How Exsitec scaled up new customer acquisition using Vainu

The company

Since its founding in 2000, Exsitec has been on a steady, strong growth path, providing around 4,000 clients with market-leading business systems, IT support, and consultation in several business-critical areas and processes. Exsitec is one of the biggest partners in the Nordics for software vendors like Visma and Qlik BI systems and is also a HubSpot platinum solution partner.

Driven by a desire for continued growth, Exsitec sought a scalable solution to support the company's new customer acquisition in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Since 2019, Exsitec has relied on Vainu as a trusted source for company data. Powered by Vainu, the company's processes for sales prospecting, segmentation, and lead management have undergone a significant transformation.

The challenge

To scale up new customer acquisition

In 2019 when Pernilla Chis, Sales and Marketing Manager in CRM and E-Commerce branch, joined Exsitec as the company's first BDR, the sales team used multiple company databases and vendors, and the sales process included a lot of manual work from generating lists to researching the companies.

"Everybody had their own ways and methods for finding new leads, and there wasn't a structured way of prospecting. We had Google Drive full of outdated company lists our sales reps could buy whenever they wanted. They rang a few times to these companies, and the lists were of no use after that. You know the drill." Pernilla recalls the situation before Vainu. "There were experienced people in the sales team with extensive networks for lead sources. As the team grew, naturally, not all had that kind of a network in place."

As the sales team was snowballing, the need for one trusted company data vendor and scalable sales processes grew. Having worked in the company only for a year, Pernilla spearheaded a project focusing on increased collaboration between the sales and marketing teams for more efficient and scalable lead generation and inbound and outbound sales practices. Pernilla started looking for the best tool for B2B prospecting: "That's where I got to know Vainu. I said we need this to work more effectively," Pernilla describes and continues: "After comparing several company data vendors, we chose Vainu because it felt more premium, and the tech side more profound. We always want to work with the best partners and the best tools."

The solution

New customer acquisition made easy

A unified, simple sales prospecting process, more efficient lead qualification and management processes, and easy access to a wide range of company information nowadays help 30 sales reps save time and focus on more value-adding parts of the sales process, i.e., customer conversations and meeting preparation. But how's that done exactly?

Lead qualification: "I always have Vainu open in Chrome because it's my go-to place for looking up a company. I also use Vainu as a lead qualification tool for quick checks before forwarding inbound leads to sales reps," Pernilla describes.

Sales prospecting: The sales team uses Vainu to dynamically generate target groups of potential companies using attributes like industry, size, revenue, and technologies in use. Potential companies are sent to HubSpot CRM along with other relevant data points to keep the company records up to date.

Upsell and cross-sell opportunities: The team uploads a list of existing clients into Vainu to search for similarities within the companies and then filters out the next best candidates.

Company research: The sales team can easily access comprehensive company profiles and get an understanding of a prospect before initiating contact. This saves a lot of time and resources. Furthermore, Exsitec uses Vainu to research potential companies in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark for M&A purposes.

B2B segmentation and targeting: With Vainu, the team can identify target accounts for sales and marketing campaigns, such as companies using particular technologies like Mailchimp, a specific CRM, or an e-commerce system. Appropriate companies are sent to HubSpot and targeted through email sequences. Pernilla describes how she used Vainu in planning an event to see how the event's primary target businesses were geographically dispersed to find the most attractive location.

Results

Supported by Vainu, Exsitec has done fantastic work optimizing their sales processes. The key to success was engaging the new sales trainees in Vainu's implementation process, and soon they became fans of Vainu.

According to Pernilla, the improved efficacy in terms of sales and marketing is evident: "We've become substantially more effective in finding and qualifying prospects. Instead of tens of sales reps using a lot of time browsing several websites, we get up-to-date company lists and a good idea about any company's potential in a few minutes using Vainu." Pernilla ads that a minute or two saved in each part of the sales process adds up to hundreds of hours saved every month in a sales team as big as Exsitec has. The collaboration between Exsitec and Vainu is only about to begin!