Glasswall Case Study – 41% Positive Reply Rate in 40 Days

When the sales director, Pete Newman approached us from Glasswall, they were struggling to find new leads.

Cold email outreach wasn’t working for them and they didn’t know how to leverage Linkedin for prospecting.

They needed a company who wouldn’t lock them into a contract, generate qualified leads and teach them how to prospect via Linkedin.

And this is exactly what we did for them.

We trained up their BDR and generated 100 qualified leads in just 40 days. 

Salesbread specializes in finding qualified prospects, by building ultra-targeted lists and by sending personalized messages that stand out. 

(This strategy gained our clients close to 5000 leads in 2021. If you want results get in touch with us here for your free 15-minute consultation call)

Here is how we did it for Glasswall Solutions.

Who are Glasswall Solutions and what do they offer?

Glasswall offers file protection known as CDR technology. CDR doesn’t wait for detection like Antiviruses or Sandboxing. Instead, you can have the peace of mind to open any file without the risk of catastrophe. 

Glasswall started out as one of only two file sanitization filters in the US Intelligence Community’s highly classified networks.

And now today they are rated  #1 by the National Security Agency too.

Glasswall CDR was built to protect businesses against the most advanced file-based threats. So much so that they are now rusted by commercial and government organizations around the world.

Why did Glasswall approach Salesbread?

Glasswall had been getting a lot of business through their networks. They had many connections in the North East, as in New York and the New Jersey area. But they decided to open up their market to different companies across the US.

Why?

Because they needed to grow, without new leads they couldn’t expand to other companies across the US. 

They wanted to hire a salesperson but without new leads, what was the point of hiring someone to sell? They would be wasting their money, which they didn’t want to do. Plus they needed a strategy and didn’t have much Linkedin outreach experience. 

Glasswall had already tried cold email outreach and it didn’t work; they even tried setting up a white paper blog but inbound took too long to generate new leads. 

When we started working with them, we got on a call with their marketing director and their VP of sales (and this was pretty much it for their growth team.)

They told us that they wanted to hire someone in-house to do their lead generation but what they liked about Salesbread was that there was no long-term contract that had to be signed.

Glasswall said that to be realistic they could only work with Salesbread for 2 months because they wanted to hire someone eventually to take over the lead generation in-house. Obviously, we said that’s fine (we never lock clients into contracts.) 

They liked this approach because it meant that they could learn from us; Glasswall could use our scripts and quickly come up with a lead generation playbook that would get them the results that they needed.

Glasswall didn’t have a lot of experience selling through LinkedIn because they were mostly selling to their networks in the North East United States. 

So in order to grow, they needed to figure out how to make Linkedin work for them. 

BUT…. They had a problem.

Glasswall had a really tough market to get into; they were going after chief security officers at really big companies.

The issue selling to CSOs or chief business security officers is that it is their job to keep their companies safe. So a lot of the time, if you’re selling another security product, you could infer that they aren’t doing their job correctly.

Many salespeople might say in a message: “Hey did you know that your company is not secure, use this.” And if this message got around to the company, it would look poorly on the person that they are trying to sell to (the chief security officer.)

Therefore we needed to think of a strategy that would allow us to start conversations with these top security professionals in these big companies. 

We helped learn how to build targeted lists of prospects and how to make Linkedin outreach work for them. 

What were the titles we were they going after?

Some of the titles that we were going after were: 

• CISO
• CIO
• Executive Directors 
• Chief Technology Officer
• Chief Information Security Officer
• Senior Director
• Executive Director
• Owners
• Chief security officers

We targeted companies that were in fortune 500 companies and only the top titles at those companies. 

Could we start conversations with such a hard-to-reach target audience? 

Yes, we did, and here’s how.

Step 1: Build a list of titles to reach out to at fortune 500 companies on Linkedin

When it came to finding chief security officers and founders at fortune 500 companies, we just hopped onto Linkedin Sales Navigator and used the filters. 

We filtered by title, company, location, and even industry. 

This gave us a list of prospects, which we then filtered by Glasswall’s second-degree network and by recently posted. 

Why filter by the client’s second-degree network and recently posted?

Because if a prospect is already in your second-degree network, it creates commonality. It also means that they have already accepted someone like you into their network in the past, so the chances of them accepting you will be higher. 

And the reason why we filter by recently posted is that there is no point in sending out connection requests to someone who isn’t active on Linkedin. 

This just wastes time and money, which we don’t want for our clients. 

We do this until our list is super targeted. Often we start out with thousands of prospects but get the list down to a few hundred. 

At Salesbread we obsess about list building and this is one of the biggest reasons for our success.

Our prospect list is so defined that the people we reach out to are usually a perfect fit.  This means that most of them say yes to a booked sales meeting.

Step 2: Write personalized messages

Once we had our list and narrowed it down, we had to write connection messages and follow-up messages. As we mentioned earlier, we decided to take a subtle route. 

So instead of telling these chief security officers to buy from Glasswall, we asked them if they would like to be interviewed for the Glasswall blog. 

In our connector message, we mentioned how we noticed their activity on our Linkedin feed and that we would like to interview them.

Step 3: Follow up and ask for a meeting

In our first message, after the prospect connected with us, we shared a link to Glasswall’s blog on why antivirus is REACTIVE and how others are switching to PROACTIVE protection instead. 

This approach allowed us to introduce Glasswall and what they offer in a subtle way. 

If the prospect didn’t reply to the first follow-up message, we sent another 2 after that. 

 In these messages, we asked for a meeting by saying: “What does your calendar look like next week to connect on this?” 

To recap:

• Write personalized messages that include a compliment
• Ask if they would like to be interviewed for Glasswall’s blog and share a link to Glasswalls website.
• Follow up two extra times and ask for a meeting.

Did this strategy work? Check out some of the replies we got

Have a look at the stats

To break it down:

In total, we started out with 2367 prospects in the campaign.

We then narrowed that list down to 1627 prospects who would be the perfect fit. Once we sent out our connection requests 240 prospects connected with us.

This then gave us a connection rate of 14.75%. 

We then sent out follow-up messages to those who connected with us and we had a whopping 100 positive replies from leads who were happy to book a meeting with Glasswall.  This gives us a positive reply rate of 41.66%

If you need a strategy that guarantees 1 lead a day, get in touch…

Glasswall came to us looking for a strategy.

They wanted leads but also wanted to learn how to leverage Linkedin for outreach. 

Salesbread isn’t just about making money for ourselves, but we actually want to empower our clients to develop their own sales playbook, so that eventually they can move their lead gen process in-house. 

So if you want to work with a company that guarantees 1 lead a day, AND who teaches you how to generate leads, don’t hesitate to contact us.