How CIENCE Generated B2B Sales Leads for Dobson Fiber

Sales Development

Dobson Fiber Case Study

About Dobson Fiber

Dobson Fiber is a leading provider of high-speed, fiber-optic networks with customers in Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. Dobson Fiber is known for being fast, reliable, and secure, providing the highest levels of service and support to consumers and businesses.

The company was founded in 1936 by E.R. “Doc” Dobson as a small telecommunications provider serving Western Oklahoma. Today, Dobson Fiber, formerly called Dobson Technologies, has grown into a regional provider of fiber internet and phone systems for businesses and homes throughout Oklahoma, and areas of Texas and Arkansas.

Dobson Fiber now owns and operates a 4,500-plus mile regional fiber-optic network and provides connectivity services that include high-speed internet, cloud and data connectivity, and voice over internet telephone solutions. They now go up against national giants across all three states—including AT&T, Cox, T-Mobile.

Matt Milliron
Matt Milliron
Chief Revenue Officer
Industry
Internet
Website
www.dobson.net

The Story of Dobson Fiber

Since its founding, the Dobson companies have continued to grow steadily over the decades, providing customers with reliable communications and technology services.

At the turn of the new millennium, it became clear that the internet was quickly becoming the communication channel of the future. Customers would still need phones, but fast, reliable internet access was starting to become essential to consumers and businesses.

Dobson adapted, rebranding as Dobson Technologies and rolling out an extensive network of broadband cables across Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas. However, technology and consumer demand moved quickly. Before long, customers started to require something faster, with more bandwidth: fiber broadband. Fiber optic cables were capable of carrying a lot more data, faster. 

With the big tech and communication giants making inroads into Dobson Fiber’s territory, further investment was needed. 

Even with an expansive network—and the company's deep-rooted history in the state—increasing market share and revenue remained a serious challenge, and one that it needed help to solve. For Dobson Fiber to maintain and improve its current position, it needed to accelerate growth. 

Integral to this renewed focus, the company rebranded to Dobson Fiber in 2021,  needing the name to represent its mission to customers and partners—to continue to grow and support its state-of-the-art fiber networks. 

The newly appointed CRO, Matt Milliron, was keen to increase sales from B2B customers, making this a mission-critical priority. He recently recruited an enterprise sales team to focus on businesses in the state of Oklahoma.

Milliron wanted to work with a partner to execute an outbound sales campaign to generate leads for that team—rather than hire an in-house business development team —which is why he turned to CIENCE to deliver on that goal.

Challenges & Scope

Standing out and winning new customers has never been more challenging, as every potential customer already uses a fiber/broadband provider. In a market filled with providers, Dobson Fiber needed a skilled team with data and outbound marketing expertise to help them achieve their goals. 

Given Dobson Fiber’s success across Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas, the company was now looking for ways to increase growth and reach its target audience. Increasing market share and revenue from consumers and businesses was the next challenging step forward.

Challenges

With a newly recruited enterprise team, the challenge for Dobson Fiber was building a sales pipeline from scratch. Despite the fact the company is the local incumbent in Oklahoma, they were competing against much bigger brands, such as AT&T, Cox, T-Mobile, and several others.

“In a competitive and saturated market, the challenge is always going to be multifaceted,” said Charlie Rizor, CIENCE account manager. “This starts with addressing the size and scale of the opportunity, even when a company has been around for eighty-five years.”

“We had to first identify the markets and segments Dobson Fiber wanted to focus on, then implement a multichannel approach to generate sales qualified leads (SQL) for the enterprise team,” said Rizor.

Because B2B customers were already going to have an internet provider, the real challenge was creating an effective campaign that gave businesses a good reason to switch.

Need

Generating qualified B2B leads and scaling outreach wasn’t going to be easy. Dobson Fiber needed a scalable and reliable outbound campaign to generate warm, sales-qualified leads for the enterprise sales team.

Dobson Fiber would have to target a wide range of new potential customers. Sectors and segments included SaaS/IT, law firms, realtors, medical, financial, healthcare, commercial workspaces, and co-working spaces. As B2B customers are usually higher-value to fiber broadband providers, these accounts would be worth the investment in an outbound campaign.

