How we've booked 300+ demos
for a logistics SaaS

This software / SaaS company was targeting VPs and above in Operations, Supply Chain, Finance and Procurement at companies with fleets over 100 commercial vehicles.

In this case study, I'll present the initial challenges we had, then sharing exactly what we did regarding outbound revenue share, SDR / AE splits and multi-channel outbound strategies to reach a relatively limited TAM without burning leads.

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1. Initial Challenges

1. Relatively small TAM (Total addressable market)

We had two main market segments: SMBs (Small Businesses) and Mid-market / Enterprise. Before we started working together, there was no clear split, no clear teams and no separate sales process for these two VERY different ICPs.

2. Running WAY too little volume

With about 6 SDRs and 3 AEs we had nine people doing outbound. Issue was, reps were sending emails manually, doing about 10 LinkedIn DMs a week and 50 dials per day (because this was mandatory). This is not nearly enough volume to effectively get an offer out to the market.

3. Spending time on the wrong things

Sales Reps were spending most of their time sourcing leads / prospect lists from Gmaps, LinkedIn and Lusha manually. This gave them less time to actually work leads properly and burned tons of credits because no one really knew what to search for.

4. High employee turnover

Because of the constant pressure for more outbound without the proper support, reps got frustrated and started leaving. This left leadership with no options. Investors wanted a high outbound revenue share, but no one seemed to get outbound to work.

5. "Cold email doesn't work"

This was what we heard tossed around hundreds of times. Yet the actual reasoning behind this was no proper strategy, AI generated scripts, a fragile infrastructure and abysmal deliverability.

6. Putting branding over actually helping people

Yes, branding is important. But putting 2 banners, 3 logos and 5 links in the email signature was only hurting outbound sales efforts for obvious reasons. People get distracted and email providers start blacklisting you.

2. What they tried to fix it

1. Hiring more sales reps

Perhaps the most straightforward solution, yet it's also the riskiest and most expensive one. They went through multiple sales reps that had "experience". Evaluating whether it's a fit or not normally took 6 months, by then, salaries, insurance, benefits and manager time was paid without getting a single dollar ROI. Some stayed, some didn't. But the hiring costs for one SDR exceeded five figures.

2. Hiring an agency

The only other solution left. They tried multiple agencies, paying huge retainers with long locked contracts. The same issues came up every time: No leads at all. If they did get leads, they didn't book. If they did book, 5 times out of 10 they weren't qualified at all.

3. Field Sales strategy for big accounts

AEs frequently went out with company cars to bigger businesses, trying to get hold of the decision maker. While this was successful, it got them 4 demos within a year. Solid long-term strategy for huge businesses, but nothing for the next 6 months.

So how did they fix this?

3. Our solution: SMB segment

Different markets need different solutions.

For SMBs, the plan was simple: Send highly relevant, non-personalized emails to the entire market every 30 days.

Some example scripts we've used:

Hey FN, are you still tracking your entire fleets TCO manually using excel?

If so, we've built a software that automates all of this. Clear real-time cost reports for your finance department and a driver app to manage damages and insurance filings without error.

Worth a chat?

Hey FN, we recently helped CLIENT save about €300 in yearly maintenance costs per vehicle for a 400 vehicle fleet.

Confident we could do the same for you. Interested in a quick video showing how it works?

Hey FN, if we helped your drivers submit driving license checks digitally on time without unorganized in-person meetings, would you be interested?

These are some slightly altered variations to protect their privacy. We tested around 8-10 new scripts every week.

Doing this we were able to reach the entire TAM every 30 days with a new angle of the same offer. This led us to convert most of the market that could actually benefit from our solution over time and gain some new relationships with bigger holding companies that are likely to close in the coming years.

Once the positive replies came in, we called each one within five minutes, qualifying them and booking in about 70% of them on the first call.

The AEs received a booked meeting with handoff notes in their own Salesforce account in a structured SPICED framework.

4. Our solution: MM / Enterprise segment

Contrary to popular belief, cold email works great for small markets, IF you do it right.

