Smiling and dialing- those are the words I used to hear often to describe a once-powerful strategy to get B2B sales. While cold calling is still a strategy used, partially evidenced by all the calls I get that are marked as spam before I would even have a chance to answer, the top strategies to reach potential business buyers have shifted. While the items on this list would shift a bit by industry in terms of importance, all strategies include some combination of these activities in order to reach new business customers:
Email Outreach
Industry Tradeshows
Sponsorships
Lead Gen Materials
Podcasts
Newsletters or Blogs
Consultations
Ambassadors or Influencers
Collabs with Other Companies
Platforms
Social Media
Referrals and Testimonials
SEO
Online Advertising
Aside from running my own companies, I spend a lot of time each year mentoring early-stage founders and instructing for entrepreneurial training programs. In early-stage companies, there are a lot of key activities to do and often limited resources to do them. This leaves founders having to make very strategic decisions on where to spend their two most precious resources- their funding and their time. Investing in strategies that don’t bring in new qualified leads and ultimately add to the monthly recurring revenue for a business can be deadly to the ability to sustain the business and bring in new capital if the startup is angel or venture backed.
As my fashion technology company, Couture Technologies, entered the market and shifted from being focused primarily on deep technology development to focusing primarily on business development and sales, we’ve been deep in determining the ‘right mix’ of customer acquisition activities for us.
Here is a look at some of the considerations that have guided our decision making (2 Cs and 2 Ts):
Customer Discovery: What did we actually hear from potential customers about how they have found solutions and made purchasing decisions in the past? We gather this data from 1:1 conversations with leaders inside businesses that fit our ideal customer profile and we listen to them as we build our strategy.
Competition: We pay attention to what our competitors and other software providers serving the apparel industry are doing. Avoid reinventing the wheel whenever possible. We have an emerging technology so there is no tried and true approach but it Is helpful to learn from what others try and stick with vs. stop doing after a couple of months.
Trials: With any approach, we look at how we could test it out before fully committing. For tradeshows, we took the year before we knew we would want to exhibit and went as attendees. This gave us a firsthand look at the audience and format and made our decisions clear on where to spend the money for a booth.
Track: We keep a detailed account of how we met each lead in our pipeline, we track if we close them, how long it took, how much the strategy that brought them in cost us and so much more. Without visibility into that data, you only have anecdotes to go on when determining what’s working or not working.
Over the last 6 months, here is a look at a couple of strategies we’ve seen work well for us in our industry:
Tradeshows: Having a tradeshow booth vs. just buying a pass and attending has filled our pipeline with more leads than we’ve been able to secure through attending alone. With that said, we scoped out all the tradeshows the year before and knew which ones we wanted to invest in.
Ambassadors: Partnering with key ambassadors is a newly implemented strategy for us and early indications point to this being a really strong approach. Stay tuned for an announcement on our first ambassador. It’s very exciting!
Stay tuned for more insights as we move forward deploying our technologies across the industry. We also own an apparel brand and we’ll do a future blog on what we’ve seen work when it comes to customer acquisition in a very crowded D2C market.
Be kind and use what you’ve learned to help other business owners!
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