early sales development for b2b startups

Early Sales Development for B2B Startups

Mark Birch @marksbirch @Enterprise_Sale

1 ENTERPRISE SALES MEETUP | @ENTERPRISE_SALE


•Focus on big results with little investment •Go broad and narrow down as you

analyze results •Do first, learn how to improve, then

outsource or delegate •Scale the process before you scale

the team

Key Points

• Lack of sales people

• Early stage with limited capital • Crowded market or market that requires

significant education • No one knocking down the door to use

your product

• Product/market fit still nebulous at best

Need to generate enough leads to fill the pipeline


Challenges

Intersection between your product & prospect need is small

Your Prospects

Your Product


The Fundamental Sales Problem

• Hire an outsourcing firm

• Hire an appointment setting firm

• Hire an SDR team

…all large upfront commitments

Be wary of the investment in capital and time without certainty in results


Possible Solutions

• Simple process and flow

• Works with minimal people

• Requires minimal investment

• Immediate and actionable results

• Allows you to measure and learn

Before you scale the team, scale how you do things


A Better Solution

• Source the Leads

• Scrub the Data

• Create a Hook

• Build the Sequence

• Measure, Improve & Repeat


The Scalable Prospecting Stack

Finding Your Source

ENTERPRISE SALES MEETUP | @ENTERPRISE_SALE 8

Question Why did Willie Sutton rob banks? Because that’s where the leads are of course…

• Find groupings of prospects that fit your target market – Online professional networks such as

LinkedIn, AngelList, niche industry networks

– Tradeshows & events

– Sales intelligence tools

– Paid industry lists

– Inbound traffic

The cheapest sources are often the best and most reliable sources


Common Lead Sources

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator – Easy to use search on multiple parameters

such as industry, title, company size, etc.

– Provides number of people that fall within each search – are you targeting too wide (over >5000) or too narrow (<500)

– Allows you to view 3rd level connections

• Salesloft, SellHack, or SellIntelligent – Provides key data points about prospects

(company, title, location, phone, etc.)

– Fills-in best guess for email address

– Extract into spreadsheet for processing


Lead Acquisition Tools

• All lead sources have some percentage of bad data

– Tools that provide email addresses are simply guessing at the proper formats

– Some people do not update online profiles often

– Information grows stale quickly

You can recover bad contacts through quick cleanup


Scrub the Leads Clean

Lead Scrubbing Tools

• Kickbox.io to weed out bad emails – Protects you from getting lots of bounced

emails which hurts your email “deliverability”

– Provides helpful explanations as to why email addresses will bounce

• Data.com to get full email or domain – Recover bad emails by uncovering the

correct domain & email pattern

– Get “free” credits by uploading a portion of your contacts into Data.com


• Find one thing that grabs the attention of prospects that matters to them – Big upcoming event, topical news item, major industry

report are useful starting points – Think relevant and applies broadly to target market

• Write very short, very direct message as many emails are read on a phone

• Personalize, but limit to just a few fields like name, company, and attention grabber

• Personalizing subject line is a big winner when it comes to opens, increasing open by > 40%

Ask yourself, is the message relevant, to the point & personal


Hook Your Audience

• Subject: Bob, catch you at Hack-a-mania 2015

• Body: Hi Bob, I am attending Hack-a-mania next week and wondered if you were also going as well. The reason is that I was hoping to chat about hacker tools and was curious what Big Enterprise Co. is using today.

My company HackerTools offers a mobile hacker tool focused on helping hackers code faster and we work with lots of folks in the gaming industry. When would be a good time to meet for a quick chat?

Mark

Hook!

Personalization!


Example of Target Email

• Use a sales tool for automating the prospecting process such as Outreach.io, Salesloft, Reply, etc.

• Focus on email to start – Inbox is still where business gets done – Calls are not as effective a channel early on

• Start with sequences of 4 – 6 steps – Each step is an email based on personalized template – Open / reply rates improve the deeper within a sequence – You can add more steps as the

• Consider using a transactional email service like SendGrid or Mandrill to improve

The more touches, the better the results (within reason of course)


Build Your Sequencing Engine

• With data, it’s easier to see what does not work i.e. is it the prospects or the messaging?

• A/B test for the most impactful things such as subject lines, hook, industry focus, lead source

• More touches matter and email is often more effective than calls

• Use outsourcing to help on time consuming tasks like list building & data cleansing

Experiment often, review data, understand results, iterate


Measure, Improve & Repeat

• Read my blog Strong Opinions on sales http://birch.co

• Tweet at me, I generally reply if you are nice @marksbirch

• Connect over LinkedIn and mention this article https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksbirch

• If you sell to enterprises, join us for the Enterprise Sales Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Enterprise-Sales-Meetup/

• If you are focused on prospecting, join us for the Sales Development Meetup http://www.meetup.com/Sales-Development- Meetup/


Let’s Talk

http://birch.co/

https://twitter.com/marksbirch

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksbirch

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marksbirch

http://www.meetup.com/Enterprise-Sales-Meetup/





http://www.meetup.com/Sales-Development-Meetup/






Q & A

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early sales development for b2b startups

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