Optico breaks into 100% of Tier 1 enterprise accounts

Optico makes precision-moving optical instruments for engineering companies, usually mid-market ones. But leadership wanted to move upmarket, which meant going from a space where they enjoyed near universal awareness into one where they had nearly none. 

After trying to approach a few large accounts on their own, they realized that they simply didn’t have the expertise. Up to that point, they’d relied so heavily on their brand reputation and the product features that had made them successful, they’d become reliant on that inbound. Asked to outbound to a new market, their marketing and sales teams just didn’t have the institutional knowledge. So, they called Inverta.

We worked with them to build a program that helped them go after not hundreds of accounts, but four, with far more specific outreach than they’d previously sent. They successfully engaged 100% of those accounts.

Without awareness, they couldn’t get meetings

Optico’s issue was an awareness problem. “Their sales team felt like they were just banging their heads against a wall trying to get meetings,” recalls Jeff Hirka, Inverta Senior Consultant. “They didn’t have the relationships and they felt they didn’t understand those enterprise engineering departments well enough to get a foot in the door. Their outreach mostly went without response.” 

To us, this was a clear call for conducting more account research. Optico’s sellers needed to identify what exactly was being produced or manufactured at each of the enterprise’s specific sites and reach out to those general managers based on it. This was a mix of good old-fashioned online sleuthing, first-party data from their CRM and marketing automation platform, and third-party data about the topics those companies were researching. This produced detailed account profiles for technology initiatives and associated contacts. We provided that layer of research to show Optico, so they could adopt that process themselves. 

We then used that research to build a series of webinars and workshops across time zones  that’d give salespeople a compelling reason to reach out to those target managers: 

• A webinar workshop series
• Innovation “demo” days
• Executive strategy briefings
• A quarterly technology speaker series
• A podcast

“We took Optico’s motion optics expertise and converted it into these goodwill series where we were giving away that information,” says Jeff. “It was them going, ‘Hey, we’re experts in this space. If you found this useful, imagine what you could learn talking to our people.’”

As part of that program, Inverta refreshed Optico’s ads and emails to be account-specific, to include the new content, and to form cohesive, coordinated plays. “They’d been running ads and sending emails before, but they hadn't been doing it all together around messaging with a value that people could instantly grasp,” says Jeff. 

Optico reached 100% of Tier 1 accounts

The outreach worked exactly as hoped and the workshops were oversubscribed, which they didn’t anticipate. Sometimes, they’d have 13 attendees per account. “Part of what made it work was the consistency of the messaging across each account,” says Jeff, “which worked because we had such precise data around what specific topics contacts were researching.” 

Now Optico has a 1:1 account-based model with real data and templates that they can repeat across segments.