On this page, we do not want to celebrate just transactions, but also highlight the remarkable journeys behind them. Dive into our curated collection of sales tales that transcend the ordinary—where challenges are conquered, horizons are expanded, and every deal marks a milestone. From navigating through the complexities of international markets to pioneering innovative solutions that set new industry standards, our stories are a testament to the power of vision, tenacity, and the art of the possible. Welcome to where every story is an expedition, and every expedition is a victory.
At Wingmen Consulting, we distill the complexities of business into simple, actionable steps, guiding entrepreneurs toward achieving personal freedom throughout their entrepreneurial journey. Our expertise lies in tackling the crucial marketing and sales challenges that arise at the first and second growth hurdles.
We cater specifically to small businesses driven by visionary founders. Whether you're navigating the initial phase of market entry or striving to overcome the operational challenges of scaling your business, our tailored offerings are designed to address your unique needs. For those at the start, our Go-To-Market Strategy lays the foundation for a solid entry, equipping you with effective sales, customer engagement, and business growth strategies.
Objective: Developing a Lead Generation Strategy
Description of the client: Our client, a forward-thinking investment firm that pioneered a groundbreaking, fully automated trading platform. This platform was ingeniously crafted to ensure a favourable return on daily subsistence allowance accounts, incorporating mechanisms for downside risk mitigation. The company's primary goal was to attract a clientele keen on circumventing the pitfalls of negative margin rates.
Pain Point of the Client: The client was lacking leads and had an empty sales pipeline
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client: The targeted demographic consisted of shareholders, owners, directors, and Chief Financial Officers (CFOs) of mid-sized German companies that exhibited growth during the challenging pandemic era, operated within margin-sensitive industries, and possessed the financial capacity for minimum investment thresholds.
Challenges Encountered: Our thorough market analysis revealed significant hurdles in promoting cryptocurrency investments, primarily due to stringent regulatory constraints. Direct marketing strategies, such as email campaigns, were fraught with the risk of legal repercussions from attorneys. Moreover, the prevailing skepticism towards cryptocurrency investments, fueled by prevalent fraudulent schemes, posed a substantial barrier to building trust with potential investors.
Strategic Approach: Acknowledging the dual challenges of trust deficit and lead generation within the intended market segment, we adopted an innovative indirect marketing strategy. Our approach involved engaging financial and corporate influencers across YouTube and LinkedIn through meticulously structured email drip campaigns. These influencers championed our client's investment services, thereby leveraging their credibility and audience reach. A commission-based model, facilitated by tracking through UTM codes, incentivized influencer participation.
Outcomes Achieved: This strategic collaboration yielded remarkable results, securing over 184 appointments within a mere three months of initiating the partnership. This success underscores the efficacy of leveraging influencer networks and indirect marketing tactics in overcoming regulatory and trust barriers, thus paving the way for substantial lead generation and customer engagement in the highly scrutinized realm of cryptocurrency investments.
Objective: Generating High Value and qualified Real Estate leads.
Description of the Client:
Our client is a prominent real estate company operating within the competitive landscape of German urban markets. Their focus is on two distinct groups: businessmen on the cusp of retirement seeking to relocate their businesses and utilize urban properties, and property owners inclined to divest their real estate assets to the company.
Pain Point of the Client:
Our client faced significant challenges in a sellers' market characterized by fierce competition and inflated property prices. The primary obstacle was the difficulty in identifying and acquiring attractive properties at reasonable prices before they were snapped up by professional investors. Additionally, the presence of tenants in properties further complicated direct access to property owners, creating a barrier to effective communication and negotiation.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client:
1. Former business owners and businessmen over 60 years old who are considering retirement and wish to sell their company or repurpose their business properties within urban settings.
2. Property owners interested in selling their houses or flats, particularly those located near city centres, to leverage the urban real estate demand.
Challenges Encountered: The primary challenge was navigating the sellers' market dynamics where demand significantly outstrips supply, leading to high property valuations and intense bidding wars. This environment made it virtually impossible for Real Estimate to find and secure deals on attractive properties at affordable prices. The problem was compounded by limited access to property owners due to the intermediation of tenants, which hindered direct negotiation efforts.
Outcomes Achieved: 1. To address these challenges, our client implemented with our help a dual-faceted strategy. The first facet involved targeting retiring businessmen and small business owners by analyzing commercial register data in Germany. Criteria included age (over 60), business type (privately held, production-related businesses near city centres), and land register entries. Through a combination of personalised, automatically generated letters and follow-up sales calls, our client generated leads willing to discuss selling their properties.
