New business generation campaign by Market Makers for ADP Dealer Services

Market Makers remit was to provide lead nurturing and lead generation in order to create new business opportunities for ADP’s sales team

About ADP
ADP is a leading supplier of business solutions to the retail automotive industry, with a global turnover of US $7bn. Their dealer services portfolio includes the Autoline fully-integrated management system that provides dealers with visibility across their entire operations, from inventory to finance and car showroom management, streamlining their business processes.

Strategy
In the UK, ADP has a 42% share of the total franchised dealer market and over 60% share of the top 100 motor dealers, and they plan to build upon this impressive record of penetration with an ongoing strategy for new business generation.

Market Makers remit within this fuller strategy was to provide lead nurturing and lead generation in order to create new business opportunities for ADP’s sales team. It was identified that using telemarketing would enable ADP to gather valuable market intelligence to help them increase the relevance of their collateral to their target audience, as well as providing sales-ready leads through the use of a clear qualification process.

Campaign Audience and Objectives
The target audience was the IT manager or primary IT decision maker within a core of 600 car dealership groups.

The campaign’s objectives were twofold. The first phase involved researching, cleansing and refining ADP’s prospect database by identifying key traits such as the number of users in a dealership, timeframe for reviewing their incumbent system and their current purchasing processes and cycles. ADP also wanted to understand the IT infrastructure within each firm in order that they could refine future targeting.

Prospects were profiled and segmented by size of company and existing contract renewal or those with no existing system in place. The telemarketing exercise also afforded an opportunity to discover any budgetary constraints, gather general intelligence about the prospect company and simultaneously raise brand awareness of ADP. The data was scored and prioritised as follows:

Prospect    No. of Users    Review Date
A                 > 50 B                 20 – 50             6 – 12 months
C                              12 months

The second phase focused on generating high quality leads and nurturing activity, with a target of 13 confirmed and set appointments for the initial benchmark campaign. Working closely with ADP, Market Makers defined the mandatory criteria for lead qualification as:

– appointment to be made with primary decision maker
– dealership to have a minimum of 20 users
– dealership looking to review their systems within the next 12 months

The prospect data was prioritised according to the profile created in the earlier lead scoring phase of the campaign, with the hottest ‘A’ profiles given precedence.

Execution
ADP engaged the prospect database with email and direct mail touches focused on a specific business area, offering white papers and case studies to educate prospects on their offering and generate demand.

Initial messaging was tailored according to the scoring criteria defined in the data cleansing process and any subsequent contacts by either ADP or Market Makers.

Market Makers role then became focused on lead nurturing, working with the prospect database to identify and qualify leads. Intelligence gathered by telemarketing was consistently fed back to ADP and data was re-prioritised on a rolling basis.

Once a lead reached A prospect status, Market Makers created sales appointments for the ADP new business team, providing ADP with a full call recording for each opportunity.

The same Market Makers telemarketing team has worked on ADP’s campaigns from day one, supported by a substantial investment of time in training, to give the client consistent points of contact with whom they can build strong and transparent relationships. Market Makers has effectively evolved into an extension of ADP’s own team.

Campaign Performance
Since the campaign commenced in late 2008, Market Makers has created over 200 sales-ready opportunities for ADP.

Market Makers have consistently exceeded campaign targets, setting 17 appointments in the initial benchmark campaign versus the target of 13, and achieving an actual rate of 0.28 appointments per hour against a target of 0.20. This equates to almost one out of every three contacts resulting an opportunity for ADP, with leads representing over a third of the total data pool.

Additionally, ADP are reaping the benefits of telemarketing with an up-to-date, accurate database, containing valuable intelligence obtained from each prospect. This allows them to more effectively develop their offering in a smart, measurable way.

Client Testimonial
“I was impressed with their total transparency, with the ability to listen to call recordings of all leads transferred. Market Makers’ ability to fully understand the solutions they are outlining and the market they are targeting, and deliver good results on each campaign they work on is very clear.” Adam Palmer, UK marketing manager, ADP Dealer Services UK Ltd

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