As a veteran in the automotive safety space, LHP Engineering Solutions has serviced big names in the transportation industry for more than 20 years without relying on marketing. But when the pandemic put a halt on in-person interactions and direct sales efforts, the marketing team knew they needed to get serious about tapping into key audiences.
The Challenge
Megan Verkamp, LHP’s Director of Content Strategy, explained that “historically, we’ve dealt mostly with internal combustion companies for traditional gas vehicles, but as we transitioned into more autonomous and electronic vehicle (EV) startups and mid-level companies, we needed effective ways to reach them.”
To start building awareness in the EV space, LHP adopted a simple approach to ABM — some paid social, email and display — but the company quickly realized it needed something more robust. In its first stab at ABM, the marketing team relied on a combination of paid social and retargeting through the company website with mixed results and uneven ROI.
The Solution
To gain more visibility into ABM activities — and build more predictable revenue plays — LHP partnered with RollWorks in 2021 with three core strategies in mind:
- Target and advance accounts in EV space;
- Reach $1BN+ companies in EV space; and
- General retargeting.
The first step for LHP was connecting RollWorks with its CRM, HubSpot.
“The data has been incredibly useful, from intent topics to who’s playing on our website or engaging with our ads,” explained Verkamp. “We track leads coming from RollWorks weekly. From there, dashboards in HubSpot show us who came in, and we’re able to pass that along to SDRs to follow up.”
In keeping with their goals, the LHP team primarily focuses on how many leads move down the funnel in a given month or quarter, which is a significant shift for LHP.
“If we didn’t have the integration, we’d just be tracking vanity metrics like click-through rates, impressions and clicks,” said Verkamp. “Because marketing was never seen as a lead generator until a few years ago, we must show the return for any investment we make. Being able to do that from the connection between RollWorks and HubSpot is fantastic.”
To encourage better alignment with sales, the marketing team also instituted monthly meetings to share metrics and trends.
The Results
Since choosing RollWorks as its ABM partner, LHP has increased leads, brand awareness and lead quality tenfold.
“Since introducing RollWorks over the past 16-18 months, we’ve seen an incremental jump in the quality of leads we’re reaching, as well as the value of those leads,” explained Verkamp. “This year alone we’re already seeing 3X the value of leads year on year.”
In 2022, the company saw so much ROI with RollWorks that the marketing team decreased Google-direct spend and cut back significantly on LinkedIn and Facebook advertising.
“We were doing the same thing on LinkedIn but spending 3X as much and not seeing nearly the same results,” added Verkamp. “RollWorks is getting visibility to customers we otherwise wouldn’t for a relatively low cost.”
The new investment strategy is working. With three recently closed $1M deals under its belt, the marketing team can confidently attribute these wins to the brand awareness and retargeting plays that RollWorks enables.
“Partnering with RollWorks has been incredible for our pipeline,” Verkamp explained. “It would never be on that list to cut the budget. We’re putting more into RollWorks because it benefits the business.”
