Introduction
Beam is an easy-to-use financial platform whose mission is to empower builders with better financial tools and services. Beam helps contractors take control of their project finances, improve cash flow, and ultimately earn more money. One of the ways they grow their business is through cold outreach to contractors. This is an effective customer acquisition strategy provided there is a source of quality leads, and an opportunity to reach out at the right time with a personalized message. When expensive lead lists yielded poor results, Beam turned to Shovels. Shovels' ability to provide high-quality, regularly updated leads enriched with information such as permit type and recent activity proved to be a game changer for Beam’s outreach efforts.
Beam’s Story
The majority of homes and infrastructure are built and maintained by small and midsized contractors. However, most financial software has underserved these businesses, and many great builders still rely on paper checks, spreadsheets, and accounting software from the 90s. As a result, the payment process is error-prone and inefficient, leading to long delays and cash flow challenges. Beam’s easy-to-use financial platform is built to serve the needs of small and mid sized contractors to help them move their processes online, speed up payments, and better manage their cash flow. In order to acquire new customers, Beam relied on cold outreach as one of their strategies.This proved to be challenging - lead lists were expensive, often contained information about companies and contractors no longer in business, and had no information on specific projects the business was engaged in or its recency. These lists had better data about the types of companies found on LinkedIn and not the small and medium sized businesses who were
Beam’s target customers.
Beam therefore resorted to looking up contractor information on the Contractors State License Board (CSLB) public database, and this yielded a massive list. Calling businesses one at a time was inefficient. Many licensees contacted were either not in business anymore or were not actively working on a project. As a result, the yield rate from cold outreach was poor and the return on investment of time and effort was very low. Beam sought a better solution to high quality lead generation, and found that Shovels had the perfect solution to their challenge.
Why Beam chose Shovels
Shovels analyzes over 100M building permits to help customers with lead generation by offering a comprehensive and filterable database tailored to the construction sector, adding between 5 and 10 million new permits nationwide every month. Raw permit data is cleansed, parsed, granularly categorized, and enriched with other data such as contractor profile information through cross referencing multiple data sources.
Shovels’ ability to deliver high quality data containing detailed information including the type of permit filed, the date of filing, the profile of the contractor who applied for the permit and the permit fees paid made the company’s offering stand out. Top notch customer service during the sales and onboarding process sealed the deal for Beam. Shovels enabled Beam to efficiently and cost effectively generate a lead list, personalize their messaging, and reach out at the right time to prospects, thus scaling their cold outreach and providing a significant edge to grow their business.
How Beam Used Shovels
Once Shovels became an integral part of Beam's cold outreach strategy, their outreach efforts underwent a significant transformation. For instance, when the latest weekly data from Shovels listed a contractor who had pulled an ADU permit in the past month, the Beam team would swing into action and promptly reach out to the prospect using the contact information provided in the data feed. They would then establish rapport with the potential customer by citing an example of another customer who also constructs ADUs, whom they had assisted in achieving cost savings and efficiency. This type of timely, personalized outreach helped Beam earn trust and sign up new customers, eventually proving to be a game changer.
The Results
Integration of Shovels data in Beam’s cold outreach strategy resulted in a remarkable 20 to 30% higher likelihood of contractor engagement. Not only was Beam able to save time and effort by only reaching out to those contractors who had recently applied for a permit, they were also able to win new customers at a higher rate through personalizing their outreach efforts and reaching prospects at the beginning stages of a new project.
The periodic data updates from Shovels helped fill Beam’s sales pipeline with prospects and helped the Beam team nurture awareness which subsequently transformed to consideration and high purchase intent among their target customers. The data also provided the Beam team with information about the other projects the contractor was working on, as well as information about derivative metrics such as inspection pass rates enabling future business opportunities.
Call-to-Action
Ready to revolutionize your outreach strategy? Connect with our team today to explore how Shovels can empower your business. Whether it's contractor and permit data or solutions to uplevel your go to market strategy and software, Shovels is your partner in navigating the complexities of the construction industry. Explore our features, and contact us.