At Enspyre, our core objective is to help B2B enterprises to accurately identify and connect with business customers. We aim to go further by assisting businesses in creating sustainable opportunities.

Our main service revolves around assisting B2B enterprises in targeting industry goals and developing prospect lists. As a result, many large IT, electronics, and renowned foreign companies such as Oracle have become our long-term customers.

Starting in about 2020, we noticed that awareness about sustainability started to influence Taiwanese enterprises. We started to receive numerous requests for our sales and marketing solutions from companies offering ESG-related products and services.

During the 2023 Meet Taipei where we had a booth, almost one-fifth of the visitors inquired about how we can assist in developing customer lists of sustainable enterprises, including well-known Taiwanese frontline companies.

Enspyre: A B2B Lead Generation Team with 20+ Years of Experience

Founded in Taipei in 2002, Enspyre has helped businesses generate billions in business leads and opportunities. Our team consists of more than 50 professionals, with the lead generation department sporting an average tenure at Enspyre of more than 6 years. Most of them also had sales or business development experience even before they joined us. Our Project managers are equally experienced in their roles. Each business consultant specializes in various industries in Taiwan, including large IT, electronics manufacturing, cloud security, startups, and ESG/sustainability industries.

Starting in 2020, Enspyre successfully developed sustainable business opportunities, contributing to green economic growth. Every month our Lead Generation team helps our customers reliably connect with and qualify 100 precise prospects, with an average 15% success rate in setting sales appointments.

Enspyre successfully develops sustainable business opportunities, boosting green industry value

Three Major Challenges in Developing Sustainable Business Opportunities

Over the last 4 years we have spoken to thousands of companies about ESG. According to Enspyre’s observations, companies offering sustainable/ESG solutions face the following common challenges in their business development:

1. Many industries can apply sustainable/ESG solutions

As it is becoming increasingly clear that humanity is screwing up our living environment, it is clear that we are all to some extent part of the problem and the solution.

This means that every company in every industry can be a customer of ESG solutions. This also means that the lead generation efforts can be very broad and precise at the same time, demanding a lot of effort.

For example, the “E – Energy Conservation” projects alone encompasses six major industries: information and digital, cybersecurity, precision health, green electricity and renewable energy, defense and strategy, and civil and military integration, with each industry being highly specialized.

Therefore, 90% of Enspyre’s ESG related customers have told us that they have trouble recruiting and then training salespeople to connect with such a wide range of clients.

These salespeople not only need to learn ESG professional knowledge but also the industry-specific knowledge of their customers. At the same time, for supervisors or founders, training is also a significant challenge. To then add skills in lead generation to this already tall order makes recruiting a very tall order.

By splitting up the tasks and outsource the lead generation to Enspyre’s experts, recruiting and training can be more focused.

2. 40% of companies have negative prejudices about ESG.

From the thousands of conversations about ESG Enspyre has learned that 40% of companies believe that sustainability and ESG solutions only increase their costs and are difficult to quantify in terms of return on investment. Many also think they are too small to have an impact or that there isn’t really anything they improve.

Therefore, their willingness to spend money to make improvements is low. Most companies that are willing to purchase solutions do so based on regulatory or procurement requirements.

Furthermore, from the perspective of companies, according to KPMG‘s 2023 Taiwan CEO Outlook Survey, 28% of companies believe that they lack the technical and professional knowledge to implement solutions, which is the biggest obstacle to achieving net zero goals.

Enspyre can help here by being skilled at explaining complicated solutions and help people see how they related to their company and position. Our own internal training programs, data tools and scripts, help our highly experienced experts connect with the decision makers.

3. Only 10% of companies have appointed an ESG-department.

Further complicating the lead generation process is that we found that only 10% of the companies we have spoken to had defined who within their organizations would be responsible for ESG issues. To make matters worse, often employees are not aware of who should make decisions about these matters.

According to ESG-report CSRone‘s data for 2022, even though all listed companies are by law required to, only 39% (702 companies) of the listed companies in Taiwan had actually completed sustainability reports. Even among the companies with a relatively strategic approach to sustainability, only 62% had established dedicated ESG departments or managers.