Doing it right doesn't necessarily mean changing the scripts. It just means that you reach ALL the decision makers within a company with a relevant message tailored to THEM.

Multi-threading accounts

First we looked at all the different pain points this software solved.

Then we wrote down which titles are affected by which pain, directly and indirectly.

We came up with a list like this:

Once we had this, we could email every decision maker in a company. We frequently contacted 10-15 people in the same business with relevant pain points.

Often, we got multiple responses and booked meetings with 3+ stakeholders in the first demo which helped reduce the sales cycle as well. That's why this works.

Using this strategy, we've booked meetings with hard-to-reach companies like AIRBUS, Lockheed Martin, BMW Group, Toyota Group, IBM, Vattenfall, Siemens, Bundeswehr, REWE, Porsche AG and many more.

The script remained very simple:

Hey FN, Are you currently dealing with problem? If so, we've built a solution that helps you get a quantified outcome in just time. Worth a chat?

Don't think you need to overcomplicate scripts just because you're going upmarket. What matters more is that you have a relevant pain point (again, I'm repeating myself) and just messaging every decision maker in the company. That's the only difference between SMBs and mid-market or enterprise companies.

Multi-Channel Outreach

What also helps if you have a small market is adding other channels to support your cold email effort. For example, LinkedIn DMs and cold calling. This works great because you just get more shots at target, so that's exactly what we did here as well.

The SDRs didn't have to worry about prospecting, finding leads, or manually sending cold emails anymore. They could put all their attention into building relationships within companies by:

• cold calling specific people
• finding out more relevant information that could be important to people higher up
• expanding their connections on LinkedIn
• DMing every single person at that company with something relevant

Fundamentally, the more you expose your market to your messaging and offer, the more people are going to know about it, and if people know about it, they can buy it. And this is why doing more is always a good thing to do.

5. Sales Team Improvements

It doesn't matter how good your outbound motion is. If you can't train reps on the winning process and have them stick to it, then you won't get any results over time. When we started with this company, the team structure and management and training were a big mess.

So here's what we did to fix it:

I'm going to go into onboarding new reps, ongoing training, management, and commission structures that we've implemented to improve the overall results of the sales team.

Please note that doing this without having enough volume in the first place won't matter, so make sure you actually do enough outbound. People only learn by actually doing something and repeating it over and over again, so if they don't have a chance to repeat stuff, it won't work.

The problem with scaling is that problems scale exponentially with a factor of two, which means that if you double the size, you quadruple the problems that previously existed. That's why we need to get extremely rigorous in the result of having a system that gets repeated the same way, every single time.

It all starts with onboarding

Good onboarding means a new hire can replicate the ideal process as fast as possible.

Leon's Definition Of Onboarding = % of similarity to winning process * speed

What this means is during onboarding you have two objectives:

• Drill them on the process so they stick to it
• Do it as fast as possible

For someone to understand your process (or system), they need information. To be more specific, they need to learn:

• Scripts (What to say)
• Tonality (How to say it)
• SOPs (How to do things)
• Schedules (When to do things)

If they learn these 4 things, they will say the right things, the right way and do the right action at the right times, which means, they replicated the system that got you in KPI. Success!

Script Writing

So we did exactly that: we wrote scripts for every single situation, meaning an outbound call and inbound/warm call, when you get a positive reply from an email, and how to answer specific questions and objections properly.

Then we told management to start recording calls and praise people publicly when they actually stuck to the script. The reps started connecting "sticking to the script" with "making more money", which incentivized them to do the right thing.

Tonality

People overcomplicate this a lot. There's no such thing as 'curious tone' and so on. At least it won't significantly impact your results. All you need to know is when to pause and when to ask a question.

• Pause = Draw attention to certain words
• Question = Upward inflection, expecting a response

So in the scripts, we simply put a double dash for long pauses, "..." for short pauses, and a ? for upward inflections. And if this seems extremely simple it's because it is. And that's why it works.

