After handing prospecting & outreach over to Wyngman, Ponoko was able to generate 18 sales opportunities in 5 weeks.
Who is Ponoko and what do they do?
Ponoko provides same-day-delivery for manufacturers in all sorts of niches like medical devices, robotics, automotive, IoT and many more.
What Situation was Ponoko in?
We reached out to Derek (CEO of Ponoko) ourselves via cold email and it happened that they were looking to grow further.
Back then Ponoko did not have an outbound process in place and was purely reliant on inbound leads.
Ponoko tried cold outbound before without ever getting a reply to their emails, so they were rightfully doubtful if cold outreach will work for them.
In Ponoko’s experience their audience (mostly engineers) were very sales averse and hard to approach.
What was the challenge?
There were 2 main challenges for us to solve:
How to identify companies with hardware or machinery on scale?It was easy to scrape tons of companies who roughly fulfilled the criteria of being in Ponoko’s most revenue driving niches, but it’s a whole different story to tell if any of them requires the manufacturing of any machinery / hardware just by having their company name and the niche they are in.
How to present Ponoko to a sales averse audience?
Given Ponoko’s concerns we had to unwrap, fine-tune, and reposition their offer in a way that a) resonates with an audience that tends to be more analytical, and b) incorporates a human touch to make it easy to ignite a conversation.
How did we solve it?
How to identify companies with hardware or machinery on scale?The question was, what information would a company put out there that tells us they are actually manufacturing themselves. After a quick brainstorming it was obvious: Job hirings for any manufacturing engineering related role. So we used job listings to determine whether or not a company is manufacturing themselves.
Additionally the fact that these companies were hiring told us they are growing and what specific areas they needed help with.
How to present Ponoko to a sales averse audience?Facts + Humor. We can’t give away too much on this, but spiced up facts with movie references engineers are likely to relate to like Star Wars, StarGate, I-Robot etc, depending on the niche they were in.
The Workflow
1) Extracted head of research & development contacts from companies within the automotive, electrical manufacturing or medical devices sector from https://apollo.io/.
2) We then scanned if these companies where hiring for any engineering roles, like:CAD Design Engineer, Structural Design Engineer, Mechanical Engineer, HVAC Engineer, Automotive Engineer, Aerospace Engineer, Thermal Engineer etc.
3) We analyzed if the job listings mentioned any manufacturing related tasks with GPT to match areas of alignment with Ponoko’s offer.
4) If they mentioned any manufacturing we let chatGPT analyze what hardware or machinery they manufactured.
5) To add a layer of personalization and to make the emails sound less generic, instead of referring to the job title of the person we were reaching out to, we let chatGPT take the job title and return the main focus of such a role, e.g. “Head of R&D” became “product innovation”.
6) At this stage we knew a) the ideal contact to reach out to, b) they were hiring for a relevant role c) what they’re manufacturing, and d) what our ICP is focusing on. Putting everything together we could send 1000s of personalized emails like this:
“Hey {{firstName}} are you still looking for a {{Job Hiring Title}} to take care of {{Matching Job Listing Activities}}?
Noticed your focusing on {{Job focus}}, not sure if that be helpful but {{Pitich}} (sorry, but we can’t give away that one)”
The Result
Partnering with Wyngman transformed Ponoko's outbound marketing strategy and led to substantial growth. By identifying companies hiring for manufacturing roles and personalizing outreach with relevant, engaging content, Ponoko significantly increased engagement and response rates. This targeted approach allowed Ponoko to reach CEOs and lead engineers more effectively, overcoming their audience's sales aversion.
As a result, Ponoko not only saw a boost in high-quality leads but also strengthened their market presence and achieved a consistent flow of new clients in key industries such as automotive, medical devices, and robotics.
