Scaling Digital Tech Businesses & AI Solutions: Lessons Learned Across Continents

Hi everyone,

I am really excited to present some of the insights and strategies that shaped my journey in digital tech business development, AI, and global market expansion.

A Bit About My Background 📝

With 14+ years of international experience in the United States, Europe, China, and Southeast Asia, I have operated in nearly all walks of businesses. The work has taken me from building AI and ML solutions for Yandex and Toloka to running international sales for large enterprises, and even launching subscription services for millions of users across Asia.

I want to share some strategies and lessons learned in this post, hoping to help you navigate this complex world of business development, lead generation, and AI-driven growth.

How to Build a Sales Engine Without a Massive SDR 🏆

Building global door-opener teams doesn't always have to mean pounding the pavement with dozens of SDRs. I have built completely new international business operations for 7 companies. One of the most impressive was for pro-glance.com, an expansion from zero to exporting into 35 countries within six months.

This is how we did it:

• Data-driven targeting: By focusing on perfectly accurate Ideal Customer Profiles, we could focus our efforts where they would reap the most value.
• Negotiation Mastery: I learned how to manage a deal from multiple continents, where cultural nuances and negotiation tactics really made a difference in closing key partnerships.
• **Resource Efficiency:**We focused on building a system that maximized impact with minimal resources, instead of building a huge sales force.
  

Unorthodox partnerships can magic your business overnight—and they are usually the last things you expect. While working at RPC LLC, I was leading sales for the company in international markets since the pandemic. We closed multiple deals, each above $100,000, with Chinese partners, and all that with a shoestring marketing budget due to the closed borders of these countries.

Key takeaways: 💥

• Cultural Competence: My fluency in Mandarin was used to leverage trust and relationships beyond belief.

  
  

  With a meagre marketing budget of $1,000, we were able to win hearts and get our job done excellently. This was possible due very specific and niche outreach in Chinese social media and also through accurate lines of networking. Think first, where your leads might be, what do they use, and what they read, so you can get in front and catch them. Despite all, cold calling doesn’t work, you need to engage smartly, and find those who really might be your customers starting from SEO and social media content up to search engine ads.

  
  

• Long-Term Relationships: Partnerships do not mean a short-term gain. It is the relationships that helped us to secure continuous growth even in the most adverse of situations. Build trust with your potential partner, even if he doesn’t show interest in your product right now, he might help you with networking or other means.

From Content Moderation to AI-Driven Success 🏦 🎰

The rise of AI has been a game-changer. At Yandex Toloka, I led efforts from development to launch in creating AI/ML solutions that are being used in a wide variety of mission-high scenarios, from content moderation to fraud detection.

Here are a few highlights:

• Search Optimization for E-commerce Giants: Develop and implement search relevance models for big e-commerce players, from Zalora to Tokopedia, in a way that would optimize their search engines, making them better for customers and increasing the conversion rate. Content Moderation at Scale: Development of an AI content moderation system attuned to vast amounts of text, video, and image content produced daily across multiple languages and regions in Southeast Asia.

  
  

• Advanced AI Applications: Projects in this portfolio include checking weather conditions using IBM Watson to developing a stock market fraud detection model. They show the adaptability and strength of Artificial Intelligence in solving a wide range of complex problems.

  
  

Whether you are trying to leverage AI in your business for success or developing a B2B SaaS in generative AI, I have designed and outlined frameworks and methodologies that take you through the process seamlessly.

When you’re trying to acquire leads within AI market, everything becomes more complex and you should be super sharp with your outreach.

Types of lead generation and methods: 💥

Firstly, you should understand there 2 types of lead generation: inbound and outbound.

Inbound is when you use GoogleAds or SEO to acquire warm leads that already showed some interest to your topic or even to your solution personally.

Outbound is when you try to outreach through cold calling, LinkedIn messaging and emails cold leads that most probably didn’t show any interest or have little interest to what you’re doing/selling/promoting.

For B2B SaaS products you should have both (inbound and outbound) and it might take time to set up efficiently the sales pipeline and marketing engine, but efficiency and accuracy are the keys to the door that will boost your sales. You will have to experiment in variety of ways and methods.

One of the tools that helped me and which is crucial for both outbound and inbound lead generation is Zoominfo, and particularly “Buyer Intent” feature that shows you which leads showed interest to your topic and potentially your product. You can check for alternatives - Seamless.ai, Telescope App etc.

Secondly, never forget to create target lists of companies and ICP profiles, this could help not only you, but other team members to identify which companies are crucial for you to get to and they will help you acquiring leads from them.

Thirdly, for cold lead generation you should post a lot and use influence marketing. Think of tools like Ivee, Lempod, chatGPT and others that might help you launch your B2B influence marketing and generate leads as well.

Building a B2B Empathetic AI Business 🪄

Currently, I'm building a B2B empathetic artificial intelligence business at Ex-human that would fundamentally change how humans interact with machines. Our goal is to create naturally human-like, empathetic, multimodal conversations long before any tool can be built, such as ChatGPT or DALL-E.

This is what we are doing now:

• Next-gen GTM Strategies: Launching new technologies in competitive markets needs a savvy go-to-market strategy. Leading with this approach, we fuse both inbound and outbound lead generation with digital performance marketing to pave the road to success.

  
  

• Cross-Industry Applications: Our AI technology is versatile, as shall be the applications in a broad range: in-game NPCs to dating sites, smart gadgets, and AR/VR environments.

I am quite excited to share more with you as we continue to build and refine our strategies.

To Close

I hope these insights shared valuable strategies and perspectives that you can replicate in your own ventures. I for sure have had my own journey full of lessons learned across industries and markets; I am always open to sharing more.

Do not hesitate to contact me in case of any questions or thoughts. Let's grow and learn together!