You'll be surprised how many people mess up even something simple like a pause.

Other than these variables, we made sure the team always talked loud enough, clear enough and slow enough to maximize comprehension. That's it.

At this point they knew to say things. Great. Next we needed to show them how to certain actions.

Writing SOPs (Standard Operating Proceedures)

An SOP is a step by step explanation of how to do a certain action needed to run the system.

Examples:

• Booking Appointments SOP
• Pre-Call SOP
• Post-Call SOP
• No-Show SOP
• Onboarding Handover SOP

The quality of the SOP will determine the human error rate and therefore the scalability of the business. Here's what we did:

1. Wrote down every step in detail, even if it seems 'self-explanatory'
2. Made one document per SOP
3. Linked a video (Loom) at the top showing how you do it
4. Made an SOP Hub per function where we linked all documents / SOPs
5. Made it part of your culture to always stick to SOPs

Doing this made the reps do the same things in the same order every time. Which means we got predictable results. Awesome.

Daily / Weekly Schedules

We implemented two 'operating modes'. Hunting and Killing.

• Hunting = Finding new opportunities, doing outbound, cold calls, etc
• Killing = Going for the close, doing sales calls, following up, etc

Fundamentally, hunting is more important, because without doing it we can't do the other.

Which means, every minute that the team doesn't spend on killing, should be spent on hunting.

Other than this, we had certain SOPs that need to be completed at certain times in the day.

For example: Daily Report SOP (End of day), Pipeline Review SOP (End of week)

For those:

1. We wrote the time in the SOP itself.
2. Made them schedule it as an event in their calendar.
3. Regularly checked up if they're actually doing it.

Doing this meant getting the % of similarity to the winning process close to 100%. Great. Onboarding successful.

Ongoing Sales Training

People need to be reminded more than they need to be taught.

At this point we managed to make someone replicate the process, but we needed them to keep doing it, which is what training is for.

There are 3 things that can be done:

1. They train on their own
2. They train with the manager
3. They train with others (the team)

We did this by:

1. Making it a habit to read the Scripts, SOPs & Training materials once a week
2. Having roleplay sessions where we went through difficult scenarios together
3. Letting the team do calling rounds or something similar without the managers presence

Important note for anyone reading this: Make SURE, you record every single sales call & meeting. You can give those transcripts to any AI and let it find common issues, objections etc. You can use that data to improve the training. It would be unwise to not do this. Especially because it's completely free.

Commission Structures

If you don't pay your reps enough money, they're going to leave. No matter how good everything else is.

Rule: You'll always optimize towards the thing you incentivize for.

Meaning, if you give bonuses on showed meetings, you'll get people putting more effort into getting more showed meetings. Simple.

With that framework, and the KPIs I mentioned earlier, here's what we used:

Appointment Setters / SDRs

1. Base pay
2. Commission on showed meetings (Fixed $ amount per meeting showed)
3. Commission on closed deals / SPIFF (1% of closed deal size as a bonus)

Especially the last one made a huge difference, because then everyone was incentivized to collaborate, push each other, get better together and book more high quality meetings.

Perfect balance.

Rule: Don't make the highest percentage of their payment reliant on somebody else. That will only cause resentment and stress.

Closers / AEs

1. Base pay
2. Commission on closed deals (% of closed deal size as a bonus)
3. Kicker (2x the % when they exceed 100% of their target)

SMB / Enterprise Team Split

Before we started making changes, everyone was responsible for everything.

Problem is: Enterprise sales is VERY different from SMB sales. The latter is way more transactional, we had a sales cycle of about 2-3 weeks and the contracts were usually under $40k ARR. Enterprise deals took upwards of 6 months, some are still ongoing and are in the high six figure range.

So we made a clear split by vehicle & location size. If a lead of the enterprise segment accidentally landed with a SMB SDR, they had to hand it over asap. Inbound requests got filtered and routed to the correct team.

Progression Framework

A lot of people think that you go from SMB AE to Enterprise AE to Manager over your career.

