Prospecting by numbers: Sopro is 5 years old

Like many in 2020, we are going to have to forego any birthday celebrations this June as we hit our fifth year.

Yet we have plenty to pop corks about.

Back in early 2015, when SoPro was still just a twinkle in Rob Harlow and Ryan Wellman’s eye, the world was a different place. And our business emerged, kicking and screaming, ready to disrupt the lethargic slumber that prospecting had fallen into.

Back then intrusive cold calling and over-used, horrendously out of date email lists were the norm. We were born to change all that.

Our aim was to make prospecting accessible for start-ups and remove the stress and strain that lead generation entailed for large businesses sales and marketing teams.

In 2015 a perfect storm was brewing, so we kitted up SoPro to ride the sales enablement waves.

• Social networks were well-established and promised a continually refreshed bank of global contacts
• Big data sets such as these were increasingly crunchable, allowing us to mine multiple sources to unearth the most niche of target audiences
• Tech stacks and open source stacked up to open out the rapid development of proprietary platforms

While Ryan manually tested the social prospecting approach, Rob explored ways to automate processes so the demonstrable gains in deliverability, open rates, conversion success and cost per lead could be scaled up to the nth degree.

Meanwhile the rest of the world revolved around scandals at FIFA, mounting debt in Greece, the first majority Conservative government in the UK for 18 years and the great, great granddaughter of Queen Victoria gracefully sailing past her seemingly unassailable longest-serving monarch record.

Whoosh.

That was us fast-forwarding to 2020.

Looking back now, 2015 does seem a long, long time ago.

But living it, it has seemed like only yesterday when we opened our office in Skopje, hit a headcount of 70 and expanded our working space in Brighton for the first, then second, then third, then fourth and fifth time.

Things sure do move fast when you’re having fun.

Here’s our five years’ achievements by numbers.

43,824 hours of prospecting for B2B clients

200 active prospecting campaigns live and kicking every day

98.7% is our near-perfect delivery rate for emails and…

30-40% our enviable open rate that sees a…

4-12% lead rate that is pretty much unparalleled in the long history of prospecting

1,000,000+ prospects engaged for our clients every year that deliver…

£100m worth of new business to…

50+ sectors

500+ clients that we have helped to grow their business

89 staff now directly employed by us

7 over-sized screens now gracing Rob’s overburdened desk

3,400,792 uses of the phrase “Now we’re cooking” by Ryan

3 consecutive years of 100% revenue growth leading to three awards won in the same number of months during 2019 (UK Agency Awards, Stevie’s and Technology Innovator Awards)

4 team members who look up if you call James in our Brighton office – go on, try it when you can next visit us

5 years and counting (cakes gratefully received)

So, it’s been five years.

And, in that time, we have achieved prospecting at scale that regularly lowers the cost of acquiring new business opportunities by 80%.

And we’re working on the remaining 20%!

Maybe next year, heh?

Thanks to all those who have journeyed with us and supported us.

We’ve loved every one of the 157,766,400 seconds.

157,766,401

157,766,402

157,766,403

157,766,404

157,766,405…