Commercial Prospecting Unlocked with Convex

Modernizing commercial sales operations

How long does it take to find and identify a new customer in the commercial space? Traditional prospecting methods can take hours, as you navigate a labyrinth of potential pathways to the right person. 

The goal at Convex, a ServiceTitan company, is to make the prospecting process much faster and more efficient, Geise says.

“We want to help everybody find their ideal customer profile, do it at scale, identify their targets, and then contact decision-makers,” Geise explains.

And with the unique software platform of Convex by ServiceTitan, you can achieve these results within minutes, not hours. This drives improved efficiency, time savings, and potential growth for your business.

Arcem Entry Systems seeks modern sales model

Arcem Entry Systems provides commercial services for garage doors, docks, pedestrian doors, and fire inspection for customers in St. Joseph County, Indiana. In April of 2024, Love says, the business was migrating from an old sales model to a more modern, new sales strategy.

“Our sales department was undergoing a large, rapid change—in the fact that we no longer had a sales team,” Love says.

The Arcem prospecting process also faced a few critical challenges.

“We waited for the phone to ring, and once it rang, then we were great, we would take over from there. But we had no set way to plan revenue or plan our growth in any way, shape, or form,” Love says. 

A commercial business like Arcem relies on securing lucrative projects that are part of capital expenditure budgets, Love says, but they didn’t have a team that would go after that kind of work and contact those decision-makers about next year’s budgets.

“Naturally, every business is going to have customer attrition each year, but we weren’t proactively going out to replace that or getting ahead of the curve,” he adds.

Sales teams at commercial businesses struggle with building effective outreach efforts, as well as identifying customers who may be shopping for their services or finding the right contact information and property data, Geise says. For Arcem, the biggest challenge involved defining an actual sales process for the business.

“There was minimal outreach and prospecting, and a lot of it was relying on phone calls coming in. So, kind of this reactive approach,” Geise explains.

Arcem changed all of that by adopting ServiceTitan in June of 2024, followed by Convex by ServiceTitan.

Using property intelligence to target decision-makers

Love says Arcem wanted to grow within the existing market, but also into new markets. That meant building a modern commercial sales operation with the right digital tools.

“We were looking for a way that we could strategically do that in a planned way, with a process that could be repeatable,” Love says. “Not only here, but when we do go into adjacent markets, of being able to basically drop a playbook and go from there. Convex has allowed us to do that.”

Enabling predictable revenue streams

Prior to Convex, Arcem based its expansion prospects on a gut feeling, mainly focusing on areas with other commercial businesses or cities of a certain size. 

“We didn't have any data, there was nothing to go off of,” Love explains. “With Convex, that's allowed us to go in, actually look at maps, look at our ICPs (ideal customer profiles), look at the customers we want to go after and find out, ‘OK, based on the successes we've had in our current market, do these adjacent markets have those types of customers for us?’”

Arcem defined its ideal customer profile as manufacturing, local government, police, fire, utility, and warehouse distribution. Love says Arcem achieved the most wins in industries where the businesses dealt in B2B (business-to-business), rather than in B2C (business-to-customer). 

After defining its ICP, Arcem researched each B2B industry’s buyer persona to determine how they buy their garage door services, at what cadence, and the job titles of the buyers. 

“From there, we were able to build models with Convex, to be able to say, ‘These are the customers we should be going after in these verticals and in these geographic areas,’” Love says.

Convex helps Arcem easily track each prospecting campaign, from the first initial contact all the way through to that business becoming a customer.

“By being proactive in our market, and tracking and documenting, ‘Hey, this is the campaign we use to reach out to these businesses. This is what was successful, and this was the lifecycle it took for them to become a customer.’ We can then use that to predictably go into other markets…And have a playbook to go into that market,” Love says.

Designing a modern commercial sales approach

Once Arcem developed its playbook for prospecting, the company needed to hire someone who could implement it, says Cleek, Arcem’s sales operations manager. But after trying and failing to train techs to be salespeople, Arcem decided to hire a business development rep (BDR).

“This BDR can be somebody that works inside of Convex solely. They're creating campaigns in there, they're using the lasso tool to look at different areas and different sectors, things like that,” Cleek says. “We have a business development rep going out there getting these leads for the account managers to then maintain.”

Arcem also uses Convex’s Signals to prioritize prospective customers, receive weekly reporting, and send mass email campaigns. Signals monitors buyers’ digital behavior to analyze when prospects are looking up commercial services and solutions. 

“We were completely reactive, we weren't proactive at all. And this flips the script,” Cleek says. “Now we're able to see what these customers are searching, who these people are, what these companies are. We're able to look at everything as a whole, to make sure it's something that’s worth our time prospecting.”

The data included in those Signals reports inform Arcem’s mass email campaigns targeting new prospects.

“We're sending out emails and connecting on LinkedIn. That report has really been our bread and butter each week as we take a look at the new Signals that come in every Tuesday,” she adds.

The dedicated BDR also learned the Convex software system and showed the Arcem sales team the best ways to use it to get the most actionable prospecting lists. Cleek says the BDR didn’t need to know anything about garage doors or entry systems, they just needed to be “someone who was hungry.”

