About Office Depot
From everyday stationery items to complete office management solutions, SME to blue chip, Office Depot provides more office products and services to more customers in more countries than any other company. With annual global revenues exceeding 12 billion dollars, Office Depot operate through retail, wholesale and contract channels in 54 countries.
Strategy
In the UK contract market Office Depot operates two teams of business development managers: one that handles regional and key accounts, and another focused on the mid-market – customers that fall between small businesses and corporate enterprises. Office Depot works with a global business contact broker that provides them with databases of companies that fit its target profile.
Office Depot were looking for a data partner to cleanse and enrich this database with intelligence that would accelerate qualification and help identify which of the business development teams each prospect should be allocated to.
Campaign Audience and Objectives
Office Depot appointed Market Makers because of its core competence in lead generation and its ability to provide not only high quality data cleansing but also in-depth reporting and analysis. The profiling exercise aimed to identify:
- a named decision-maker and contact details including email address
- relevant information on the decision-making structure
- the incumbent office product supplier
- details of any existing contract, together with renewal date
- current annual spend on office products
- preferred order channel
- the split between office workers and non office workers
- total number of sites
Aspirations for the campaign were for Office Depot to be able to conduct more targeted email activity, grade the business opportunity within the database and gain insight into its target market to proactively identify further prospects in future.
Campaign Execution
Market Makers initially benchmarked 200 records to ascertain that:
- accurate and reliable targets could be set for future campaigns;
- the approach and quality of profiled records would meet Office Depot’s expectations;
- the reporting and campaign output were in a suitable format for Office Depot to work with on an ongoing basis.
Of the first sample of benchmark data Market Makers undertook a tele-appending exercise, achieving a high match rate of 75%. The results of the exercise were jointly analysed by Office Depot and Market Makers and on the basis of the results, targets were set for the main data cleansing activity.
Office Depot provided Market Makers with a database of 4,730 records spanning locations and industries, which were fed into the campaign in five stages. Intelligence was gathered for two key markets: stationery, Office Depot’s core offering, and facilities management, an additional service.
Experienced, professional telemarketers were deployed on the data capture element. While it wasn’t part of the original brief, they additionally identified businesses with an immediate need or requiring a quote. Thanks to their lead generation expertise, they were able to engage the prospects in a natural conversation to determine not only whether there was an opportunity but whether the prospect was of interest to Office Depot. These contacts were passed to the business development team for direct follow-up.
Campaign Peformance
Of the data records that were dialled, Market Makers achieved an 84% success rate in data cleansing, which compares favourably to the industry standard of 70-75%. The breakdown by information gathered was as follows:
Stationery Decision Maker 98.55%
Email address 96.28%
Waste Management Decision Maker 73.73%
Email address 70.74%
Employees 87.40%
Office Workers 79.46%
Annual Spend 5.00%
Current Supplier 37.82%
Market Makers provided Office Depot with weekly reports of the volume of records that had been dialled on, together with the schedule for the week ahead, plus ad hoc updates on any objections raised and how they could be effectively countered. The cleansed data was supplied to Office Depot in a spreadsheet with annotations to substantiate the quality of the data cleanse and support the client’s own prospecting.
Innovative closed loop marketing
For maximum transparency, Market Makers provided an online reporting facility that offered real-time access to digitally recorded prospect calls for quality purposes. The portal also provided comprehensive tailored analysis designed around the specifics of the campaign.
This enabled Office Depot to directly compare the outcome of the profiling exercise with the subsequent uplift in results. This boost was not only gained from more targeted email broadcasts but also from improvements in the business development team’s follow-up as a result of richer prospect information. An added benefit of this closed loop approach was that Office Depot was able to attribute return on campaign spend directly to programme activities.