2. The second facet of the strategy was designed to circumvent the tenant barrier and reach property owners directly. By creating a facade of a film production company and communicating the need for filming permissions in tenant-occupied properties, Our client ingeniously prompted tenants to connect them with landlords. This creative approach, supported by high-quality, urgent mailings, successfully facilitated direct dialogue with property owners, paving the way for potential sales discussions.
Through these innovative strategies, our client not only overcame the formidable challenges presented by the German real estate market's dynamics but also established a pipeline of potential sellers, demonstrating the power of creative problem-solving in a highly competitive environment.
Description of the Client:
The client in focus was the former CEO of one of Germany's premier online job portals. After departing from the portal through an exit program, the individual established a new recruiting company, aiming to innovate within the human resources sector.
Pain Point of the Client: Upon initiation, the client's company was grappling with a significant challenge: it functioned akin to a "total flower shop," providing a broad and unstructured array of recruiting services across the HR spectrum. This lack of specialization and structure led to inefficiencies and diluted the firm's value proposition in the competitive recruiting market.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client
The ideal clientele for the client's recruiting firm were businesses across various industries (such as Software, Sales, IT) that had specific job vacancies and were open to innovative recruiting strategies. These companies typically did not engage with recruiters and were looking for fresh, effective recruitment methodologies. The decision-makers within these companies included roles such as HR leaders, COOs, CEOs, and owners who were integral in making strategic hiring decisions.
Challenges Encountered:
The primary challenge was transitioning from a generalized service model to a more focused and structured approach that could demonstrate value in a crowded market. The firm needed to distinguish itself by leveraging the founder's unique insights and experiences without resorting to the conventional recruiting practices that clients were looking to avoid.
Outcomes Achieved:
To address these challenges, a strategic repositioning was undertaken to market the company as a beacon of industry-leading recruitment practices. An email drip campaign was launched, targeting specific job titles within industries that traditionally did not engage with recruiters. This campaign was carefully curated to exclude companies already working with recruiters, ensuring a focused approach towards businesses looking for a novel recruitment methodology.
The campaign leveraged data points such as relevant job vacancies and enriched decision-maker data to construct a multi-step process that personalized outreach. By invoking the founder's background as a former CEO of a leading job portal, the messaging was crafted to intrigue potential clients with the promise of sharing insights into how top companies approach recruitment.
Quantified Outcome:
This strategic pivot and targeted campaign resulted in a substantial increase in engagement, with the recruiting firm securing contracts with over 73 companies within the first three months of the campaign.
This marked a significant turnaround from the initial phase of operation, positioning the firm as a thought leader in recruitment practices and demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging industry insights and targeted marketing strategies to achieve business growth.
Description of the Client
The client is spearheaded by a group of university professors with specialized expertise in leadership and remote leadership disciplines. In response to the evolving workplace dynamics accentuated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the prevailing shortage of skilled workers, they conceived the idea of developing a productized coaching program tailored for companies navigating these challenges.
Pain Point of the Client:
The core issue faced by the client was its nascent brand presence in the market. Despite the founders' profound experience and expertise in leadership, the company had not engaged in active branding or promotional activities. This lack of visibility and brand recognition posed a significant barrier to attracting corporate clients for their innovative coaching program.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client:
The client’s target clientele consists of companies across various sectors grappling with the dual challenges of adapting to remote work dynamics and addressing the acute shortage of skilled workers. These companies are in dire need of innovative solutions to enhance their leadership capabilities, ensure effective remote team management, and broaden their talent recruitment beyond geographical limitations.
Challenges Encountered:
The primary challenge was establishing a strong market presence and differentiating their offering in a crowded space of leadership development solutions. The absence of an established brand meant that the client had to swiftly build credibility and articulate the unique value proposition of its coaching program, specifically its potential to mitigate the skilled worker shortage through effective remote leadership practices.
To tackle these hurdles, the client devised a strategic email marketing campaign. This campaign was not just a straightforward promotional effort but a nuanced approach that addressed additional pain points exacerbated by the pandemic, such as the need for remote leadership skills to overcome local recruitment barriers. By highlighting how their coaching program could empower companies to excel in remote leadership and thus access a wider pool of talent, they positioned themselves as a crucial solution provider in the current corporate landscape.
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Description of the Client:
The client is a pioneering startup founded by a key figure from Lieferando, a renowned German food delivery platform. This innovative venture focused on developing a quality control application designed to facilitate standardized audits within the food industry. The app aimed to revolutionize how food businesses manage and maintain their quality standards through efficient and systematic audits.
