Learn how RemoteForce used cold email outreach with SmartReach.io and LinkedIn to help close a 6 million dollar deal

Ben Sullivan
Founder, RemoteForce

What does RemoteForce do, where is it located, and what kind of customers do you serve?

We're a fast growing digital marketing agency. Initially we started out as a telemarketing business and later transformed into more digital marketing lead generation over the last 18-24 months.

We are about 3 years old, primarily focussed on business-to-business lead generation.

"     At the moment we work with a lot of financial services businesses, business brokers and technology companies and we generate leads through multiple channels. We are having a lot of success with email via SmartReach.io in collaboration with the likes of LinkedIn.     "

We still use Facebook and Google to drive leads as well. We are based out of Byron Bay, Australia. We have clients currently, in five countries, US, Canada, UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.

What do your clients expect from you?

Well, they're looking for results. They want return on investment.They want good warm leads that convert into clients. They don't care through which channel we get them the leads. Whether it's through email or through LinkedIn or Google, as long as it's a good, warm, qualified lead. That's really what they're looking for.

At any point in time, how many clients do you serve? Is there any limit to how many clients you can serve?

At the moment we have got around about 35 active clients, we're kind of just at the point now where we're hiring. So, as we speak now, I've got potential employees doing some tasks for me so I can assess them and get some new hires on board so that we can continue to grow. We can serve around 48 clients which is where our infrastructure kind of taps out at the moment. So we are looking to get some more help and grow the business a little bit in terms of support, and then we can look at taking on more clients.

Could you tell us about a few of your recent success stories?

"     We've generated more than 5000 leads in the last 8 months across 30 plus campaigns through the email outreach we do using SmartReach.io. We work with many business brokers, and we recently had a lead generated that resulted in the sale of a $6 million business.     "

LinkedIn, Facebook and Google lead generation is very competitive in some industries, resulting in lesser results in some cases, however our cold email outreach consistently continues to deliver and remains a crucial part of our strategy.

Could you tell us how you generate leads for your clients?

We typically, generate leads using multiple channels. But the one that's working wonders for us is using cold email outreach via SmartReach.io in conjunction with LinkedIn.

We use LinkedIn to find prospects on the LinkedIn database. Once you connect with these people, you are establishing a social connection. We then use this connection for our email outreach on SmartReach.io and this part of our strategy certainly helped us cut through the noise that is often found on LinkedIn.

The communications that they get through SmartReach.io are aligned with our outreach on LinkedIn. We do that using a customized API tool which integrates with Zapier and SmartReach.io. That saves us a lot of time.

"     We run thousands of Zapier tasks every month, and part of these tasks include pulling emails from various applications into SmartReach.io. In some of our campaigns, we're actually finding that we are generating 80 to 100% of our leads using email. LinkedIn's great to find these prospects, but not as great as generating replies as email is. So that's why these email pieces are really important for us.     "

And being able to connect up those various applications makes it cost effective and gives us that flexibility to price our services competitively. Otherwise, one can imagine the pains of running thousands of activities every month and having to manually transcribe and unsubscribe and doing things like that, it really adds up. So the whole automation piece makes this possible.

How long have you been using SmartReach.io and why did you choose us?

Since late 2018.

"     When we first started email outreach, we were using MailChimp. We found it really unsuitable for cold email outreach. The biggest issue for us was the fact that we were having to manually unsubscribe anyone from the drip campaign that had responded because it wasn't able to do that. The automation wasn't as good. It wasn't as accurate. It was when we tried a few other products and finally zeroed in using SmartReach.io.     "

You mentioned that you have tried a few other alternatives to SmartReach.io. Which other tools did you use and what was experience with those?

So I personally tested Mailshake, Woodpecker and I've had a look at Active-campaign. The reason why I chose to go with SmartReach.io was that it was easy to connect Non gmail accounts. So you know, those other email providers, it was easy to connect gmail but if you are running an outlook or office 365 or a custom domain, it was just a hassle. With SmartReach.io, I just found it easy with the kind of the popup that you guys had, you know, you can still select which type of account. It seemed fairly straightforward. It was clearly designed for the type of outreach that we were looking to do whereas MailChimp wasn't.

"     It also made sense in the fact that you guys have been really responsive and are pretty good in terms of support. I really had not had any issues. It has been a learning exercise for us as well. You know, with your team, we also get educated about things like email deliverability and learning about a different domains such as using a free Gmail account versus a dedicated GSuite domain.     "

So it's kind of good having that education and, yeah, just really happy with the product. It seems to work all the time and it's been reliable so far. We have no complaints at all.

Ben, when you started using us, you had fewer number of clients on SmartReach.io and now you have many more. What caused this remarkable growth for you in such a short span?

When we were testing the outreach part, we tested a number of other tools. We did have a number of our clients on mailchimp.

"     I made a decision to test SmartReach.io and so we started out with one account and we kind of grew slowly. We found it really good. We made a decision that we would migrate all of our clients that we have. We're continuing to use SmartReach.io, and if we get any new client, we would put them straight onto your platform.     "

The growth was down to our own lead generation activities. We use SmartReach.io together with LinkedIn as part of our methods to generate leads for ourselves just as we do it for our clients.

We use G-suite and have a HubSpot integration, and we generate cold outreach through SmartReach.io. As soon as someone comes back on our email, we reply and it is automatically added to our CRM. So it's really well automated.

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