Slash | How to build a B2B sales machine
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This document provides a summary of how to build a $100 million business through focusing on growth. It discusses the importance of having a growth engine to acquire customers in a sustainable way. Specifically, it outlines three main customer acquisition strategies: paid growth through advertising, viral growth by designing products for sharing, and sticky growth by retaining existing customers. The document then delves deeper into building an outbound sales funnel and playbook for hunting different types of customers in a business-to-business context on a relatively low budget through various stages of lead generation, nurturing and closing. It provides examples of tools and metrics to optimize this process.
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Slash | How to build a B2B sales machine
- 1. “How to build a $100m business” aka Build a Sales machine 1 www.slash.co Prepared for B Work Bali, 29 June 2021
- 2. Hi. I’m Andries De Vos, CEO of www.slash.co From Belgium Currently: co-founder investor 15 ventures, 8 active US$9M+ of seed previously: co-founder raised US$45m strategy consultant NGO In SG/Asia 12y Now in Bali … and more
- 4. Life is too short to build something nobody wants.
- 5. You only have 2 jobs Find a solution users want Get many users
- 6. #2 WHAT DO YOU HUNT? 3 Steps to grow a $100M BUSINESS #1 YOUR PRODUCT MARKET FIT? #3 YOUR GROWTH ENGINE? Focus of this talk
- 7. 2 Key Assumptions Value hypothesis Tests whether a product or service really delivers value to customers once they are using it. Growth hypothesis Tests how new customers will discover a product or service. Focus of your product market fit Focus of this talk
- 9. GROWTH IS WHAT YOU DO
- 10. MYTH: Product-driven businesses don’t need sales Top 36 SaaS companies: for every $1 PRODUCT, $2 SALES & MARKETING http://www.heavybit.com/library/video/benchmarks-for-xaas-businesses/
- 11. Are you in the product or in the service business? Service = sell time to solve a job Product = sell a ‘thing’ that solves a job
- 12. 8 ways to build a $100m business Definition: ARPA = Average Revenue per Account. Average metric (ignores conversion rates, how active users are, churn rate etc)
- 13. Who are you hunting? Flies? Mice? Rabbits? Deers? … or microbes ... or elephants?
- 14. To understand who you need to hunt … … you first need understand the anatomy of Growth
- 15. PRODUCT + USERS = GROWTH
- 16. 1 6
- 17. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) = cost measured over 12 months KEY METRIC 1
- 18. Lifetime Value of Customer (LTV) = revenue measured over X months (usually 12 months) KEY METRIC 2
- 19. LTV / CAC > = 3X CAC Payback <= 12 months with: LTC = Lifetime Value of Customer (typically measured over 12 months) CAC = Customer Acquisition Cost GUIDELINES FOR SUSTAINABLE BUSINESS
- 20. Consider: How to get your first 100 customers through Marketing and Sales
- 21. 1. PAID – Buy users for less money than they earn you 2. VIRAL – A user brings you more users 3. STICKY – users never leave 3 WAYS TO GROW COMPANY
- 22. Proven, but needs scale and lots of money 1. Sales people 2. Physical Stores 3. Search, advertisement (SEM, Google Ads etc) 4. Press (PR), content marketing, SEO 5. Etc PAID GROWTH
- 23. This is a product strategy. Slow. Potentially huge. VIRAL GROWTH
- 24. VIRAL GROWTH
- 25. 1. You must have design and tech in founding team 2. Prioritize growth over everything (even revenue) 3. Virality must be core to your product 4. Metrics are KING 5. ‘Word of mouth’ is NOT a strategy (it’s a bonus) VIRAL GROWTH
- 26. 2 6 STICKY GROWTH “Once a customer shows up, they never leave” STICKY GROWTH
- 27. Product and channel centric. Focus on retaining existing customers. Can be cheap and fast. Right option for 90% of the companies? STICKY GROWTH
- 28. 1. RETENTION is everything 2. Current customers are more important than new ones. 3. Get traffic and subscribers. 4. Give free gifts and value. Over-deliver. 5. Convert subscribers to paying customers. 6. Retain, up-sell, get referrals STICKY GROWTH
- 29. Early adopters / evangelists
- 30. Get your first 100 early adopters Characteristics of early adopters They have actively been looking for a way to implement a solution They have put together a piecemeal solution They have or can obtain a budget to spend on a solution Identify channels • How are they currently solving the problem? • Are any of these behavior externally observable? List behaviors. • Define the right channels to start GET OUT OF THE BUILDING!
