growing startups

Every startup founder nightmare is sales. As they say “Sales can cure everything“. Generating b2b leads is not an easy task specially for founders. At one side you want to focus on product or technology i.e the love of your life and at other you have to grow sales that will ensure your startup lives. One of the biggest reason of startup failure is not getting product market fit and in early days of your startup journey it takes lot of experimentation to get to a point of PMF. This becomes even harder for B2B startups. Sales cycles are long and you may not have experience of doing one to one sales and on top of all : how to get someone showing interest in your B2B startup? The fastest way to grow your business is by doing fast experimentation with different segments of customers.

Create different targeting segments of customers

The process of getting more b2b leads and finding product market fit is by understanding which type of customers resonate with our products or services. The best way to do that is by creating multiple targeting segments. Example: If you are into software testing business then create segments like following:

• Companies with employee size 1-10 and 11-50 (SME’s) that are having mobile apps and are based out of a specific location.
• Companies with employee size 1-10 and 11-50 that are ecommerce companies and are based out of a specific location.
• Recently funded Companies that have 1-10 and 11-50 number of employees.
• Actively hiring companies for software testers and that have more than 500 employees.

If you look at above 4 segments each of these have different companies attributes. Sending them same email copy will not give you better results. In Segment A the roles/titles responsible will be founders/CEO and CTO’s. Thus the email subject line and copy has to be in line with your targeting. By having different segments you will also be able to measure which one performs better.  You can spend more resources later on that particular segment to grow your b2b leads and find product market fit. EasyLeadz sales automation solution gives you this ability to create multiple targeting criterion’s and run targeting bots on them.

Create lookalike audience for improving b2b leads

If you already have 10 customers the next step is to get to 100 customers. You can create lookalike audience similar to your existing 10 customers. Find following info using Linkedin for your 10 customers and understand their patterns.

• No of employees: How many employees these companies have?
• Industry: Which industry they fall into?
• HQ location: Where are they based out of?
• Title/Roles who made decision: Who decided to buy or use your software/service?
• Tech stack: What kind of tools/technologies they use?
• Type of company: B2B or B2C?

Any other info: SAAS companies, Ecommerce companies, Fintech companies etc. Once you have a pattern then you just need to put your sales efforts in attracting and targeting those type of companies. We have made an excel sheet that you can use to create your own lookalike audience.

You can create a similar lookalike audience matcher for yourself to target such companies at scale and get more b2b leads.

Create targeting personas of titles/roles

The right way is by targeting the right person who is either responsible for making purchase decision or the user of the product. If you will create an excel sheet like above then you will understand which roles are the decision makers of your product or service. The next targeting campaign or piece of content you make should ideally focus on their pain points and how to address them. This way your response rates and conversion will improve and eventually your b2b leads.

A/B test email subject line and body of email

Email copy and subject lines are super critical. We have worked with various customers and helped them improve their email subject line. Having a good email subject line improves your open rates and if you have a good email copy it improves your response rates & b2b leads. The subject line often comes from the roles/titles you are targeting. We at EasyLeadz use following subject lines when our EasyBot targets companies for us:-

• Nitin, Quick question?
• Looking for a sales contact in your company
• Nitin, do you need virtual sales assistants to find leads for you?
• Quick, can we talk?
• Nitin, you checked our website?

Create multi channel targeting approach

Depending on your targeting market you can create a multi channel targeting approach. We target companies over email using our EasyBot and simultaneously target the same people over Linkedin using our integration with ORCA. This way if our target user do not reply us over email they may reply us over Linkedin thus improving our response rates and b2b leads.

Use email automation tool to improve follow up responses

Sales people often send email to their prospects and then expect them to reply. HBR says that prospects are more likely to reply you back on 2nd or 3rd email. So having a follow up strategy is mandatory if you want to scale your b2b leads. There are many tools in the market like Reply.io or ReplyUp or Mailshake that you can use to setup your automated email campaigns and follow up emails. EasyLeadz has this already integrated right from finding the companies to target, finding the decision makers and automatically sending them emails and follow up emails. All in one.

Use virtual sales assistants to scale sales

If you have a small team and you want to scale quickly then outsourcing can be helpful. But be careful when you outsource to someone. Its important to have control on your targeting specially if you are in early stage of your product market fit. One bad targeting can spoil your efforts and limited resources. That’s the reason lot of startup founders prefer Easyleadz AI based virtual sales assistant that can act like your own sales person. Its a machine that works like your sales assistant and grow b2b leads. It can perform tasks like finding the companies as per your targeting criterion, finding who are the right decision makers and then automatically sending them email campaigns.