Opportunity

After searching online for an outbound sales campaign provider, Dobson Fiber became confident that CIENCE could deliver what it needed.

“When speaking with the CRO, enterprise, and marketing teams, it’s clear we could only generate leads for Dobson Fiber with a multifaceted, multichannel approach,” said Lindsay Thompson, CIENCE campaign strategist. 

“Making a case for Dobson Fiber’s unique selling point (USP) and local competitive advantage, compared to the big broadband providers, required extensive messaging and marketing campaign work that we knew we could execute,” said Thompson.

shutterstock_417879655

Why CIENCE?

Dobson Fiber had recruited a business-focused sales team in Oklahoma. However, when it came to generating qualified leads and meetings for that team, they decided it would be more cost-effective to outsource for business development. Milliron took the lead on this, looking for a suitable lead generation provider, which led him to contact CIENCE. 

“I found CIENCE online after looking for potential partners to work with,” said Matt Milliron, Dobson Fiber CRO. “I decided to choose their team because, unlike other service providers, they were a well-rounded team that brimmed with marketing expertise and offered a wide array of services.'' 

Before this campaign, Dobson Fiber was sitting on a database of phone numbers. No emails, just business names, addresses, and phone numbers. Previous campaigns were door-to-door or phone-based, not very successful, and there wasn’t any conversion rate data.

"CIENCE created a campaign to overcome these challenges, starting with new messaging, marketing materials, outbound emails and messages, and landing pages," said Anastasiia Solodovnyk, CIENCE project manager, who worked closely with the Dobson Fiber team to create new messaging for the outbound sales campaign.

CIENCE then designed a multifaceted campaign that dealt with Dobson Fiber’s call center services, email marketing, and LinkedIn messaging and connections.

“We cooperated with our marketing and messaging teams, and they [CIENCE] researched businesses within the geographic areas where our services were offered,” said Milliron. “CIENCE then worked on customizing its marketing efforts to target those areas in generating campaigns and appointments.”

Additionally, the CIENCE team then designed its landing page and other creative marketing materials that helped Dobson Fiber collate responses from its outbound campaigns. 

Results

This three-month campaign started in February 2021, shortly after announcing the rebrand and appointment of the new CRO and enterprise sales team in Oklahoma.

Between February and May 2021, CIENCE launched and managed a proactive outbound sales campaign with a 38% open rate (much higher than the average in that sector) and an 8% response rate. From those emails, the CIENCE team generated more than twenty sales-qualified appointments. An impressive handful converted into new business customers.

“We’re very satisfied with the results that CIENCE Technologies delivered,” said Milliron. “CIENCE communication skills were spot-on throughout the partnership. Their team managed to pool more resources and optimize the entire process to adapt to the geographic challenges they met. They did everything in their power to meet our expectations despite those hurdles, and we truly respected that level of professionalism.”

shutterstock_2007206843

Partnership Success

It was a collaborative partnership, with the CIENCE team working closely with Milliron and the marketing and enterprise sales teams. CIENCE researchers, marketing, and sales professionals ran with the database, quickly starting to generate sales-qualified leads and appointments for the Dobson Fiber sales team. 

“We were most impressed with their high-quality deliverables,” said Milliron. “They swore by a structured and disciplined approach to consistently provide us with positive results, and that for me was exciting to witness.”

One of the successful outcomes of this partnership was the creation of a full suite of marketing materials, such as emails, messages, phone scripts, landing pages, and adverts. This campaign also gave Dobson Fiber a much clearer understanding of their target market and addressable business customer database in Oklahoma.

Given the competitive nature of the fiber network and telecoms market, state-wide, in the tri-state area, and nationally, these were successful outcomes for Dobson Fiber. This makes it easier for them to implement a similar campaign in-house or if they choose to work with CIENCE again in the future.

Dobson Fiber CRO Milliron is happy to endorse this partnership: “First of all, don’t hesitate to hire CIENCE Technologies. Secondly, be sure to prepare for the onboarding process and address everything you want out of the engagement from the get-go.”

“CIENCE Technologies met expectations,” Milliron concluded. “The team performed well from a product sales perspective, and they’re quick to remedy any issues. They were organized, efficient, and professional throughout the project. CIENCE is a capable vendor that excels at meeting project deadlines.”