When we launched Prelo, I had terrible anxiety trying to attract new sales leads on a regular basis. In this blog I will share with you the 8 most important steps you need to take so that you can consistently bring new paying customers from the Startup industry into your business every month. 🚀
Let’s not play around here, email prospecting is by far the most successful method for attracting new sales leads, and that is why we created Prelo. Email prospecting is 40 times better at acquiring new customers than twitter or Facebook. 🔥
LinkedIn is a different beast. LinkedIn is responsible for 80% of all B2B Sales leads and that’s why Prelo is so powerful. We’ve taken the best part of email outreach and optimized it for identifying and connecting with decision makers on LinkedIn.
1. Increase sales leads by asking for referrals
At Prelo, it took us a while to truly understand the relationship between asking for referrals and generating new sales leads. Word of mouth referrals (WoM) is incredibly powerful for a small business like ours because it creates brand awareness.
For the majority of small businesses including marketing and creative agencies, brand awareness is essential for building trust. If nobody is talking about your business, then nobody will know that your business exists.
Word of mouth is the first stage of marketing, 83% of marketers use word of mouth to generate brand awareness. With the right marketing funnel, this ultimately leads to paying customers.
The best time to ask for a referral is usually after you’ve helped your customer resolve a problem following a purchase. It’s the most effective strategy to request useful feedback and request a referral.
We’ve built word of mouth referrals into Prelo by engaging with our customers and asking them to share their customer experiences with their network.
2. Discover sales leads every month using social media
Social proof is extremely useful in helping your prospects decide whether or not to buy your product or service. A survey from Aytm already tells us that customers already want to buy from small businesses like ours.
So let’s make it easy to convert them into paying customers by sharing actionable social media content with them.
I’ve personally personally done this, and I can tell you it works. I’ve also co-hosted webinars and written a blog on how to use Twitter to boost your social presence.
Check it out when you have a moment.
Follow these simple steps to help you stay consistent on social media
5 Steps to finding sales leads on social media
- Create a personal account and introduce yourself
- Post about your journey
- Share your challenges
- Connect with your ideal customers
- Create a business account and share useful tips to solve their pain points
3. Offer discounts to new customers
A giveaway discount campaign is the basis for building out a successful sales pipeline and increasing your sales leads.
Once you know who your ideal customers are, hit their community and offer some discounts and giveaways. We did this successfully across several Facebook groups with Prelo and it worked.
It’s so easy to post a simple campaign inside a LinkedIn or Facebook group full of your ideal customers. If the offer is good enough, your DMs will blow up!
Once you start getting registrations, take a note of the email addresses of the prospects registering and retarget them for other products and or offers.
Also, reach out to them for feedback on your service. While you’re at it, ask them for referrals. Customers with a hair on fire problem will respond to you, don’t lose an opportunity to turn them into raving advocates for your business.
4. Re-target inactive customers to get more sales leads
Going back to your old customers is a great hack for bringing in new paying customers.
Review your customer database and re-target prospects who’ve failed to complete their registration in the last 6 – 12 months.
Approach them via email, by letting them know the additional value you’ve brought to your service since they churned. Hyper-personalize your outreach for a higher conversion rate.
Tell them what they are missing and offer them a discount.
Also useful to know the following:
- 71% of customers leave due to bad customer service
- 78% of customers fail to activate their account due to a bad registration process.
These two data points are a good basis to begin an email conversation when you’re trying to convince churned and inactive customers to come back.
I remembered when we launched a campaign last year and our registration process caused about 65% of our customers to give up on registering.
5. Improve your website for potential customers to find you via a Google search
Check your website and make sure that your customers can find you with the right search keywords. You’ll be amazed at the returns you can get with a high performing website copy.
If your business builds and sells software consulting or recruitment services to Health Tech Startups, then optimize your website for those searches.
- “launch your healthcare mobile app in 4 weeks with a remote development team”
- “hire pre-vetted java development teams to build your startup”
Any Startup in the health industry that’s actively searching for “development teams in healthcare” will find you. When they land on your website, make sure you share stories about your clients in the healthcare industry.
If you need help with this, an SEO expert or someone who understands how keywords and search difficulties work will be able to help you.
6. Use Prelo to find paying customers every month
Prelo is at the intersection between email and LinkedIn outreach. We’ve built a solution that will help you target precisely the clients that you are trying to attract.
Our customers are marketing agencies, consulting firms, cloud infrastructure and cyber security companies with an interest in connecting with funded Startups and taking a piece of a $200bn Startup industry.
Prelo helps them grow their monthly sales leads by providing them with contact details of key decision makers working for well-funded Startups.
How to find customers on Prelo
1. Setup your Profile
2. Use one of our search templates
3. Find Startups by location and funding stage* 4. Save your prospects by unlocking each email
5. Download your sales leads and/or send them to a CRM
7. Form partnerships with non-competing businesses
When we first launched Prelo, we knew that partnerships would be one of our key acquisition channels. However, before we could do that, we had to understand who our ideal customers were.
On average, partnerships contribute 23% to a company’s overall revenue.
The trick to a great partnership is to identify your ideal customers and seek out organizations that work with them.
For example, if you sell digital marketing services to restaurants you could partner with interior design agencies that specialize in designing and re-branding restaurants. This way, you can embed your business in many restaurants’ rebranding and marketing funnel.
Generally speaking, If your product or service adds value to their service without competing or taking customers away then you’ve found an ideal partner!
Use one of the introduction email templates on Prelo to introduce yourself so that you can get started.
8. Take part in community events to boost your sales leads every month
With the internet being readily available and so far reaching, a community is no longer limited to your local business network.
Joining an active online community can be a game changer when it comes to helping your business to increase sales leads.
It helped us reach customers as far out as the United States and Canada. Looking at the infographic below is a clear example of how your services should no longer be limited to your physical location.
Attend Podcasts, co-host a webinar with an affiliate partner and talk about how your business is solving a problem for your clients.
Key closing statements
Growing your customer base month on month is perhaps one of the most challenging tasks for most early stage Startups and/or small businesses.
As a small business, it’s difficult to easily define your ideal customer profile, therefore it’s a challenge in knowing where or how to repeatedly find those early customers.
Based on our experience, identifying a niche and going “all in” to educate them about the benefits and value your service brings to their business is the key.
We’ve shared really useful tips in the blog, from asking for referrals to jumping into virtual communities. However, if you sell to Startups Prelo is the easiest way to increase revenue.
Prelo is perfect for growing businesses with a limited marketing budget. So if you are trying to find sales leads you can build a repeatable income stream in the Startup space with Prelo
Tired of pitching to Startups with zero budget?
👉 Try Prelo
Prelo connects growing businesses to recently funded Startups in 3-Clicks
💡 Access over 1 million highly curated decision makers from well funded Startups
😲 Discover Emails and Business Contacts in seconds
🎯 Send super targeted emails to well-funded Startups and 10x your revenue
On twitter : 🐤 @oluadedj
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We’ll catch up again soon and we’ve got many blogs coming up.
Olu
Founder, Prelo
I tweet about helping founders win!
