The challenge
Aweta is a Dutch manufacturer of sorting and packing machines for the agricultural sector. Their machines process apples, potatoes, citrus fruit and other products on an industrial scale. The company is strong in Europe, but the sales team had a new goal: entering the American market, specifically the state of Georgia.
Georgia is a major producer of both apples and potatoes. That makes it a logical first market. But the sales team faced a practical problem: they had no contacts in the region. No list of companies, no points of contact, no idea which packers and growers are large enough to justify Aweta machines.
The traditional approach would be to search by hand. Leafing through trade fair catalogs, digging through Google, going over LinkedIn profiles, consulting company registries. For 300+ companies in an unfamiliar market, that quickly adds up to 130 hours of work. That is more than three weeks full time for a salesperson who also has other responsibilities.
The sales team did not have that time. They wanted to plan a first sales trip to Georgia within weeks, not months from now.
The approach
We built an automated lead pipeline that combines three steps: sourcing, enrichment and visualization.
Automated lead sourcing. The pipeline searches through international trade fair catalogs, industry lists and company registries for agricultural companies in Georgia. Specifically: companies that process, pack or distribute apples or potatoes. Not a wide net, but targeted searching for the right sector and region.
Data enrichment and qualification. Every company found is automatically enriched with contact details, company size, revenue and relevant employees. Each company then receives a qualification score based on criteria set by the sales team: minimum size, product type, activity type (packer, grower, distributor). Companies that do not meet the minimum criteria drop off. What remains is a clean list with only relevant prospects.
Interactive prospect map. All qualified leads are plotted on an interactive map built with Leaflet and Google Maps. The sales team can zoom in on clusters, click individual companies for contact details and qualification score, and plan routes between prospects. That last part is crucial for a sales trip: you want to visit as many companies as possible in a week, and your route has to make sense.
The results
The pipeline produced 311 qualified leads in the state of Georgia. Those are 311 companies that process apples or potatoes, meet the minimum criteria and come with contact details and qualification scores.
This replaced an estimated 130 hours of manual research. Three weeks of full time work for a salesperson, replaced by an automated process that runs in a fraction of that time.
The interactive map gave the sales team an immediate visual overview of the market. Where are the clusters? Which regions are most densely populated with relevant companies? Which route covers the most prospects in the fewest driving days? Those questions were answered before the team boarded the plane.
What this means
For machine builders like Aweta, entering a new market is a major investment. You send a salesperson to another country, book hotels, rent a car, and hope the conversations lead somewhere. The quality of those conversations depends entirely on the preparation.
With 311 qualified leads and a route map in hand, that preparation is no longer months of work. The sales team can travel with focus, call with focus and issue quotes with focus. No cold outreach on the off chance, but a data driven sales trip.
For companies that want to grow internationally but have no local network, this is the difference between months of searching and getting started right away.