The Curious Case of Right TIMING in B2B Sales

Businesses fail just because of TIMING. Don’t worry if I started with a bad note. Like every Bollywood movie, things will end happily at the end. Or not, I am an Anurag Kashyap fan.


Launching too early or launching too late. Pitching too early or pitching too late. Proposing too early or proposing too late.

All that matters is the TIME when you do it.

While you cannot predict, but you can always optimise.

Sales also have this element of TIME in it. Every sale that happens, happens at a TIME when the buyer needs your services or products the MOST.

That’s why it’s important to understand this curious case of TIMING in terms of B2B sales.

Let’s break it down and see where all TIMING can impact your B2B sales and closure rates.


Prospecting stage

When you reach out to a company for pitching your product or services, you need to understand at what stage the company is in the need of your products.

Let’s say you offer digital marketing services to startups. Now if you reach out to every other startup, at random time, the chances are that you won’t hear back anything from the decision-makers.

The right time for you to pitch your digital marketing services will be:-


Funding round

The startups who have raised funds are the ones who will be now at a stage where they want to invest into digital marketing and that’s the right TIME when you should reach out to them to pitch your digital marketing services.

This is the TIME when the investors will push the founders of the startup to start investing in growth, start hiring for an agency to push their mobile app downloads, increase website traffic and drive quality leads to the startup.

This is the TIME when a digital marketing company or perhaps any company selling to startups, should ideally reach out to the startup, if not any other time.


Hiring a digital marketing person

Another important TIMING milestone is when the startup decides to hire a dedicated digital marketing person.

This means, the company has budget allocated for digital marketing and more importantly their focus is to grow digital marketing.

That’s the perfect time for any company to pitch digital marketing services to the startup company.

While there will be many startups who will strictly be looking for a dedicated and full-time person as an employee, there will be many who are more likely to outsource to a third-party digital marketing agency, if the value proposition is aligned.


Launching a new product

A company that has recently launched a new store, a new mobile app or a new product is more likely to invest in digital marketing than a company who has nothing going on from last year.

This is about the TIMING of launching a new product.

Let’s say you launch a new product, what would you do next?

Promote it through offline or online channels.

This is what everyone would do and this is what you have to find out and reach out to those companies who have launched new products or apps or stores etc.


Decision-making stage

Let’s say you have moved passed the stage where the company has already shown interest in your product or services.

The next stage is where you will have to flow in the river of several follow-ups, pushy sales calls, stalking the buyer on social media and many more such Anurag Kashyap’s thrillers acts, like this.


All this becomes overwhelming when there are many such customers in the pipeline.

It’s important to identify where you have to invest more energy and resources when you follow-up with those customers.

A customer who opens up your email 2 times a day has more chances of closure compared to someone who has never even clicked on your website.

All these signals help a salesperson identify the time and the opportunities to schedule a follow-up email and sales calls.

There are many tools that will help you track such important events and help you prioritise the timing of your follow-ups and calls.


So next time when you think of sending a cold email to a prospective customer think about it hard and understand where in the lifecycle of their business, the customer is.

Identify the critical milestones and reach out to the customers at the right time to optimise your lead funnel and closure rates.

B2b Signals

Lead Generation

Sales Intelligence

10 curated prospects list - 11th Feb 19

I am back with the daily prospects analysis. I have decided to post 10 prospects daily based on certain recent activities of these prospects. 

I will do research using certain tools including my own EasyLeadz and post prospects information globally via this newsletter and on my blog.

Companies who have launched new websites 

White Mountain Dental Implant

Recent activity: New website launch

Location: North Conway, New Hampshire, United States

Company Type:Clinic

Description: It offers high-quality care and a variety of oral surgery treatments, including wisdom teeth removal and the placement of dental implants.

Dalson Park Indoor Equestrian Centre

Recent activity: New website launch

Location: Brisbane, Queensland.

Company Type: Professional Training & Coaching, Service

Description: Brisbane’s premier riding school. Operating for over 40 years, teaching riders of all ages and abilities, safely. 

Button Blue Crafts

Recent activity: New website launch

Location: Derby, England

Company Type: Ecommerce

Description: Buy all of your crafts and wedding supplies. Shop for arts, crafts, papercraft and weddings online. Free UK delivery

Companies who have recently raised funding

Gong.io

Recent activity: Funding round – Series B – 40 million USD

Location: San Francisco, United States

Company Type: SAAS, Conversation Intelligence

Description: Conversation intelligence platform for B2B sales teams. It helps you convert more of your pipeline into revenue by shining the light on your team’s sales conversations. Gong records, transcribe and analyzes every sales call so you can scale the effectiveness of your sales conversations.