For small and medium-sized enterprises, according to CSR@天下‘s 2022 survey, 81% lacked dedicated ESG personnel, and only 26% had formulated ESG strategies and actions, indicating that many SME owners are still unfamiliar with ESG or how they should work with it.

For most products or services, it is quite clear who can make the decision or recommendation to purchase. If you are selling HR software or employee training, you reach out to the HR department. If you sell IT solutions, find the IT Manager. But as we can see, in the case of ESG, it often is not so well defined. During the lead generation process, Enspyre’s team then had to work with the dreaded gatekeepers to work out who within their organizations would be the right decision makers to talk to.

We are proud to say that we more often than not were able to overcome these challenges and help our customers reach the correct decision maker.

2024.04.19 Swedish Earth Day speech

Finding profitable markets is the first step

Every marketing effort has to start with defining the customer list.

To help our customer Sunnyfounder define a list of companies with the most opportunities for their green energy market, Enspyre looked through government policies and estimated the potential demand among companies in Taiwan.

• According to the 2021 Ministry of Economic Affair announcement, the “major electricity consumers(用電大戶)” provision affects about 300 companies, with more than 5,000 kWh of electricity usage, requiring them to achieve a 10% green energy usage target within five years.
• In 2022, the Financial Supervisory Commission of Taiwan 台灣金管會 issued regulations requiring sustainability reporting for all 1,779 listed companies in Taiwan between 2023 and 2029.
• The National Development Council’s 國發會 “Twelve Key Strategic Action Plans” will promote six major industrial process improvements, household and commercial equipment replacement, and the introduction of energy management systems.

We investigated these policies and, based on the needs of Sunnyfounder, selected specific companies from the manufacturing, semiconductor, and textile industries and companies in Taiwan joining the RE100 (100% renewable energy) initiative.

Define your most valuable and potential customers

At Enspyre we are fond of using the BANT framework for evaluating potential customers. By looking at Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline, we can determine how far away a customer would be from a purchase.

We designed an exclusive business development execution strategy for Sunnyfounder based on green energy products and the needs of the four major industries mentioned above.

Budget – Potential customer budget

Screen out customers without current budgets.

For example: How much budget is your company currently allocating for green energy solutions?

Authority – Stakeholders

As most companies do not have dedicated sustainability departments, we had to ask around for the right people or in some cases make some educated guesses and then confirm their scope of authority related to the current case .

For example: Who is responsible for your company’s sustainability projects? Who’s responsible for purchasing IT products ?

Need – Demand

Understand the current usage of electricity and further understand the green energy needs of enterprise customers.

For example: Are you aware of the government’s announcement on large electricity users? Is your company considering using green energy?

Timeline – Time planning

Timing is everything. Selling food to a man who just ate will be harder than to the guy who skipped breakfast. If a company has just started implementing a new ERP system, they are unlikely to look at another system for at least a few years.

For example: When did you purchase your servers? How old are your trucks?

Listening to customers and finding key breakthroughs

B2B sales require finding key decision-makers and relevant stakeholders. In every enterprise development, we not only make contact once or with a single contact person but undergo multiple patient developments to obtain the valuable customer information.

During the project execution, we also provide regular reports to our customers so that everyone knows what is going on and can make adjustments as needed.

The first step in breaking establishing a new market is to choose the professional team – Enspyre

Successful clients have provided feedback to Enspyre such as:

“You are better at contacting potential customers than our own sales department!”
“I didn’t know there were companies in Taiwan that provide such B2B business development services.”

Well, here we are!

In the B2B sales process, starting the conversation, moving it from 0 to 1, is the most challenging step.

Many novice salespersons perish with cold calling. Many experienced salespersons who are busy maintaining existing clients, find it challenging or even troubling to spend time developing new ones.

We are very proud that some of our clients have been with us for up to 20 years.

B2B business development is a highly professional and complex task, and we know that every stage of the sales cycle requires its unique expertise.

Enspyre, we specialize in turning lists of unfamiliar companies into market information and qualified leads as the first step in helping our clients build new revenues.