How I Acquired My First Client in Sweden Using the Principle of Locality While Working at a Software House, and What Happened Next
Back in 2017, I joined a software house as a Business Developer. During my probationary period, I acquired a client in the Swedish market, where the company I worked for had a limited portfolio. The first transaction was worth €62,000, and over the next two years, the total sales value to this client exceeded €500,000.
How Did I Achieve This?
I utilized several straightforward strategies that made us appear as a local Swedish IT firm to potential clients:
- The company I represented arranged for one of its clients to allow us to use their Swedish office address on our website as our local branch.
- On Clutch.co, where we had a profile, I updated our address information to include all the offices we shared.
- A month later, I received the first inquiries from potential clients. The client I secured was convinced we would be traveling to his office from Gothenburg for negotiations until we met in person.
My intention was not to impersonate a Swedish company. The effect achieved with a few simple steps was somewhat unintended. However, we did not achieve scalability, so besides a few inquiries throughout the year, I did not get regular orders from the mentioned portal.
What Happened Next?
Acquiring subsequent clients turned out to be arduous and painstaking work. Regular trips to Sweden, arranging meetings, presentations, follow-ups, calls, long estimates, and waiting to see if there was an adequate budget to start a new project for my company – this was my reality. It turned out that I was performing a few essential tasks without which I wouldn’t have anyone to talk to. One of these tasks was cold emailing.
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Outbound vs. Inbound
The marketing department worked tirelessly to regularly bring valuable leads to the sales team. However, an inbound lead is generally more promising than an outbound lead. An experienced salesperson will quickly notice that at least half of these desirable inbound leads come from companies that need your offer only as a reference point to compare with offers they have already received from your competitors. Therefore, it’s crucial to be proactive and reach out to potential clients.
The Role of Outbound Lead Generation in B2B
To sustain their livelihood, salespeople, new business developers, and business managers must regularly meet with decision-makers who can make purchasing decisions. According to HubSpot’s research, only 2% of the market is ready to buy now. Additionally, 53% of marketers believe that cold emailing is the most effective source of early-stage lead generation. Referring back to my story, every month I created cold email campaigns aimed at arranging meetings with potential clients. Each month, I aimed to attend at least one conference or event where I could organize additional meetings. When GDPR regulations were introduced, I shifted my cold outreach to LinkedIn for over two years. Just one regularly conducted campaign yielded several to a dozen leads per month. For conferences, the numbers were much higher – the lowest result was 15 meetings, and I often managed to schedule up to 60 (which is not advisable if you have to attend 20 meetings per day during a three-day conference, as you won’t make it to half of them). This method allowed me to regularly acquire two to three clients annually from leads sourced from LinkedIn or cold emailing. Over time, I noticed that cold outreach supported my networking efforts. Without it, I would not be able to function as a salesperson. Without automation and tools for sending cold email campaigns, I would have drowned in follow-ups.
The Role of Locality in Outbound Lead Generation
How does this relate to the principle of locality discussed in previous episodes of “Outbound Explained”? Another observation I made was that response rates and the number of scheduled meetings varied depending on the country I traveled to. The number of leads and meetings in Nordic countries was, on average, 50% higher than when I conducted the same activities in countries such as Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Australia, Portugal, Spain, or the United States.
Factors That Made a Difference:
- The number of clients from a specific country in the company’s portfolio
- Availability of a local office
- Number of case studies in the given market
The difference that language makes when communicating with potential clients became evident to me while working for the Danish branch of one of the Polish software houses. Their sales director, who handled the Swedish market and spoke the native language, outperformed all 10 foreign branches of the company in sales, generating 25% of the company’s total revenue single-handedly. It is worth noting that this person performed exactly the same outbound activities as I did, overseeing sales in the Norwegian market and other business managers. Although I managed to match the number of scheduled meetings and leads, I did not record any sales. The Norwegian portfolio compared to the Swedish one was about 0 to 100 against me. Since then, representing various software houses, I have always tried to maximize everything that brought me closer to the local market, initially assessing my strengths based on:
- The portfolio we had in the given market
- The possibility of creating or using local offices
- Contacting clients in the local language, either personally or through friendly clients
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