Manawa Lead Generation Success Story

A ‘Personable’ Organization

With more than 30 IT staff serving existing clients in the greater Toronto area, a key requirement for Manawa is to ensure that its changing and growing staff of technical experts remain focused on sustaining the company’s reputation for excellent customer service and support of its broad product offering.

What really matters to Manawa’s co-founder Matthew Held is the human side of IT. Held describes the ideal qualities of a Manawa Associate as being “about delivering that awesome customer experience that really builds the relationship and the ability to be sticky to a particular customer. It’s easy to train someone in IT, but finding people with good people skills is the hard part. You don’t always find the P for ‘personal’ in IT.”

To differentiate his company and maintain a competitive advantage, Held is committed to recruiting great people, making sure that the people who come on board understand the importance of the customer experience.

Challenges and CASL Constraints

While Manawa is experiencing steady growth, one of the company’s ongoing challenges is how to accelerate momentum, expand, and stay ahead of the competition. Reaching out to prospects to build new relationships is a vital factor to achieve this goal but, like many Canadian businesses hoping to win business through outbound email marketing, Manawa recently faced a big hurdle. Canada’s anti-spam legislation is now among the strictest in the world, prohibiting companies from sending unsolicited emails without specific consent from the email recipient.

Canadian companies wishing to conduct any outreach by email therefore need to pre-qualify anyone they intend to contact. This is a huge task for any organization, and anyone conducting outreach must be armed with an excellent list from which to make new contacts. Manawa experimented with bringing on board an in-house resource for this task and with disappointing results.

“It was hard to manage this new resource and the output wasn’t what we were looking for,” explained Matthew Held, CEO and co-founder of Manawa. “We were, in a way, too flexible and dynamic an organization for this internal approach to work. What we needed was a more targeted service to develop a sustainable outbound marketing strategy, and one that did not require time-consuming daily supervision.”

“ZINFI’s efforts have been very encouraging. It’s a team effort and with ZINFI, we have a growing database of prospects, are building a pipeline and we have an approach to marketing. We have a better strategy and we’re learning from the experience, making adjustments along the way.”
~ Matthew Held
Co-founder and CEO, Manawa

Solutions

Held decided to avoid the twin distractions of trying to work within the boundaries of CASL and generate meaningful new business leads, bringing demand generation experts ZINFI on board as a result of a corporate referral. With traditional email outreach out of the question, ZINFI’s task was to provide list development services, reach out to prospects by phone to obtain the necessary CASL permissions, and set appointments.

“ZINFI scoured lists, sliced diced, peeled and chopped the data they had access to, and with a set of clear criteria, gave us a workable plan,” said Held. “Above all, the team was flexible. ZINFI brought their expertise and helped us get the results we wanted.”

“The email design, the templates to choose from are awesome with ready-links that made it easy for me,” says Joseph.

Results

Today, Manawa’s fine-tuned database of opt-in prospects is growing. To enhance the relationships it has built, the company recently launched a customer newsletter that furthers its goal of providing top-notch personal support to their customers. The response so far has exceeded expectations.

Together, Manawa and ZINFI have also been able to secure multiple appointments and, importantly, a number of qualified leads that are ready to close. Manawa and ZINFI are now working on a second campaign, refined and adapted based on the ZINFI team’s experience and advice with an even more highly targeted list and stronger marketing message. Held explained, “ZINFI brought that wisdom to the engagement to make sure we were getting the results we wanted.”