Pain Point of the Client:
As an early-stage startup, the client faced significant challenges in establishing a product-market fit. The lack of a clear strategy to penetrate the new market and effectively communicate the value the proposition of their quality control app to potential customers was a substantial obstacle. This uncertainty hindered their ability to attract the attention of key decision-makers within the food industry, crucial for the app's adoption and success.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client:
The ideal customers for the client's quality control app are professionals within the food industry responsible for maintaining high standards of quality and compliance. This includes:
Heads of Quality,
Quality Management and Quality Assurance personnel,
and Operations Managers.
These individuals are key decision-makers in adopting new technologies and tools that can enhance their quality control processes.
Challenges Encountered:
The startup's main challenge was its initial difficulty in reaching and engaging these decision-makers. Without a clear message or understanding of the market, the client struggled to demonstrate the app's potential benefits and how it could address the specific pain points related to quality management in the food industry.
Outcomes Achieved:
To overcome these challenges, a targeted marketing strategy was devised, focusing on a drip campaign tailored to the identified personas and their unique pain points. This campaign aimed to highlight the app's value in simplifying and standardizing quality audits, thereby ensuring higher compliance and quality levels within food businesses.
By crafting compelling messaging that resonated with the specific needs of quality management professionals, the startup successfully arranged appointments with relevant decision-makers. These interactions were followed by web demonstrations of the app, showcasing its functionalities and benefits in real-time scenarios.
Quantified Outcome:
The strategic approach led to a marked increase in engagement, with the startup conducting over 73 web demos for potential clients within the first two months of the campaign. This surge in interest and demonstrations significantly boosted the startup's visibility in the food industry and laid the groundwork for establishing its product-market fit.
Description of the Client:
Our client stands as the preeminent German staffing agency specializing in recruiting for the heating and plumbing sector. Their primary service offering is centred around filling long-standing, vacant job positions in a market characterized by an acute shortage of candidates and intense competition for skilled craftsmen.
Pain Point of the Client:
The agency's major challenge was generating the required 40 leads per month in an environment where the target audience—owners and operators of heating and plumbing service companies—was notably difficult to reach through online channels. This difficulty was compounded by the highly competitive nature of the job market, which made traditional recruitment strategies less effective and necessitated a more innovative approach to attract potential candidates.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client:
The client's ideal customer profile encompassed companies within Germany actively seeking heating engineers and plumbers. These entities were identified not just by their immediate staffing needs but also by their growth trajectories, indicating a sustainable demand for skilled labour. The decision-makers within these companies typically included owners, managing directors, and, where applicable, HR personnel. These individuals were crucial for initiating and finalizing the recruitment process but proved challenging to engage through conventional marketing and outreach efforts.
Challenges Encountered:
The staffing agency faced a two-fold challenge: firstly, the scarcity of accessible online platforms to effectively reach the decision-makers in the heating and plumbing industries; and secondly, the overarching issue of distinguishing their outreach efforts from the plethora of advertisements and solicitations that these decision-makers receive regularly. The saturated market of candidates further exacerbated the difficulty in presenting their proposition in a manner that would capture the attention and interest of potential clients.
Outcomes Achieved:
To navigate these challenges, the agency employed a unique and creative strategy by leveraging Job Vacancy data to pinpoint companies in dire need of heating engineers and plumbers. They meticulously crafted application folders representing the "perfect candidate" and dispatched these via postal service, with each envelope hand-addressed to ensure a personal touch. This approach ingeniously bypassed the common filters used to screen out advertisements, directly capturing the interest of company owners and decision-makers. Upon attempting to contact the candidate, these prospects were redirected to the staffing agency, thereby generating high-quality leads without the drawbacks of traditional advertising.
This innovative method not only allowed the agency to meet its lead generation targets but also established a new standard in reaching and engaging potential clients in the highly competitive and candidate-starved market of heating and plumbing professionals in Germany.
Description of the Client:
Our client is a specialized ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) provider based in Germany, focusing on the logistics and wholesale sectors. Before our engagement, their customer acquisition strategy was non-existent in digital terms, relying primarily on personal connections of the owner or happenstance encounters for business development.
Pain Point of the Client:
The main challenge faced by our client was navigating the inherently lengthy sales cycles associated with ERP systems. Identifying prospective customers at the precise moment they were considering the purchase of an ERP system presented a significant hurdle. Furthermore, creating a sense of urgency among decision-makers and accurately determining the suitability of the client's niche ERP solution for potential customers added layers of complexity to their sales strategy.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client:
The ideal customer profile for our client encompassed companies within the logistics and wholesale industries that were undergoing significant changes, such as mergers, acquisitions, or leadership shifts, which could trigger the need for a new ERP system. These companies often faced specific challenges in areas like the return of goods management and wholesale operations, which the client's ERP system was uniquely equipped to address.