- 31. 3 1
- 33. HUNTING MICROBES & FLIES ● Strategy: ○ Many active users to download + subscribe to your app. SCALE!! ○ Strategy #1: viral / social product (e.g Instagram, Snap, Telegram etc) ○ Strategy #2: lots of User-Generated Content (UGC) > lots of SEO > virality (e.g Yelp, Brainly) ● Monetization: advertisement, data ● Examples: ○ Whatsapp: ~$0.1 ARPA / year Microbe $1+ ARPA Flies $10+ ARPA
- 35. HUNTING MICE & RABBITS Mice $100+ ARPA Rabbits $1000+ ARPA ● MICE: ○ 1M users who spend ~$100/year, sign up ~10- 20M users (depending on conversion) ○ Some VIRALITY (e.g social sharing, “powered by”) ○ Examples: EVERNOTE, MAILCHIMP ○ Maybe: e-commerce. But requires huge funding to get 1M users. ● RABBITS: ○ Most SaaS ($50-100/month -> $1000/year). 100k paying users -> 500k-2M free users or trial signups. ○ Usually little virality ○ Growth? It is hard. ■ Inbound Marketing (content), or maybe paid ■ OEM (get product distributed by big partners) ■ Inside Sales (office-based) team
- 37. HUNTING DEERS & ELEPHANTS Deers $10k+ ARPA Elephants $100k+ ARPA ● DEERS: ○ 10k customers @ 100k ARPA, with 100k business leads. ○ Similar to hunting rabbits. Add on top a good ‘inside sales’ force to support the growth! ○ Option to pay commission to channels. ○ The best deer hunters? Rabbit hunters who become Deer hunters. ● ELEPHANTS: ○ Large enterprise clients (SalesForce, SuccessFactors etc) ○ You ‘only’ need 1000 customers with $100k spent. ○ Different approach than Rabbit or Deer hunting. Sales- centric. ○ 2 steps: ■ Good solution for big problem experienced by many enterprise clients. Need a LOT of money for Product- Market fit ■ Build enterprise field sales team. Requires millions to finance long sales cycle (3-18 months to close 1 deal).
- 39. HUNTING BRONTOSAURUSES & WHALES Brontosauruses $1M+ ARPA Whales $10M+ ARPA ● BRONTOSAURUS: ○ 100 customers of $1M ARPA ○ Sales strategy! Example: Veeva and Workday ○ Strong background: 20+ years of experience selling enterprise software, domain expertise and an extremely strong network in your target industry. Otherwise, start with smaller animals. ● WHALES: ○ VERY large enterprise or government clients ○ You only need 10 clients ... Unique solution, sales, reputation! ○ Example: PALANTIR
- 40. Most common hunting strategies for first-time grassroot founders? Flies & Mice for B2C? Rabbits & Deers for B2B? Elephants (and maybe later brontosaurus!) for more enterprise-ready solutions
- 41. You only have 2 jobs Find a solution users want Get many users
- 42. PART 2 of talk: Deep dive on outbound sales
- 43. Let’s breakdown 1 specific ACQUISTION strategy B2B outbound sales It’s getting far too little attention and new tech is changing the game J
- 44. Traditionally:
- 45. Outbound Sales Performance Marketing (Channel Partners) Inbound Sales Content (Channel Partners)
- 46. Outbound Sales Performance Marketing (and Channel Partners) Inbound Sales Content (and Channel Partners) Bootstrap/hustle Can it be done cheaply? More mid- to long-term
- 47. New Lead Gen Tech & Channels reduce cost and increase ability to Target Competition for good content grows. Need to be very differentiated and/or high production cost
- 48. 3 simple, essential acquisition stages in your funnel
- 49. 1 MQL Funnel 2 Nurture Funnel 3 Closing Funnel MQL = marketing qualified lead From Aware to Interested Example KPIs: # of sales appointments # inquiries for product info Nurture over period of time From Interest to Desire in product Example KPIs: # demo requests # inbound RFQs received # new trial users acquired Purchased product licenses, signed contracts etc Example KPIs: # sale closed # licensed sold # new paid users
- 50. Deep dive into building an outbound sales playbook 1) on a relatively low budget 2) that allows you to qualify, target and convert prospects at scale for your B2B or SaaS solution.
