How Verhaert 3X their opportunity generation rate

What is Verhaert Digital and what does it do?

Verhaert Digital builds custom software solutions. As part of a larger group, we invent, build and scale digital products. We help our customers identify the right technology for their business as well as build, deploy and maintain the solution following the highest quality standards.

Verhaert Digital is a fast-growing enterprise in digital products development. From automating manual tasks to creating added customer value, we aid in boosting productivity, minimizing costs, and delighting partners with innovative digital products.

Which geographies and industries do you focus on?

We work on the Belgian market where we focus on international accounts. We are working with companies in textiles, construction, machinery, services, healthcare, IoT, and many more to create digital products fulfilling a variety of use-cases.

How many people are in the company today and how many colleagues are focused on outreach, sales, or marketing? What is your main role?

We are a total of 30 people in Verhaert Digital, with a team of five focusing on outreach, sales or marketing.

My role in the company is Business Manager, which entails the running of the business’ day to day operations and providing direction to the rest of the team. I am also fully involved in the sales & marketing of Verhaert Digital.

Before hubsell how were you acquiring data and doing cold outreach?

As a group, we had a large database to work with. We also defined the industries that were important to us and created new lists of companies who we wanted to talk to.

Manually we started looking in tools like LinkedIn to reach out to the right people within those companies through email communication, so we could follow up with a “less cold” call. All of which was hard to scale and very manually driven.

Why did you stop acquiring data and doing cold outreach in that way and switched to hubsell?

Instead of stopping we outsource it to hubsell.  We had our large database cleaned and enriched by hubsell, and which we are subsequently reaching out to for setting up conversations.

We are also sourcing new contacts from new industries that are important to us and where we want to get a foot in the door.

Thanks to hubsell, we have been able to reach more people in less time whilst still communicating in a very personalised way as we would do manually.

I am not referring to a gain of time of a few minutes a day, but really having a really large personalised reach in a very automated way. Of course, it takes time as the preparation of a campaign is crucial for the success of it, but hubsell’s team is very hands on with their support and customer success. When well planned, the results are really amazing.

I am really convinced we’ve reached and scanned in 6 months, what should have taken us at least 15 to 18. As the process is now even more automated (generation of new contacts), the sales engine is really up to speed.

Is hubsell providing you with value?

Yes, and the main value for us is a huge win in time and effort. We only communicate with contacts who already are engaging with our company, so the time used by our salespeople is really only on the relevant contacts.

What normally is a manual process and takes a lot of time and efforts, has been sped up by nearly three to four times.

The main thing is, that sales is a numbers game, so if you want to reach a lot of people you need a sales army to attack them, or you use hubsell.

Is hubsell helping your team become more successful? If yes, how?

Yes, as we can focus on what is important and that is listening to our potential customers, learning about their challenges, and assisting them in their growth. So, because we can spend a lot more time getting to know the companies who are reaching out to us, we deliver a higher quality service.

In a few words what are the most valuable aspects or features of hubsell for you?

Highly personalised message templates and automated outreach that help us engage our prospects at a level that otherwise would require a large amount manual effort. The level of personalisation we can reach with each message is ~90%, so the message is totally different from one prospect to the next, and thereby also relevant.

Is there a specific campaign you were most pleased by? What made it work so well?

I love the A/B testing functionality, as we use a lot of templates with several small changes and in a specific flow. So by knowing trying out different versions we can learn a lot from the conversion each have.

The last campaign gave us a lot of insight and convinced me it is the right format for us. The statistics and editing modes helped us stay sharp and enabled us to easily optimise in each iteration.

The results are apparent.

What kind of conversion rates are you experiencing? And what type of bottom-line improvements did you experience?

Beyond what we had expected to say the least.

As we started with an opening rate of 28% I was already enthusiastic. I can now say that thanks to the personal approach and support from hubsell, we now are reaching opening rates of 60% easily and are converting our suspects to prospects.

Almost none of them are lost. It only may take some more time for a specific project to come across. In our line of business that’s just what we need (engage with the hot ones, and keep in touch with the wishlist).

In your own words, how would you recommend hubsell to a friend or a colleague in your industry?

I would recommend hubsell and I have, for the added value of gain in time, growth in reach and conversion rates generated by the solution.