“Somebody who would go out and hear ‘no’ 20 times, and maybe get a ‘yes’ in between those 20 ‘nos,’ and still be encouraged to keep moving forward, keep going, keep knocking on doors and making phone calls,” Cleek says. “We knew it had to be somebody who was able to follow processes, or at least build processes from the jump.”

Following the Convex process to find new prospects was a critical requirement for the BDR role, Love says. The company didn’t want someone shooting from the hip with a “spray and pray” method, but rather needed someone who could focus on specific targets. 

“So, using Convex to say, ‘Hey, this is exactly how we go after new prospects, and we follow this religiously. We use our Signals, and this is how we reach out," he says.

Geise agrees, pointing out how hard it is to see progress without using a system like Convex.

“How would you be able to know where they're communicating, or who they've talked to, tracking all that stuff? You can't see the progress,” Love says. “And that's a good feedback loop Convex can provide to you.”

Arcem also uses Convex to qualify its ICPs, searching for job titles like maintenance managers, purchasers, operations managers, and production personnel. 

“We're using that job title filter to really pull out those contacts we want to reach out to, and get a direct email or direct phone number for,” Cleek says. “We also qualify according to the range of products that the company might have. We use those street-view images that we find in Convex to look around the entire building.”

Lastly, Arcem looks at the type of business to determine whether it’s a viable prospect for garage doors, fire doors, docks, and more.

Contacting and connecting with ICPs at scale

Geise says once you’ve identified your ICPs, it’s important to craft a message that makes sense and resonates, as well as create a process that you can implement at scale.

“How are you going to contact that person? Is it going to be cold calling? Is it going to be emailing, is it going to be dropping in?” Geise explains.

At Arcem, the sales team reaches out to ICPs in multiple ways, Cleek says. 

“We do a combination of boots on the ground, actually going out and showing up and knocking on doors. We call the customer to see if they need anything. We send out mass emails. And we connect on LinkedIn,” Cleek says. “What we find the most success with is sending out emails.”

Arcem sends sequenced emails, automated emails, and follow-up emails, while making phone calls and connecting with prospects on LinkedIn at the same time.

“In our world, we have to have multiple touches before a sale even goes through. So, we can contact somebody 20 times before we ever get anything they might need from us,” Cleek says.

With Convex reporting, Cleek says the ability to find direct phone numbers for ideal buyer personas like maintenance managers or production managers is one of the major benefits.

“What our BDR found is that when he's got the phone number of a direct maintenance man, he can give him a call and say, ‘Hey, I'm so-and-so from Arcem Entry, I'm here to just talk to you about your doors.’ And the maintenance man says, ‘Hey, yeah, come to the second door on the left and come on back. I'm standing back here at my desk.’

“So, having that straight line to who we need to talk to is so much easier than going and standing at a front desk when nobody's going to answer you, or give you the time of day,” Cleek says.

Love says Arcem often prospects to maintenance personnel, who are very willing to take the call or meeting, and getting a direct phone number to that person through Convex makes all the difference.

Geise summarizes, “When you can have somebody's phone number, set up an appointment, go in person, meet with them, share with them what you do, your services, the effectiveness of that salesperson goes up.”

>>Ready to see Convex in action? Watch the full webinar for a quick demo. 

Arcem’s outcomes with Convex by ServiceTitan

Love says the Convex tool guided Arcem as it set up the proper ways to create a sales prospecting process, from the top of the funnel all the way to execution. 

“We wouldn't be as far as we are along in our journey of creating an actual prospecting process if we didn't have the tools like this,” Love says. “How powerful it is to be able to have this, to shorten your time from training a completely reactive sales team, to a completely forward-thinking, process-oriented sales team.”

Through this short partnership with Convex by ServiceTitan, Arcem closed $18K in new business, completely modernized its sales process, and gained 10 fire drop door ICPs they never had before.

“We really feel like we’re now starting to hit our stride when it comes to the prospecting side of things,” Love says, adding that Arcem has used Convex to train a brand new sales team and that revenue from new business prospects will only continue to grow.

“When we get a customer, that first sale is typically very low dollar. It’s their first trial run. They're not buying $100,000 worth of dock levelers, they're buying a service,” Love explains. “We go in, we execute that service, and then we’re able to build a relationship, where the lifetime of that customer could be hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Convex even helped Arcem identify a new stream of potential customers for their fire door drop services. Rather than solely focusing on the end user, Arcem also targets the local fire marshals who require businesses to test their fire door drops.

“We use Convex to go into every county that we have access to, locate who the fire marshal is in that area, and then create campaigns to reach out to them, teaching them about what we do when it comes to fire door drop testing,” Love says. “By the time I gave this stat, we've already had about five more calls come in. So, the fire marshals are making their rounds, and Arcem Entry Systems is getting the referral.”

Convex grows commercial business

While Convex helped Arcem achieve huge gains in a short period of time, Geise says the software platform can steer any commercial business toward growth.

“We also work with HVAC, plumbing, security, fire safety, landscaping, janitorial, equipment, water, the whole gambit,” Geise says.