CAPE Groep Leveled up Their Sales Strategy and Booked 93 Meetings in a Year

Mendix Partner

CAPE Groep

Industry: IT Services and IT Consulting

Company size: 100+

Location: Utrecht and Enschede, The Netherlands

About CAPE Groep

CAPE Groep is a leader in IT services and consulting and specializes in digitizing business processes across various industries, including transport and supply chain, agrifood, and civil engineering. Within these industries, unique business challenges often can’t be solved with off-the-shelf software.

CAPE Groep has made it their mission to tailor software to their clients’ individual needs. “We offer our clients custom-made solutions that help them solve specific business problems. Both to fill the gap between existing applications and the business process and as solutions from scratch to digitize and automate parts of the process.” Bart Knol says. Bart is the Innovation Manager at CAPE Groep, and just over a year ago, he partnered with The Linq Group to restructure and improve CAPE Groep’s lead generation strategies.

At the beginning of the collaboration, CAPE Groep set a goal to build a sustainable and effective lead-generation strategy. Here is how the partnership created tangible results for the company:

Challenges with Traditional Marketing Strategies

Before partnering with The Linq Group, the CAPE Groep team was mainly dependent on referrals and word-of-mouth, which limited their scalability. Bart Knol explained, “We did not have a lot of structure or processes in place that supported us in our marketing and sales efforts.”

The absence of a clear strategy hindered consistent lead generation,“Getting more leads, acquiring more customers, and generating new business were our main challenges. We also realized we needed to create a more consistent stream of leads.”

The company also explored LinkedIn as a means to get in contact with qualified prospects, but their approach did not create the results they were looking for. “We did try LinkedIn, but we didn’t have a strategy in place. It was a lot of trial and error, and after some time, the lack of structure became an issue because we couldn’t stay consistent with the messaging or doing follow-ups with new connections.”

Partnering with The Linq Group

In 2023, CAPE Groep began working with The Linq Group to revamp their lead generation strategy. Over the past 14 months, this collaboration focused on different key areas:

“Our collaboration definitely helped our team quite a lot; it helped us be more efficient and save time. If we didn’t have you guys, we couldn’t do the LinkedIn outreach in such a structured way.”

Bart Knol, Innovation Manager at CAPE Groep

Targeting and nurturing the right audience

The Linq Group started by conducting a baseline measurement of the existing network of CAPE Groep’s sales team. This allowed for the segmentation of their current audience and the targeting of each group with tailored messaging sequences. “The structured approach provided by The Linq Group helped us bring more focus and effectiveness into our outreach,” Bart noted.

To grow the company’s network, The Linq Group got the sales team into contact with pre-qualified leads and initiated conversations through direct LinkedIn messaging – converting new connections into meetings. Going forward, his expansion creates new opportunities in the sales pipeline of CAPE Groep, which will help the company grow in more industries.

Achieving Results

The partnership created notable improvements in CAPE Groep’s approach to sales and lead generation:

Strategic outreach and network growth

The structured LinkedIn outreach campaigns led to a notable increase in network connections by adding more than 1.500 new and qualified contacts to the sales team’s network, resulting in 93 requested meetings so far.

Key factors in booking 7 meetings a month are the regular performance reviews and data analysis of the running outreach campaigns. This enables CAPE Groep to continuously refine strategies and focus on high-potential industries. “The ongoing support and strategy adjustments from our account manager Koen Scholten have been incredibly helpful,” Bart added.

“During our bi-weekly check-in calls, we go through the campaigns we are currently running, see how they are performing, and make adjustments when needed. Koen has been our consultant and is helping us a lot to evaluate which industries or job titles we need to focus on more and whether we should switch to a different target group to create better results.”

Making better data-driven decisions

Tracking data has been crucial in making targeting decisions. The Linq Group’s web application is an important tool for CAPE Groep to access and evaluate reliable insights. “The web application has been very helpful in understanding how the campaigns are performing, how prospects are reacting to different messaging, as well as getting a better overview of how the pipeline is looking.”

Getting these insights has also helped their sales team approach their outreach strategy more effectively:

“Because now, we can have an ongoing process so we can do the follow-ups with our prospects after three months or six months, we can also see who’s responded, who needs to re-engage, or who we need to schedule a meeting with.”

Access to their sales data combined with The Linq Group’s expertise also supported CAPE Groep in evaluating internally which industries to focus on.

Looking Ahead

“Now, we can see the progress with the campaigns and that we are now logging new prospects into the pipeline. So for the next months, the goal is to keep generating leads and moving them down the pipeline.”

The collaboration between CAPE Groep and The Linq Group demonstrates the power of a strategic approach to lead generation. By leveraging The Linq Group’s expertise, CAPE Groep has successfully enhanced their outreach efforts, grown their network, and improved their sales funnel. The ongoing support and data-driven insights provided by The Linq Group continue to drive CAPE Groep’s business growth and success.

For more information on how The Linq Group can help your business achieve similar results, visit our website or book a call with our experts today.