FullFunnel Doubles NTS' Qualified Lead Volume

Company Background

National Technical Systems (NTS) has a rich history dating back to 1961. Since the company’s founding nearly 60 years ago, NTS has grown into a leading testing, inspection, and certification services provider for the most performance-critical industries. NTS operates a network of 28 testing laboratories throughout North America that support more than 8,000 clients within the automotive & transportation, autonomous vehicle manufacturing, energy, telecommunications, and consumer & medical industries. NTS’s service offering is highly complex, offering more than 70 distinct categories of environmental simulation and materials testing, and serving complex industries such as Aerospace and Defense.

The Challenges

Despite a robust client base and status as the 2019 NASA Award Winner, NTS was just scratching the surface of the organization’s potential growth. NTS had a massive internal database of 40,000 existing accounts that could generate net-new business, but lacked the in-house sales team to fully maximize this opportunity. The company’s combination of in-house Regional Sales Managers and outside Sales Managers were already tasked with handling prospecting activity, submitting quotes, and client success, limiting their ability to also devote time and energy into broad lead-generating efforts. NTS stakeholders sought a way to bridge this gap and explore sales opportunities at scale.

The Solution

With an opportunity to expand the organization by targeting prospective accounts from the company’s internal database, NTS stakeholders sought assistance from FullFunnel, a full-stack sales and marketing outsourcing firm located in Boston. Following an audit and discovery session that identified the organization’s internal sales limitations to generate leads from these accounts, FullFunnel developed an engagement roadmap that would enable NTS to expand the brand’s lead generation efforts by outsourcing sales development functions to FullFunnel. The two teams also determined that it would be beneficial to validate NTS’s existing prospect database, which would allow NTS to more effectively target leads with marketing materials.

To ensure the sales program’s success, FullFunnel and NTS worked closely on establishing a scalable partnership. During the early stages, FullFunnel focused on integrating with the different NTS teams by working with the company’s Director of Sales Operations, Vice President of Marketing, Director of Customer Support, and all Regional Sales Managers. To further introduce the pilot program to stakeholders across the organization, FullFunnel leadership attended an NTS global sales call to discuss goals and tactics and team members toured a local NTS facility.

Early on, the FullFunnel sales representatives concentrated on immersing themselves in NTS’s complex service offering. They became acquainted with commonly requested types of testing and certifications, learned how to talk like a peer with highly technical Engineer prospects, and adapted to each specific industry’s needs.

“Their efforts greatly improved the integrity of legacy lead data providing us with key insights about our prospects and customers.  Additionally, the enhanced lead qualification process allowed us to shorten the nurturing timeframe and more quickly create high-quality leads ready for sales follow up.  I highly recommend working with FullFunnel.”

Sarah Willis - Vice President of Marketing, NTS

Results

FullFunnel implemented a lead generation program to help NTS target key segmentations. At first, the two teams focused on high-priority geographies, including Silicon Valley, Texas, and Illinois, where the organization either had turnover in sales rep coverage or where overall sales volume was lacking. Later on, FullFunnel prospected into additional target groups, such as former customers and cold inbound leads.

In addition to generating impressive demand, FullFunnel cleaned and identified the company’s addressable database. This included validating information such as email address and website domain, as well as grouping companies based on whether or not they used product testing status and if that testing was completed internally or in an outsourced manner. This allowed the NTS team to further purge their database of irrelevant leads and to intelligently target eligible prospects through segmented marketing.

With this program in place, FullFunnel has helped NTS not only exceed the organization’s initial SQL goal, but also better understand their target markets and clean their extensive database. Between the end of 2019 and 2020, FullFunnel has:

• Nearly doubled the number of SQLs generated from its target. Between 2019-2020, FullFunnel booked 209 SQLs during a nine-month period, versus an initial target of 108 during that time frame, equaling 194% of the program’s goal. 
• Collected more than 1,000 data points on companies’ product-testing status, averaging over 100 a month during the engagement. 
• Worked on numerous data provisioning and cleansing projects with NTS.

To sustain this high level of activity, FullFunnel uses a mix of channels, with a heavily emphasis placed on getting prospects live on the phone. In fact, despite navigating through current remote working conditions at prospect companies, FullFunnel has booked 31% of SQL meetings via the phone.

The partnership between NTS and FullFunnel proved so successful during the pilot engagement that the two organizations continue to work together to this day.