Product EVO Case Study: A Detailed Breakdown of Strategies and Results
Dec 18, 2024
After testing every possible lead generation strategy in-house, and then getting burned multiple times by other agencies, Product EVO, a research & product development company...came to us to design and run their cold email campaigns.
The results? $90,000 in PROFIT collected, with an additional $1.2mm in pipeline revenue by implementing a proven cold email outreach system for their business.
Problems Product EVO Faced Before Working With Buzzlead
Worked with another cold email agency 2.5 years ago. The quality of leads from this agency was horrific. Product EVO ended up wasting 7 months with the partnership and LOSING thousands of dollars because the unqualified leads couldnʼt convert
Following this negative experience, Product EVO decided to take things in-house and try running cold email outreach themselves for 2 years. They got decent results after a year or so...but the time, effort, and investment was FAR greater than the return. Aside from Josh (CEO of Product EVO) spending 10 hours EVERY WEEK trying to manage campaigns internally, he was also losing ~$50,000 a year to a full-time employee he had to train on cold email, plus a $25,000 Zoom Info subscription.
Product EVO wasnʼt aware that youʼre not supposed to send cold emails from your main websites domain. After running cold outreach for some time, they began seeing customers reach out to state that all Product EVO emails were going to spam. This cause major issues in all aspects of their operations for obvious reasons.
Product EVO In-House Cold Email Results - At peak performance, Product EVO was able to schedule 9 qualified sales meetings over a 90 day period running cold email in-house before calling it quits and seeking outside help.
Product EVOʼs lack of success can probably be broken down into 4 main buckets
Lack of Technical Know-How (List building, email deliverability, inability to send high volume)
Bandwidth Issues
Not enough time or staff members to manage efficiently)
Not knowing how to position their offer to different markets
Negative ROI (expenses were greatly outweighing results)
Product EVO Results After Working With Buzzlead
142 qualified sales meetings over 10 months
12-20 sales meetings booked every single month with QUALIFIED prospects
Cold Email Infrastructure Setup Properly, with emails being sent from SUBdomains (no more jeopardizing their main website domain health reputation)
Less than 30 minutes a week being spent on lead generation now since Buzzlead takes care of everything from A-Z
Targeted campaigns going after hand-picked prospect we KNOW are a good for their service
Lead Scoring on every campaign to ensure weʼre not contacting irrelevant companies
$90,000 in PROFIT collected, not revenue (10+ clients signed at $5,000/mo on average, with most of the revenue yet to be collected)
25 active open opportunities amounting to over $1.2mm in pipeline revenue
Proven cold email system that allows them to PREDICTABLY scale their business
Product EVO Cold Email Campaign Playbook
1. Cold Email Infrastructure Setup
Buzzlead setup 35 subdomains with 2 inboxes each, allowing us to send high volume across 70 email accounts. We had a 50/50 split of outlook/gmail inboxes which allowed us to optimize email deliverability by matching our email accounts with the Email Service Providers our prospects were using. We used Smartlead as our email sending tool and maxed out sending at 15 emails/day per inbox, allowing us to contact over 1,000 prospects every day, without landing in spam.
2. Data & List Building Tech Stack
One of the big issues Product EVO faced is they couldnʼt find enough data to build targeted lead lists. They were spending tens of thousands of dollars and relying only on Zoom Info for list building, limiting them to saturated lead lists with stale
data.
Ocean.io (we were able to find lookalikes of their best customers with this tool)
Storeleads (we identified a MASSIVE opportunity by going after Ecom brands selling physical products)
Clay.com (we use clay for data sourcing purposes to find untapped data across dozens of different databases like apollo, findymail, datagma, hunter, sales navigator, etc...)
3. Crafting The Offer (Cold Email Scripts)
Another major challenge Product EVO faced was not knowing how to craft a persuasive offer that differentiated themselves from their competitors.
We used the Why You, Why Now approach to get our prospects to engage by calling out pain points we were fairly confident they were dealing with. Hereʼs what one of our higher performing scripts looked like:
Example 1:
“Hey NAME, I noticed you oversee production efforts, are you still dealing with manufacturing volatility in China?
We help product teams take their product ideas from inspiration to tangible reality in under 150 days by utilizing our Elevated Product Method to vet market opportunities, source production partners and enable go-to-market rollout.
We recently helped Dynamic Discs test market demand and find a production partner for their new Scout Baskets, generating $2.4M revenue in the first half of the year.
Can I send over a relevant case study breaking down our proceess?ˮ
Example 2:
“Hey NAME, if we could help you validate market demand of your new product pre-launch so you can ensure it will be a success, would that be interesting?
Last year, we helped BoxHouse profitably take their solution from a napkin drawing to full market rollout in under 150 days by sourcing multiple factories to hit their target price, MOQ, quality, and technology requirements.
Are youopposed to exploring this over a quick call?ˮ
We ran 3 step sequences and split tested tons of variations to the scripts above, particularly with the pain point question in the opening line. While the volatility of China was a trigger pain point for many prospects, we found that some were struggling more with bandwidth issues and not having enough hands to keep product development operations running smoothly. Others were disappointed that their last product launch didnʼt go as well as they had hoped. You really wonʼt know what sticks without doing major split testing, which is what we were able to successfully do with our campaigns.
4. Inbox Management & Cold Calling
A big advantage we have with cold outreach is the internal systems we have in place to manage cold email replies efficiently at scale. Every time we get a positive response from a prospect, that prospect automatically gets pushed into our slack channel with a mobile phone number enriched automatically. This not only allows us to respond in less than 15 minutes, but it gives us the contactʼs direct phone number so we can pick up the phone and convert them into a booked meeting while theyʼre hot. Itʼs easy to miss replies and lose track of opportunities when sending 1,000 emails a day, so having systems in place to manage this at scale is a must.
Product EVO Campaign Results