I fully disagree. All of these three are entirely different jobs with different processes. The best closer isn't the best manager.

And so we made sure to give each rep a clear path to where they want to go. Nothing was fixed, everything was aligned to the individual. Some SDRs made great managers even though their numbers were worse than the best in the team.

6. Lead Routing & Scoring System

The worst thing that can happen to a sales org is a cluttered and unreadable CRM. The reps don't know what to prioritize, so you lose big deals without ever knowing about it.

That is why it is extremely important to route leads correctly based on:

• Funnel level
• Qualification level

So we had to implement both of these into Salesforce. Note that we only came up with the concepts and strategy, the RevOps team actually implemented this.

Funnel-level routing

This is very simple, we implemented three funnel levels:

• Upper funnel (White papers, PDFs, simple leadmagnets)
• Middle funnel (Webinar signups)
• Lower funnel (Demo / Pricing requests)

For the longest time, this company was handing all of these leads to the SDRs. They obviously had no issue with this, since lower funnel leads meant free demos that counted towards quota. As nice as that might be, this messes with your statistics.

So here's what we implemented:

• Upper and middle funnel leads got routed via round-robin to the correct SDRs. Equal weights. Excluded if OOO.
• Lower funnel leads got routed to AEs directly and created as an opportunity in Salesforce.
• For each form we enabled partial submissions and multi-step forms to catch leads who decided to stop halfway through.

Each partial submission got emails, a manual intro from the assigned team member and a call within five minutes.

Lead Scoring & Qualification

We were dealing with a lot of arguments between SDRs, AEs and management as to which leads are qualified and which aren't. That's why we implemented Binary Qualification Frameworks.

Binary meaning: yes or no statements that add or remove points.

Examples:

• Fleet Size over 100: If yes, add 5 points
• Fleet Size under 20: If yes, remove 5 points
• Warehouses over 5: If yes, add 5 points

This allowed us to have one number that can't be argued with that decides whether a lead is qualified or not.

• Score over 30: Demo accepted, Opportunity created
• Score under 10: Disqualified completely, nurture
• Score over 50: Gets the "Priority" tag and is handled first

Suddenly, every argument was gone.

Finding what points to add for what criteria came down to analyzing the entire customer base by who:

• Spent the most
• Stayed the longest
• Complained the least
• And got the best results

Once we filtered that list, we found certain attributes that all of the companies shared. We went extremely deep. How much time between each meeting? Average response time? Employee count? Titles? Call availability? And so on...

Using this data we built the "Perfect Company" also called ICP.

Then we defined the lower end of the spectrum, the worst company that we'd still work with.

Once we had that range, coming up with qualification criteria was easy.

And using all of this, we could reverse engineer questions that the SDRs HAD to ask before every meeting.

Qualification Frameworks

And the last part was giving reps a framework to sort their answers by. For this we used SPICED.

• Situation: How are you currently doing x?
• Pain: What's wrong with that?
• Impact: What happens if you don't do anything?
• Critical Event: Example / When is the last time this happened?
• Decision: Who needs to be involved and what do they care about? / Must-haves

Having this as fields in the CRM helped a ton with how effective the deal reviews were.

• Why is this company ghosting? Impact is empty
• They said yes but aren't closing: Decision structure missing
• They aren't giving me a timeline: No critical event

And we knew exactly what questions to ask in the follow up meetings based on which fields looked empty.

BONUS: This also massively helped with forecasting and setting realistic timelines.

7. Results

This resulted in roughly 300 demos booked from us alone, around 500 demos booked from the sales team using our strategies and $5-7M in new business ARR attributed to our efforts within 12 months.

We managed to get accounts like AIRBUS, Lockheed Martin, BMW Group, Toyota Group, IBM, Vattenfall, Siemens, Bundeswehr, REWE, Porsche AG and many more on 1-hour long demos with 2+ stakeholders.

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Copied from the public logistics SaaS Gamma case study. The client is unnamed. Scripts are slightly altered to protect privacy.