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Operating in Singapore and Malaysia, AXTRO was founded in 2004 as a supplier of corporate gifts. In 2006, they diversified their business by venturing into the distribution and retailing of sporting goods under the brand AXTRO Sports. They identified an opportunity in the competitive swimming industry and began representing the FINIS brand. Since then, AXTRO has experienced significant growth by building on their core strength, and by being a pioneer in business innovation. They have also expanded into the consumer electronics industry, focusing on lifestyle and fitness technology such as activity trackers, connected health devices, and smartwatches.
As the General Manager at AXTRO, Jeremy Low is responsible for client acquisition and revenue growth. He manages a team of B2B sales executives to drive the top line. Prior to implementing The Grid at AXTRO, Jeremy struggled to keep the client acquisition cost sustainable. His team had relied heavily on Google Adwords to generate leads. The cost per lead kept skyrocketing until it was not viable. This prompted the search for alternatives, and Sales Intelligence software was one of the options being considered. Although he chanced upon many options, they were predominantly focused on the U.S. market, and he was unsure of their usefulness for the local market. “There are local options but these are primarily traditional business directories, where the info is very generic,” said Jeremy.
Thankfully for Jeremy, he came across The Grid while searching for company info on Google. Given how often he saw featured company profiles on The Grid ranking as a top search result on Google, it piqued his interest and he decided to give The Grid a shot. As someone with a decade of industry experience in corporate gifting, Jeremy is well aware of his ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). “The Grid is a game changer; we didn’t know such a solution existed” Jeremy described. Jeremy was able to use The Grid’s filter feature to perform detailed segmentations and discover new prospects that fit his ICP. Furthermore, The Grid’s wide industry coverage was a huge plus as upcoming industry-specific events meant he had to shift his sales focus from time to time. To increase efficiency, he combines The Grid with an email automation tool, which has worked wonders for his outreach. He shared from experience that spamming doesn’t work. Instead, he uses information from The Grid to craft targeted email campaigns and personalise his copywriting which significantly boosted response rates. Of course, Jeremy shared that optimising the process required trial and error. He had done quite a fair bit of research on sales cadence by reading up useful resources.
Since switching to The Grid, AXTRO’s sales appointments have multiplied by 5x. His personalised outreach emails based on The Grid’s company data insights have also improved email open rates by 2x. Jeremy acknowledges that “the quality of leads have been better compared to those from Google AdWords; we got many junk leads from Google AdWords”. The Grid has given his team greater control over the profile of the leads compared to inbounds through Google AdWords. In fact, Jeremy has stopped Google AdWords entirely and now solely relies on The Grid as a cost-efficient and effective platform for lead generation. The closed sales originating from The Grid has more than recouped the cost. Based on closed sales alone, AXTRO’s ROI is a whopping 75x.
“In the past, we relied on personal contacts or previous sponsors, but now we are starting to get new sponsors from various industries including hospitality, fashion, entertainment and consumer electronics that we have never worked with before ... because of The Grid’s ability to find key stakeholders in human resources and marketing departments.”
“Considering my market focus, The Grid’s data depth immediately stood out... I’ve peace of mind that the companies in The Grid are legitimate as registry data is one of the main data sources.”
“In the past, it would take us an entire month to completely piece together the info on inbound leads for one event. It has now been shortened to 2 days thanks to The Grid... What would have taken 5-10 minutes per company now only takes a matter of seconds.”