Creating sales leads
For B2B startups (companies who sell products/services to businesses), there are a few hurdles to jump through when starting to grow sales. First, you have to get some initial customers. If you’ve worked in the industry before, these customers are probably folks you know. If you haven’t, it’s a little more difficult.
To start targeting new customers, you have to build a list of potential customers from scratch.
My biggest tip for building out that list of prospects, whether it’s for the first few customers or even after you’ve brought on your early adopters, is to turn it into an industry-focused marketing project.
You’re trying to solve for a few things:
Find out more about your customers. Who are they? How do they purchase products? Do they use something like what you offer already?
Identify a point of contact.
Identify their budget.
Possibly identify their buying process.
Instead of trying to search for leads randomly, you could build a community around you and your industry. Think about something your industry would benefit from and offer that back to the community. For us, the indoor ag industry was so new at the time that everyone wanted to know what baseline metrics looked like - eg: yield by crop type, labor spend, total operating budget, how growers thought about technology, what the biggest challenges were, etc.
So we put together a survey of close to 100 questions all related to operations. We partnered with a number of trade publications, sent the survey to growers, and we received over 150 responses. Then we compiled the data into a report filled with great graphics like the one below, and shared it with the industry for free. It was a fantastic way to share performance benchmarks with the broader indoor ag community, which everyone wanted to have.
Those 150 growers were great leads for us. We now knew how they operated, what their budget for new technology was, and we had the contact info for the growers. Note: we asked those who responded if it was ok to followup with them and every single grower said yes.
On top of the 150 leads, over 10,000 people have downloaded that report since we released it. Because of how successful it was, we did a second report the next year. It’s still the piece of content we get asked about the most (and the info has been used various forms in publications all over the world, like this example). You can check out the reports we put together here.
Reports and surveys aren’t the only thing you can do. I was speaking with a founder the other day who said their industry isn’t as interested in these types of benchmarks and that the industry is hyper-competitive. I suggested creating an award instead.
You could have folks nominate themselves for an industry award, choose winners, and partner with a trade publication to highlight the winners. You can still collect some information on the prospects this way, and they might be more inclined to participate in an award process if they’re competitive. This is done all the time (see award Artemis won just this week).
Additional reading
If you want some more info on running a sales process, one of my colleagues at Artemis wrote an awesome series of blog posts on how we run ours.
The Buyer Journey – What we do, why it matters and how it impacts you