Rebag

Recent activity: Funding round – Series C – 25 million USD

Location: New York, United States

Company Type: Omnichannel, E-commerce, Mobile app

Description: A fashion re-commerce startup based in New York City and founded by a team out of Harvard Business School. The ultimate destination for endless access to luxury handbags. Runs both online and offline store.

Zoovu

Recent activity: Funding round – Series B – 14 million USD

Location: New York, United States

Company Type: SAAS, Customer Engagement, Digital Assistant

Description: As a data-first and AI-centric company, zoovu leverages all of today’s digital touchpoints to enable authentic 1-1 conversations. It empowers brands to truly understand their customers and help deliver incredible brand engagement by asking questions.

Companies who have launched new products

SeaPigs

Recent activity: New product launch

Location: New Castle, England

Company Type: Footwear, Physical Product

Description: Unisex beach footwear that doesn’t cost the earth. 

ParkingForMe

Recent activity: New product launch

Location: New York, United States

Company Type: Marketplace, MobileApp, Consumer

Description: Online community marketplace that enables people to list, find, and rent private parking spots.

Corus

Recent activity: New product launch

Location: Denver, CO

Company Type: Marketplace, B2B, Consumer, Mobile app, Market Research

Description: Corus is a market research platform allowing direct communication between businesses and customers. Through an integrated survey platform, app, and collaborative tools, Corus captures customer feedback in a matter of hours, not days and weeks.

Companies actively spending money

Kolikof Caviar

Recent activity: Spending money on SEO

Location: Los Angeles, CA

Company Type: Ecommerce, Food Products, Fine Gourmet

Description: Delivers the finest and best tasting sustainable caviars and smoked salmons in the world.

Oxygen Studio

Recent activity: Spending money on SEO

Location: San Diego, United States

Company Type: Fitness Studio

Description: Offline fitness studio based out of San Diego.

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If you have any suggestions on how we can improve this email or what would you like to know more about the companies or prospects then feel free to email me at nitin@easyleadz.com or reply to this email.

B2b Leads

B2b Signals

Sales Intelligence

Sales Intent Signals

Sales Research

Day 1 – B2B sales leads predictions for 5 companies – 31st December 2018

I posted analysis of one company in a Facebook growth hacks group and on my Linkedin wall. Both had great responses and people messaged me and asked me to post this daily. So I decided to make it a like a blog post and do analysis of 10 companies daily. This will have improvements going forward but its a start. Objective of this analysis is to identify “intent” opportunities or say find out when is the right time to reach out a company based on their recent activity and existing technology usage. If we can optimise our timings while reaching out to prospects half of the job is done. So let’s start.

Thoughtbot

Thoughtbot is a design and development consultancy company. They provided UI/UX design, Mobile app development and web development consultancy services. Thoughtbot is headquartered in Boston and has around 99 employees. Recent activity: Seed Funding round of 5.3 million USD on 27th December 2018. Leads narrative: Based on recent funding round, following requirements are expected to arise:-
  1. Being an service company their growth depends on people and more or less linearly co-related to it. Thus there is expected hiring and focussing on technology and sales.  Staffing companies in these technologies and roles are expected to reach out to ThoughtBot.
  2. Their sales model is high touch, has long sales cycle and is based on referrals and relations. Companies that can help them in identifying high value prospects in terms of sales development opportunities will have a good likelihood of converting ThoughtBot as their clients.
  3. More people means more office space and thus commercial real estate or co-working spaces can reach out to ThoughtBot.
  4. They are a multi city companies and thus solution providers for team communications, project management tools are more relevant to ThoughtBot.
  5. Travel companies also have a chance as Thoughtbot is into service sector and so more need of travel, hospitality expenses.
  6. Being a high touch sales, their major expenses will go in developing relationships. Events that fall into technology will have a chance for raising sponsorship from ThoughtBot.
  7. Companies that services or product related to internships can also reach out as its a people driven organisation and they will tend to have interns based hiring approach.
  8. SAAS products that fall into recruitment solutions can also reach out as they have lot of employees titled “senior technical recruiter” which means their key activities are optimising recruitment for themselves and their clients.
Expected Timeline: 15 days- 2 months for leads closures. How to reach out to this company: You can use our free email finder tool from here.

