Sourcing Allies

Sourcing Allies

Sales process, lead generation and marketing automation for a China sourcing partner serving customers in the US and Europe.

More work
Sourcing Allies
Client
Sourcing Allies

What we did

Trade fairs, beers and chicken wings.

Sourcing Allies has been sourcing and manufacturing industrial goods in China and other low-cost countries for customers in the US and Europe since 2006. In January 2019 its CEO, Eric Bengtson, got in touch with a request that was easy to say and hard to do: get us off traditional sales. In his words, "we wanted to find a more efficient way to conduct sales that wasn't only about going to trade fairs and ordering beers and chicken wings with uninterested customers". He wanted leads found, qualified and managed by a system, and a sales pipeline that generated sales based on results.

  1. First, who was buying.

    We started with the Value Proposition Canvas and the Business Model Canvas, sat down with the team, and worked out who their core customers really were and what the business was offering them. That produced a company vision aimed at the partners Sourcing Allies wanted to collaborate with, and everything after it was built to serve that.

    Then the machinery. We built a lead generator wired into the tools the company already ran on, Zapier, HubSpot and Mailchimp, so that spotting a serious prospect, reaching them and following up stopped being three separate manual jobs. The process was designed to keep tuning itself: run it, look at what the leads did, change it.

  2. Two years down to six months.

    The sales cycle went from two years to six months. Lead costs fell from $2,000 to $100. Conversions went from 0.7% to 20% against the previous year. Niclas Bengtson, the VP of sales, put the reason simply: they could now identify serious potential customers and reach them at the point they needed help. Digital transformation lands in old industries more easily than people assume. Sourcing Allies is not near Silicon Valley and never needed to be.

In their words

Together with Up Strategy Lab, we were able to use modern techniques and methodologies such as the Value Proposition Canvas and Business Model Canvas to reflect on who our core customers are, and what we offered them as a business.

Eric BengtsonCEO, Sourcing Allies

Thinking about something similar?

Book a conversation with Noel. No pitch deck required, just an honest discussion about what you are building and whether we are the right fit.

Book a meeting with Noel

Typically responds within one business day. Based in Gothenburg, Sweden, clients everywhere.

Related projects