FullFunnel's SDRs Help Restaurant Industry Giant Expand Its Sales Program

Company Background

In operation for almost 40 years, our client has been committed to enhancing the restaurant industry for both businesses and consumers by combining the best of financial technology, loyalty rewards, and capital funding. The company achieved this goal by partnering with the country’s leading loyalty brands spanning the restaurant, airline, hotel, and retail sectors that have a customer base of more than 20 million members. Our client then provides card-linked offers that support these loyalty programs by driving full-price consumers to restaurants.

The Challenge

At the time of the engagement, COVID-19 had impacted the restaurant industry in a profound way, encouraging our client to stop charging their clients for marketing services. The business set up webinars to educate restaurants about how they can weather the pandemic and apply for Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans. This commitment and strong value proposition has enabled the organization to reach a network of 12,000 restaurants across the country. Many of these establishments are high-quality, local businesses with a presence in major metropolitan markets. These brands cannot compete with fast-casual or fine-dining restaurants that have a far more significant national presence and readily available marketing resources. Eventually, our client’s stakeholders want to expand this network to 50,000 restaurants. 

To accomplish this goal, our client's stakeholders were looking to pivot what was mostly a field-sales operation where employees generate new business through face-to-face interactions to more of an inbound strategy predicated on Sales Development Rep (SDR) functions to explore sales opportunities from incoming leads generated through digital advertising, organic traffic, direct mail, and email marketing.

The Solution

Our fully managed staffing service provided 2 full-time SDRs to support the company’s field sales team.  FullFunnel’s main priorities were: 

• Following up with inbound leads across three segments - Direct Mailer Leads, Hot Inbounds, Resource Downloads 
• Qualifying leads based on criteria provided by the client’s team 
• Setting up qualified meetings for the Account Executives and providing notes that will help them understand the prospect’s needs
• Following the progress of the leads passed over to the AEs to ensure they flow through the funnel at expected conversion rates

Results

The FullFunnel worked alongside our client to develop a process to create consistent closed won revenue from both direct mail and inbound leads. We utilized a high-velocity sales system and lead prioritization system to efficiently reach out to interested and qualified prospects to generate consistent results. Throughout the engagement, FullFunnel regularly exceeded the 40-meeting monthly goal. Additionally, these meetings consistently generated qualified opportunities and led to a substantial ROI on MRR alone.