How we built an automated growth engine for AfterSell that generated enterprise deals at $102 / deal without a sales rep in 3 months

About AfterSell

AfterSell is the leading post-purchase builder for Shopify for e-commerce, a global Shopify Plus Partner, that provides a unique & personalized post-purchase experience, providing an exceptional checkout experience & driving repeat sales. In-depth analytical tracking, high converting upsell offers, page customizer or editor, post-purchase flows, A/B testing, and multi-product offers are some of the main features provided by the app.

Today, AfterSell serves over 5,000 businesses including Feastables, Good American, True Classics, Miami Heat and Motorola.

Challenge: They needed a predictable and scalable channel to move upmarket without a dedicated team of SDRs

The right tech stack is as important as hiring the right folks at the company - especially when you’re an early-stage startup that cannot afford complex, rigid, expensive tools or that requires a team to build & maintain it. So we provided the right tech stack to jumpstart the mission, setting all the tools from data streamlining to ops infrastructure to computing the personalization while creating a seamless process for AfterSell founders to jump in the calls directly with qualified enterprise customers.

TAM setup,  pre-qualification flow

Having to skip the prospecting and qualification part of an SDR role, we put together a flow of pre-qualifying the accounts with the right job titles, industries, store ranking. At the same time prospecting and enriching contacts with the right emails was engineered to be fully automated, while making sure we have over 3,000+ enriched prospects ready to be outreached on a weekly basis.

However, cold outreaching to “everybody” in the Total Addressable Market would have been a rookie mistake. Why?

Well, picture this: “You gained some extra weight in the past weeks due to bad eating habits. But you're not ready to change your ways. That's because your jeans still fit. It may seem like an issue, but the issue isn't big enough to care about. What's the point? Problems aren't enough to motivate prospects to change. Problems need to be intense or frequent to inspire change.”

Now imagine if you can find these intense signs of problems about potential customers by leveraging data instead of going after anybody who has a problem you’re trying to solve.

So following this example, we researched what intents & triggers we could find in the daily lives of our potential customers / businesses, which we could leverage in an automated way, making sure we’re able to find the right time to outreach, with the right message. At the same time personalizing and keeping the authenticity of the emails, resulting in >60% open rate and approx. 1% demo bookings from 100 emails opened.

“We tried exploring cold email many times in the past. We’ve even hired some of the so-called “top agencies” in the world to help us figure this out. But, none of them brought the same depth and understanding as Brigitta does. Her entire strategy and approach were different and what’s even better is that most of this is automated. She cracked the code on how to personalize emails and it’s built for today. Everyone else running cold emails is using old, overused techniques and that’s why it doesn’t work. Now, we’re running the most personalized campaigns ever. At scale. Brigi’s team has allowed us to acquire large customers at scale without having to spend a fortune. This has been a total game changer for our business and we’ve entered our highest growth period ever.”

On the other hand, we wanted to make sure we reach those potential customers not only on email, which can be pretty crowded these days, but also through a more personal channel, directly in their Linkedin inbox. We took advantage of the data providers and generated a TAM based on industry accounts, which later on with the help of Linkedin algorithm, we managed to enrich the audiences with the right prospects, job titles, companies and excluded the anti-ICP accounts, resulting in a $77 cost per lead.

We used the same pre-qualification flow as the email outbound channel, only that personalization was based on industry & company level rather than on a prospect level, resulting in a $102 cost per demo booking.

At the same time, we put together a strategy to re-target the leads coming from Linkedin Ads, that didn’t booked from the ad itself, with drip email campaigns based on the ad message that hooked them in the first place, resulting in a 76% lead to demo booking rate.

Summary

From building out the tech stack, data & ops infrastructure to copywriting for both channels: Intent-based outbound and Linkedin Ads, we managed to create an automated growth machine, generating enterprise deals with $102 without a sales rep involved.