Studds Accessories

Studds Accessories is Helmet and bike accessories manufacturing company i.e consumer goods. Studds Accessories is headquartered in Faridabad, India and have around 121 employees. Recent activity: Private Equity Funding round of 14.2 million USD on 27th December 2018. Leads narrative: Based on recent funding round, following requirements are expected to arise:-
  1. Being a manufacturing company and physical products company they will scale up their manufacturing operations. Any company that is in workforce solution provider for manufacturing sector should reach out to them.
  2. They have a channel sales and dealer network for their sales. This dealer network is expected to grow in order to scale up sales. ERP Solution providers or channel sales SAAS products have a good shot here.
  3. Transport and logistics companies should reach out to strengthen their relations with the company as more manufacturing and distribution routes will open up in coming months.
  4. Biker communities and college communities can reach out to the company for doing experiential events and sponsorships.
  5. Channel sales means having a strong ground force who will need GPS Solutions, retail optimisation solutions, travel and hospitality solutions and team communication solutions including telecom operators.
  6. The distribution also entails having multi city presence and need of office solution that is in multi city. Companies like WeWork can reach out to Studds Accessories for doing a multi city deal for their channel sales team.
  7. They dont have a online sales channel. Any company who can turn their web platform to ecommerce may reach out. Consumer good specially in small price range can be sold online and Studds Accessories may be thinking of making this happen via their own online sales channel.
Expected Timeline: 15 days- 2 months for leads closures. How to reach out to this company: You can use our free email finder tool from here.

ActivTrak

ActivTrak is a employee monitoring, productivity measurement and enterprise behaviour analytics SAAS solution provider. ActivTrak is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and have around 17 employees. They also have mobile app and use Intercom on their website. They run their own blog. Their sales channel include direct sales via their own website, SDR based sales, reseller sales and affiliate channels. Recent activity: Hiring for Search engine optimisation roles. Leads narrative: Based on recent hiring activity, following requirements are expected to arise:-
  1. Their recent SEO hiring means the company is focussing on growth organic growth and willing to spend money on improving organic channels. A staffing company providing SEO hiring or a technology company providing SEO solutions can give a shot.
  2. Their blog last article was written with a gap of 3 months which means their content marketing efforts are not fully optimised. A content writer or a SAAS solution in this space can reach out.
  3. Their web traffic have gone down by 15% in last 4 months and thus there is a strong need of investment in bringing this traffic up. SAAS providers for monitoring traffic and optimising web growth or advertisers who can help them with growth can reach out.
  4. Their mobile app have around 500 installs and was last updated on June 1st 2018. Software testing companies, mobile app optimisation companies can also reach out.
  5. Strong need of SDR driven sales approach as they are targeting Enterprise accounts. Lead generation solution providers, SAAS tools can reach out if they specially focus on conversion driven sales lead generation.
Expected Timeline: 1 month- 2 months for leads closures. How to reach out to this company: You can use our free email finder tool from here.

Edge Telematics

Edge Telematics is an asset and fleet management solution provider. Its headquartered in Cape Town, South Africa and has around 12 employees. Recent activity: Upgrading their website. Leads narrative: Based on recent website upgradation, following requirements may arise:
  1. Their web traffic is below 1000 per month. A very strong need of website growth via content marketing, organic growth via SEO and paid acquisition will arise.
  2. They are investing in new website so chat bot or messenger solutions like Intercom, Drift can reach out as they don’t have any such solutions installed.
  3. Their sales channel include demo based approach and outbound approach. Lead generation companies and channel sales companies can reach out to them.
  4. They use Freshdesk as their support ticketing platform. So companies like Zendesk or other solution provider that gives them total solution including messenger can reach out.
Expected Timeline: 15 days- 2 months for leads closures. How to reach out to this company: You can use our free email finder tool from here.

ATD Homes

ATD Homes is a residential real estate company. ATD homes is headquartered in Derbyshire and have around 25 employees. Recent activity: Upgrading their website. Leads narrative: Based on recent website upgradation, following requirements may arise:
  1. Their web traffic is below 2000 per month. A very strong need of website growth via content marketing, organic growth via SEO and paid acquisition will arise.
  2. They are investing in new website so chat bot or messenger solutions like Intercom, Drift can reach out as they don’t have any such solutions installed.
  3. They have a offline sales model so they are expected to hire more people as they have money to invest in growth now.
  4. New website in pipeline for a construction company means they may have new project in hands and thus construction vendors like building material suppliers, construction software provider for project management can reach out.
Expected Timeline: 15 days- 2 months for leads closures. How to reach out to this company: You can use our free email finder tool from here. If you like this analysis then let me know by commenting below or share this with your sales folks and let them know how they can optimise their sales and reach out to right companies at right time. If you have any feedback on this analysis and want me to include anything or exclude anything that is not adding value then email me at nitin@easyleadz.com If you want to receive email alerts for this daily analysis then subscribe to my newsletter via this link. Happy selling and a very happy new year to all of you.

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