In my limited experience I have generally seen that sale team works hard. They are constantly working on many prospects. All that we do is shift their efforts in a direction that yields faster results. Want to know how?

Its great when your Service apartment business is running smooth and you are seeing success. But, How do you take advantage of that success to improve your business further? That is what I am here to talk about in this blog post.

My Pain:

When I joined, TrustedStay  I analysed all the won accounts and found that the Insurance sector topped the list.  The accounts were Acko Insurance, Bharti AXA Insurance & Tata AIG? my worry was…

• What if we lose one account?
• Have we tapped the complete insurance sector?
• How to improve Business?

My Experience:

I had to show to my sales team on the direction to tap prospects. Unless I do not show the big picture, no one is going to listen to my advice. So, I decided to compute the potential of serviced apartment business in Insurance Sector.

Here is the step by step process of what I did.

Step 1 – The List:

I pulled out all the insurance companies in India along with information like No. of employees, branches etc from their websites. Would you like to take a guess on How many Insurance companies are there in India?

Spoiler Alert: 58. Yes there are a total of 58 Insurance companies in India having a strength of 3.37 Lac direct employee strength.

Step 2 – The Potential:

Now that we knew the employee strength of each of these insurance companies, the next step was to figure out which of these companies have how much of potential in terms of giving us the business.

Its simple math based on the present no of accounts/employee strength/Room nights given. The extrapolated total business potential for serviced apartment accommodation was 25 crore per annum for 58 insurance companies put together. This was a very conservative figure. Just 10% of it was sufficient to take TrsutedStay to cloud 9.

Shared the presentation with my sales team in our weekly meet. The presentation drew attention of the sales team. The sales team had got the direction, but my work had not started till I get them the leads.

Step 3 – The Strategy:

The idea here was to flaunt our existing insurance accounts to other companies in the Insurance sector. So, we came up with 4 banner designs for our campaigns. The idea was to run Email Marketing campaign as well as Social Media Ads campaigns.

Step 4 – The Execution:

Email Marketing Campaign:

We sent emails to our existing insurance sector database with the banners we designed. (Read more on how to maintain relationships with clients in this blog post)

Social Media Ad Campaign:

Here, we leveraged the targeting methods of Facebook as well as LinkedIn. We targeted all the employees of 58 insurance companies based on their position in these 58 Insurance companies for our lead generation ad campaigns with an early bird offer.

On Facebook We were able to target around 19 of these 58 companies for which the potential reach was around 0.75 Lacs. We set a daily budget of Rs. 500 for the campaign.Whereas on LinkedIn we created two separate campaigns – one based on companies and the other campaigns target audience were filtered out based on their job roles in these companies. The reach of the campaigns was 2.40 L & 2400, respectively. We set a daily budget of Rs. 500 for each of the campaigns.

Step 5 – The Result:

Facebook Ad Campaign:

We spent a total of Rs. 4,000 on Facebook lead generation ad campaign for 8 days and the results were as following.

• Impressions on Ads: 34,949 i.e. this is the number of people who saw our ad.
• Number of Leads Gained: 80 i.e. this is the number of people who enquired with us after seeing the ad.

LinkedIn Ad Campaign:

We spent a total of Rs. 4000 for 8 days each on both Company targeted as well as Job Role filtered campaigns. Following were the results of each of these campaigns.

Companies Targeted Campaign:

• Impression on Ads: 3,420
• Number of Leads Gained: 17

Job Role filtered campaign:

• Impression on Ads: 3,759
• Number of Leads Gained: 3

What is noteworthy is that even though the amount of leads on LinkedIn were less compared to Facebook; the quality was way better than that of Facebook. The reason might be the amount of targeting options you get on LinkedIn to pinpoint your audiences.

My Conclusion:

It is like that old saying “Money attracts money”, We just improvised the saying by trying to attract business using existing business.

Though the process is long & tiring; especially the research part, it is all worth it at the end. You are putting your brand out there in front of the companies that are competitors to the companies which are already giving you business.

Best case scenario, your business gets a boost; Worst case scenario, the campaigns will provoke a thought in the minds of people about your brand. In both the situations you are improving your business. If this is not a win-win situation, I don’t know what is. Would love to have your comments below.

Also Checkout: Is cold call visit for new prospects outdated?