Outbound sales for Irish B2B firms, so your pipeline stops depending on referrals

WDI: Thomas, can you introduce yourself, your business, and what you do here at EPM Group?

Thomas: My name is Thomas Horan. I'm the managing director of EPM Group: Easy Property Maintenance, Dublin Plumbing Repairs and PAT testing. We have a number of different arms within the business that cover reactive and planned maintenance.

WDI: How would you describe the business today? The team, the scale, and the type of work you generally take on.

Thomas: The type of work we take on is really anything from the fabric of the building to the internal workings of a building, the plant rooms. We do a lot of hotels, restaurants and retail. To give you an idea of the scale of our clientele: the Dalata Group hotels, Krispy Kreme, Woodie's, Heat Merchants, Tubs and Tiles, Card Factory. These are based nationwide and we cover 32 counties of Ireland.

WDI: Before working with WDI, what did your pipeline look like? Were you relying on referrals and word of mouth?

Thomas: Brand awareness is the hardest thing to get out, and that's where WDI came in. Since WDI took over our pipeline and our CRM systems to acquire additional clients, it's vastly improved. We've already received 150 qualified clients within three months of that process.

WDI: Mark, will you introduce yourself, your business, and what you do here at 24/7 Fire & Security?

Mark: We're a company that's established over 30 years. We do all types of security. We do intruder alarms, access control, CCTV.

WDI: How would you describe the business today? The team, the scale, and the type of work you generally take on.

Mark: We do large commercial sites, and we do an awful lot of integration of CCTV, alarms, and we've barriers and gates. We can integrate the whole thing to make it seamless. So that's sort of our strength.

WDI: What made you decide to work with WDI specifically?

Mark: Just got a good vibe. He's a young company and he's very dynamic. I just felt a good thing, a good vibe there, that I could work with this. And you guys are hard to come by, because I have had a bad experience in the past with fellas promising me that they would get me leads and they never materialised. Whereas you guys have produced the goods.

WDI: What would you say has been the most important thing for you guys so far?

Keith: I would say the marketing end of things has been huge. It has really opened up doors that I didn't know were closed. It's kind of opened up my own eyes. Marketing, I would say, has been huge for us.

WDI: So would you say it isn't just driving revenue, it's also attracting top talent to Summit as well?

Keith: 100%.

WDI: Before we started running outbound for you, how were you getting new business?

Keith: A couple of different ways. Originally there's CIS, Construction Information Services, which we have online, and you would target projects that are at contract stage, because that's where the scaffolding comes in. It would mostly be on myself, reaching out to existing clients: you have a job coming up? Then there's retention of the same clients, and word of mouth. A lot of my time would have went into that. That's where there's so much value in someone like yourselves. You're hiring somebody to do a job, so it gives you time to actually work on the business again. You need to be able to strategise, and then have someone create the sales, and you can manage those sales.

WDI: So you're working on the business, not in it.

Keith: Yeah. I'm working on the strategy of where we want to grow. I know the direction. I know how much sales we need in and what market we're in, but I don't have the time to go and get them.

WDI: You said you're pricing around a million euros of work every month now. Where were you last year?

Keith: I would say probably 25% of that at best, and it was coming in more sporadic than that. It was inconsistent, to be fair. Now the flow is just there. You're nearly picking and choosing. If your head is stuck making phone calls, ringing around, you're going to miss all that. You need to be a free thinker to be able to do all that.

WDI: There's a contractor listening who relies on word of mouth, has had consistent business for the last few years, but doesn't do any outbound. What would you say to them?

Keith: Get off the fence. Jump straight in. You've nothing to lose. It's all gain. If you haven't grown by now doing what you're doing, it's not going to change. So you need to change something.

WDI: You said that if you were to start over again, you would do more outbound and build more pipeline, which can be difficult as one person. How would a system that automates that outbound have helped you from day one?

Joshua: I think it would have been instrumental. 100%. Even from our latest conversations, there were 70,000 emails sent out in one month across multiple campaigns. As one man in a van, which is what we currently are, there are simply numbers that we couldn't achieve. If we had been doing that and refining that process from day one, I reckon we'd be a lot further along the line than we are now.

WDI: Could you go to trade shows, deal with your current clients, and target several industries at once yourself?

Joshua: No, there just wouldn't be enough hours in the day. What I really like about this arrangement is that I can go and maintain my relationships with existing customers, who we are getting value from today, while WDI focus on generating that pipeline. When I come back from these shows and I have some time to close some opportunities, they've been primed and they're ready to go. I can just dial up the numbers that have been passed to me. A lot of that tyre kicking and getting in the door has already been achieved.

WDI: Where do you see CeimTech over the next 12 months, and in a few years?

Joshua: In the next 12 months, we're constantly growing our relationship with CMW in Bulgaria. We were focusing on the Irish and UK markets, and that territory has now expanded to Scandinavia and more recently the US. Two years from now, we'd hope that with our continued efforts with WDI we'll have a lot more home-based business to work from, so that we can take on more people, and whoever's on our team can focus on supplying, supporting and developing relationships with our existing customers locally.