in simple spreadsheets too.
Go-to-market pipeline
The go-to-market (GTM) pipeline links the revenue to activity KPIs. The example below shows a pipeline that’s identified 13 methods of implementation to draw on leads, and to the right of the table, the sand key shows the sources of the revenue goal.
In this customer example the sources are inbound organic with LinkedIn invites, some Affiliate programs and partnerships amongst other things.
Flow number 6 highlights the Dux-Soup LinkedIn invites and this is broken into two parts:
- Initial connection request
- Nurture message using the Ideal Customer Profile work.
Johannes is not a fan of sending out LinkedIn messages with Calendly links the moment someone has connected. He takes a more gentle approach:
“Put out the honey and engage people rather than going after them with a fly swatter.”
With each team trained in tight workflows, and with metrics in place, the GTM pipeline can be implemented.
Monitoring goals with KPIs
The goals are monitored by tracking the associated KPIs. A monthly plan vs. actual KPI tracking enables timely adjustments and optimizations to lead volumes and spend. This provides an early warning system of what’s working and what isn’t working and allows you to be accountable to your customers.
Here are examples for both a Sales team and a Marketing team:
The Tech Stack
Johannes uses a selection of different technologies to manage the planning and revenue framing, the outreach, marketing, analytics and project management.
This stack has been implemented on numerous occasions and this blog focuses on the technology in the red boxes.
To watch Johannes demo the tools go to 25:15mins of the webinar recording.
Johannes started by showing the Premonio planning tool. It’s a javascript app that runs on Google Sheets making it easy to implement. Once the revenue growth goal has been determined it allows you to implement the GTM programs to achieve your goal. Using Pipedrive CRM, the performance reports allow for weekly or bi-weekly comparisons to determine what’s working.
Views of the long term to observer the impact of changes in business strategy can also be observed:
In 2023, Premonio took a deep dive into its ICP, messaging and customer journey. The graph shows the benefits this has brought to 2024, and a strong pipeline in place for the next couple of years.
Johannes uses Dux-Soup for his campaign management. The stats below are the average conversion rates over the last 2-3 years. Implementing changes based on the data allows them to tighten up messaging and targeting, resulting in a 50% acceptance rate and almost a 30% response rate.
AMPED Marketing automates some of their outbound campaigns - both LinkedIn invitational campaigns and first connect follow-ups, all of which run through Slack and are accessible to the entire team.
Apollo is used for targeting; it’s a Crunchbase, plus LinkedIn, plus MailChimp with a similar search algorithm and methodology to Sales Navigator, all tied up on one app! When you search for a company it brings up information about the product, the technology they use, the people and employee trends, plus the website, LinkedIn profile and Facebook page.
From Apollo the companies can be added to lists, and to outbound campaigns.
The LinkedIn Ad Library brings up all the Adverts for a company allowing you to see the messaging the company is using now and has used in the past. It’s a mechanism for finding out the Leader’s priorities or to simply find a topic that enables you to strike up a conversation with an Executive, for example, “Who creates your ads?”. You're more likely to get engagement and a response to that question, than if you were to talk about yourself!
TeamFluence builds a list of all your network connections on LinkedIn. It helps Johannes refine his connections and align them to his ICP as either a thought leader or a target, and then he can engage with them to discuss the content they find interesting - all without setting foot in LinkedIn.
CrystalKnows offers ideas and insights on the communication style that best suits your prospects, allowing you to connect at a deeper level and build a meaningful relationship from the get go. It crafts emails and LinkedIn messages and Johannes has found it to be very powerful at helping him to understand how a person “ticks”.
Sharetivity is an app that presents all the social media activity they can find on an individual condensed into one page. A useful tool again, to find out how active a person is and what the content they’re interested in.
SparkToro is a tool that pulls together a variety of data on a keyword search, this includes websites, domain authorities, stats, influencers and other data relevant to that search. Johannes put the influencers brought up by a search into TeamFluence and track what they publish, comment on it, forward it or simply to dial in to the latest content.
When Johannes has a targeted list of leads he uses Clay.run to summarize the profiles and create customized responses targeting their interests. He exports out a .CSV file and feeds this list into Dux-Soup targeting a specific demographic. The invitation or “thank you” messages are tuned to the individuals as Clay.run has already done the work to build a quality foundation - essential for nurturing relationships with prospects.
In Summary, to drive high level conversions and sales with C-level decision makers, follow the strategy:
1. Generate GTM LinkedIn strategies, specifically for the C-Suite
- Tightly define your ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs)
- Tune your messaging to the ICPs
2. Model growth to forecast revenue for your clients and monitor campaign success:
- Clearly align GTM channels with targeted ICPs
- Set both activity and outcome-based goals to monitor progress and results early and often
3. Drive high C-level conversion rates by integrating a tech stack around Dux-Soup
- Use Dux-Soup to send out invites
- Use Dux-Soup’s campaign feature, especially for segmented first-connect campaigns
- Augment Dux-Soup for segmented messaging and outreach at scale with ancillary apps like TeamFluence, SparkToro, CrystalKnows, Sharetivity, Clay.run, etc.
Read the Premonio Success Story
The Q&A with Johannes
There were plenty of questions at the end of the webinar from the attendees who listened on the day. If you’d like to have a listen in full go to 47:46mins of the webinar and click play!
Here’s a sample of some of the questions:
- Do you have a strategy and an example of the typical first message you send to people?
- When is it useful to run a LinkedIn campaign alongside an email campaign? From which do you get the most leads?
- How long is your typical Dux-Soup campaign and how many messages do you send?
- Do you use any AI tools to streamline your operations?
- Do you find it more effective to reach out directly to C-Suite executives, or do you start with the influencers?
- Can Dux-Soup integrate with any existing AI tools that can hyper-personalize each message that’s sent out?
