18 qualified sales meetings in the first month, with cold email only

Packaging Donckers is a Belgian manufacturer based in Lier. They make cardboard cake boards, trays and boxes for bakery, patisserie and traiteur, and have been doing it since 1995.

They keep thousands of items in stock and can make them in the customer's own sizes and colours, printed with their logo. They only sell through wholesalers and never direct to bakeries, so they never compete with their own customers. They wanted more of those wholesale partners across Europe.

Donckers had the product, the stock and almost 30 years of experience. What they needed was a steady way to reach new wholesalers in countries where nobody knew them yet.

• The buyers are hard to find. Packaging distributors don't sit in one clean category in any database. On paper they look like manufacturers, machinery suppliers, co packers or even bakeries, so a standard list would have been mostly the wrong companies.
• Nobody is looking for a new board supplier. Every wholesaler already buys cake boards from someone. There was no buying signal to wait for, so the email had to give them a reason to talk.