We've launched 4 months ago and since then we were able to grow two times by 3 digits in revenue. But each time it obviously gets a lot trickier.
We were bootstrapping. So there was no real marketing budget or sales team. But that's when the real fun begins, or at least that's the case for me :)
10 steps to epiphany
- Outreach has to address the ONE problem your prospects are facing
- Mail prospects — Call Leads. Don't cold-call, ever
- Don't look for new customers, look for similar customers
- Trust is everything
- Reseller / partner program
- Follow up, follow up, follow up
- Relevant referrals
- Frequent newsletters
- Exit-Intent Strategy: provide incentive to sign-up (discount, etc.)
- Social selling (mainly LinkedIn and Twitter)
5 things that just don't work (tried them all :)
- Automated tweets & direct messages
- Automated social media bots (favourites, follows, etc.)
- Posts in Facebook Groups
- Posts in LinkedIn Groups
- Searching for the ideal partner
To keep it short and sweet;I noticed that the more you try to automate outreach — in terms of mail-campaigns or activity on social media, the worse results you will get. Also not every free source of traffic is a good source. We have done a lot of posts in all sorts of Facebook and LinkedIn groups — and the truth is: if your product costs more than $10, I doubt you will get any results. It's a waste of time. Same as searching for one ideal partner.
What worked the best for us; is to put effort into quality lead generation. Luckily we are pretty good at that, as that is also what we are offering :) Then, we crafted highly-converting cold-emails & got the “foot in the door”.
If you want to see some examples of cold-emails that made us $thousands, shoot me a message or tweet to me.
And then, it's all about closing. When I get into a conversation with someone, it takes me on average 1–2 emails to evaluate whether he/she can become long-term customer. That is mainly because I try to make progress with every single email. I ask for more information or (ideally) for direct action. If I feel that I lost their attention, I follow up. But it never happens that I have a lead in my “pipeline” for more than a week.
The last thing I would like to share; is that I see a lot of founders continuously searching for new customers without really understanding who are they searching for. It's much better to see your customer base as a small snowball that becomes bigger and bigger with every roll. That is also why our best resellers are our clients. And we only approach prospects who are similar to our current clients. Because it's much easier to say — “we have been doing the same thing for Jake and he has been getting these results”. Than to try to use a generic sales pitch every time.
If you would like to share with me your experience or learn more about what we do — feel free to drop me a line at dominik(at)spaceship.rocks.
Written by Dominik Vacikar.
Astronaut @spaceshyp • Founder@rentomato • Previously CMO@nestpick • Studied @Erasmusuni
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