- 51. 1 MQL Funnel Goal? Attract and convert stranger into a prospect who has indicated interest in your product. KPI? # of sales appointments, # inquiries for product info Process? 1. Market research -> value proposition, scripts, product assets 2. Lead Research -> Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) with contacts 3. Outreach (e.g email, linkedin etc) -> achieve KPIs
- 52. 1 MQL Funnel B2B Outbound Sales Tools? 1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator - for primary prospecting 2. Dux-Soup for LinkedIn - for LinkedIn automation 3. Pipedrive - as the main CRM (alternative HubSpot) 4. Hunter.io / Snovio / Apollo - for data enrichment 5. Unbounce / Neverbounce - for data validation 6. Dedupely - for CRM cleanup 7. Folderly - for email antispam 8. Zapier + custom scripts - for automation
- 53. Research: define buyer persona For example: Gender: male/female Age: 30 - 50 Titles: CxO, Directors, VPs, Partners Role: engineering, information technology Industry: IT & services, retail, fintech, banking, financial services, shipping & logistics, travel & tourism, automotive + many more; Geo: APAC Pain: looking for reliable solution to achieve XYZ;
- 54. Lead Research: define buyer persona Goal: targeted lead with accurate contacts How? • Contact mining • email enrichment, verification, backup & reporting • cleaning up the lists, filtering the cohorts • writing the templates and more
- 55. Targeting A lot of raw data for B2B lead research comes from external sources, such as LinkedIn. Use the premium plan Sales Navigator specifically designed to conduct lead research across many geographies. Example screenshot: On the left, sample targeting for GIS executives based in Jakarta, Indonesia
- 56. Data Mining Use a combination of tools and methods in order to get the entire data in your CRM to push it into the outreach workflow. E.g use native Pipedrive integration, with Dux-Soup to get LinkedIn data in CRM with: ● Name, Surname ● Job Title ● Company ● Summary ● Twitter handle ● + 30 more
- 57. Data Enrichment Many tools available for data enrichment and validation. Tools we love: ● Hunter.io ● Clearbit ● Apollo ● Snov.io ● Uplead ● Zoominfo ● + many others Using a combination of these or similar tools can give you around 80% of SQLs for US$50-500/month.
- 58. But data is not coming in consistent, clear way so use data cleanup and validation tools and techniques: ● Neverbounce ● Zerobounce ● Unbounce ● Clearout Without these tools it would be hard to reach out to many qualified leads (e.g for email campaign, emails would bounce) E.g: In the screenshot below, only one email address is actually deliverable (marked /w green). Data Validation
- 59. Outreach Automation with Four Waves As a result of your research, you can feed your SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) into your CRM automated outbound workflow. Consisting of the following basic steps: 1. Cleanup the list; 2. Adding prospect to LinkedIn network; 3. Moving to Email Steps 1 - 4; 4. Moving to the next pre-sales cycle; 5. Moving to Finished state
- 60. Smart Templates For your outreach campaign, create templates with different levels of engagement and customization, such as: ● Marketing message ● Industry angle ● Geographic location ● Company sector ● + more E.g At Slash we use tens of templates for our manual engagement steps. It looks like the screenshot below >
- 61. Drip Campaigns on LinkedIn You can also design drip campaigns on LinkedIn. The campaign on LinkedIn typically consists of a connection note + few follow-up messages. Whenever the lead accepts the invite BUT never replied anything - they’re exited from the automated workflow. In the example on the left we use 3 follow-up messages.
- 62. Tips #1: CRM automation!! Use a CRM to build an actionable sales funnels and process centralization including: • automation • various integrations • no strict API limits As soon as you spend 50% of 1 FTE time on prospecting, a CRM can start helping.
- 63. Tips #2: Good vs Bad Leads Good Lead Bad Lead Example: ● Executive in one of the relevant industries ● Has a relevant colleague to address to ● Company type fit Example: ● Company too small ● Revenue less than defined sum* ● Frequent position changer ● No referral
- 64. KPIs we keep an eye on ● # of unique prospects contacted via channels ● conversion from outreach to first appointment ● conversion from first appointment to contract ● duration of sales cycle ● average size of first contract ● lifetime value of account from outreach in 2021 We love to follow the data-driven approach for the entire outreach process, so we love to keep track on few important metrics, such as:
- 65. Hyper- automation Tools for outbound sales or leadgen automation are getting more powerful with the day. While human-control is still required whenever human judgement is needed, a new value proposition is tested on a segment or persona , or leads reply, smart automation in every step.
- 66. 2 Nurture Funnel Goal? Keep your leads warm and engaged, build trust and convert to deal after a nurture period of X time (days/weeks/months). KPI? # of demo requests, inbound RFPs received, # trial users acquired etc. Process? • (Re)target SQL with relevant content through drip campaign • Specific process depends on product.
- 67. Est. Budget • US$50-$500 for automation systems • US$1-2k total labor + management • For an outreach funnel of 1-3k SQLs/month • Or US$0.8 - 2 / SQL • Cost of sale US$50-4000/deal! Wide range. Realistic Outcomes • Outreach to appointment: 1-5% • Appointment to closed deal: 5-30% • Expected range: 0.05% to 1.5% The clearer your pitch and targeting, the higher your conversion.
- 68. What do you Hunt Recap: Your Growth Engine Outbound Sales Playbook