Challenges Encountered:
Key challenges included:
Identifying timely sales opportunities within the long ERP system sales cycles.
Generating action pressure on decision-makers to prioritize the evaluation and purchase of an ERP system.
Assessing the fit between the client's niche ERP offerings and the operational needs of potential customers.
Outcomes Achieved:
Leveraging the current customer database, we reverse-engineered the profile of decision-makers, relevant industries, and the technologies employed by existing clients. A pivotal insight was that ERP system purchases are often triggered by corporate events like acquisitions or mergers due to the ensuing need for consolidation processes.
By creating a targeted cluster of decision-makers and aligning it with comprehensive company data—including job vacancy information to glean insights on required technologies—we honed in on leads characterized by recent shareholder or management changes, urgent company announcements, and alignment with industries prone to specific operational pains addressed by our client's ERP system.
This strategic approach led to the generation of over 350 leads within a 12-month period, significantly enhancing our client's ability to engage with potential customers at critical decision-making junctures and demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging detailed market and operational insights to drive targeted sales efforts in the ERP domain.
Description of the Client:
Our client specialises in offering outsourced IT services, including expertise in Laravel, PHP Symfony, blockchain, and iOS development. Previously operating without a specific focus, they offered a wide range of outstaffing and outsourcing services, akin to a "flowershop," where any service that could potentially be sold was offered. This approach was not backed by a structured sales process.
Pain Point of the Client:
The client faced a significant challenge due to the absence of a coherent sales strategy. Their primary method of securing business was through competitive platforms like Upwork, which often led to inconsistent project flow and the need to compete on price rather than value or expertise. This approach made it difficult to sustainably grow the business or select projects that aligned with their core strengths and desired direction.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) of Our Client:
The ideal customer profile for our client was defined through a process of identifying the specific jobs and technologies that aligned with their expertise and service offerings. The focus was on companies that required advanced IT solutions, including Laravel, PHP Symfony, blockchain, and iOS development, and valued the experience of working as if they had the developer in-house. These companies were likely experiencing extended vacancies in their IT departments, indicating a potential need for outsourced solutions.
Challenges Encountered:
- The lack of a defined sales strategy and reliance on competitive bidding platforms limited the client's ability to attract and retain quality projects.
- The broad spectrum of services offered without clear differentiation made it challenging to stand out in a crowded market.
Outcomes Achieved:
To address these challenges, we collaborated with the client in a workshop to carve out a unique market position. This led to the development of a compelling unique selling proposition (USP) that emphasized the benefit of working with our client as akin to having an in-house developer, offering proximity, responsiveness, and integration that outsourced solutions typically lack.
We then identified the jobs and technologies that were most relevant to this positioning and created a search filter aimed at job vacancies. This system was designed to automatically reach out to decision-makers with tailored proposals when a relevant IT job had been posted for an extended period in Germany, signaling a potential opportunity for our client's services.
This strategic overhaul transformed the client's approach to securing projects, moving away from competitive platforms to a proactive, targeted outreach based on identified market needs. As a result, the client now enjoys a full project pipeline, affording them the luxury of selecting projects that best fit their expertise and strategic goals. This has not only improved project quality and client satisfaction but also positioned them as a preferred provider in their specialized IT service domains.
Supercharge Your Small Business with Wingmen-Consulting
You're seeking personalised guidance to navigate market entry challenges and lay a solid foundation for your business
You aim to overcome operational hurdles and scale your business with tailored strategies and actionable insights.
You're a visionary entrepreneur aspiring for personal freedom through your business success.
You feel stuck in operational tasks and need a clear roadmap and expert reflection to reach your entrepreneurial north star.
Supercharge Your Small Business with Wingmen-Consulting
At Wingmen Consulting, we distill the complexities of business into simple, actionable steps, guiding entrepreneurs toward achieving personal freedom throughout their entrepreneurial journey. Our expertise lies in tackling the crucial marketing and sales challenges that arise at the first and second growth hurdles.
At Wingmen-Consulting, we provide the expertise and support you need to transform your business and achieve sales success. Our services include:
Don't let a lack of time or resources hinder your business's growth potential. Schedule a free consultation with Wingmen-Consulting today and let us be your trusted partner in propelling your sales success to new heights.
