Innovade was able to close 2 new clients after only 2 weeks of our collaboration.
Who is Innovade and what do they do?
Innovade is a team of social media recruiting experts and everything around human resources (specifically for tax accountant offices). If you want to know how to improve the overall mood of your employees, their performance, make them want to stay with you, or win top candidates for your company - it wouldn’t hurt to get in touch with them.
What Situation was Innovade in?
Innovade was in the same stage as many other people and companies I work with. He wanted to extend his business and get more clients. Before we started working together he played the numbers game of cold calling. It worked kind of, he closed a deal every now and then, but it was rather hit and miss than predictable.
What was the challenge?
here were 2 main obstacles to overcome:
1) The main challenge was that there is a ton of competition in the HR field. Especially for tax accountants, since it’s not a secret that there is a lack of quality tax staff in Germany. So tax accountants get more emails from HR services than a model DMs on Instagram.
2) A bit of a debbie downer was that technically speaking cold emailing in Germany is illegal. Practically nobody will really file a charge against you, but you never know - if we Germans see a beautiful castle, the first thing we’d do is to complain about the power bill..
Also it’s not necessary to do so, in this particular case the client preferred a rather safe strategy.
How did we solve it?
So first of all on our side was that we knew there was a big need for someone who can staff a tax accountant with quality employees.
Our job was to find a strategy to mitigate the 2 challenges we faced and get the foot in the door for Innovade.
And we came up with a stupidly simple tactic that 1) made our emails stand out drastically from the usual cold emails people in Germany send, and 2) to completely dodge the legal bullet.
To tackle 1) you have to know that in Germany there are 2 ways to address someone with “you”. One is formal: “Sie” and the other one is casual: “Du”. And especially in this niche you better be careful having the audacity to address someone with “Du” in a professional context. BUT you never know if you never try - and come on, we had to stick out somehow. So we addressed all our prospects “per Du”, instead of using the formal “Sie” + “Last Name”.
Now we were left facing issue number 2) Better not catching a case. So if we’re not allowed to unsolicited pitch to someone, how about just asking them a question? And that’s just what we did, a plain & simple 1-liner. I will show you in the “Workflow Section” which one it was.
The Workflow
1) We scraped tax accounts through apollo.io and via Google search results (with clay.com).
2) Next we uploaded the contacts to a table in clay.
3) Then we scraped their sites for career pages & checked if they had open job listings.
4) If so we would extract the job listing title to refer to in our emails.
5) Now we had to map accounts to people. We used the apollo integration in clay to look for Founders & CEOs of these tax accountant offices, because in most cases these offices are rather small businesses and the founder would make decisions in that matter.
6) We validated each contact's email with neverbounce.com.
7) For every contact we could get a valid email address we took the job listing title from step 4. and normalized it with chatGPT (with clay) so it sounded more organic in our emails. For example, instead of: “Hybrid: Tax Assistant” it be “Tax assistant”, “TA”, and “Tax Assistant”. This way we could use 3 different versions if needed.
8) And finally we exported all valid contacts to instantly.ai ready for them to receive our 1-liner: “Hey {{firstName}} - could be off base here, but could the {{Job Listing Title}} role be done remote.. or not really?”
9) This got us a reply rate of 52%, and every time someone replied we pitched them for a call where the sales team of Innovade did their magic.
The Result
In an extremely competitive environment, Innovade was able to close 2 new clients after only 2 weeks of our collaboration. And within the first 6 weeks, we evened out on about 6 new appointments per week with people who actually were interested in his service and wanted to speak with him. Resulting in 7 total new clients within 10 weeks.
