How to generate 100+ B2B Leads without a sales team and zero budget?
Generating leads specially for B2B business in startup stage is one of the toughest task, when there is no budget and technology is in nascent stage. The biggest challenge is also data because without data, AI related products can not be built and hence large businesses or even small businesses finds difficult to talk to small or early stage startups. There are many other reasons which prompts to difficulty for generating leads.
Artivatic spent about 14 months from inception in building technology but for last 4 months spent time in marketing and was able to generate more than 100 leads, that too from mostly large organisations without spending any money. Some of the best things that happened to Artivatic are below:
1. From Day 1 Global focus and Idea launch to solve business specific problems — Artivatic started with its idea in the market before even product was ready to see the businesses interest in the very early days, that put Artivatic among the top AI startups to start creating relations with interested people. We emphasised as General solutions where product or specific problems can be solved using Artivatic’s technology. This got us interest cause many large businesses still exploring in AI sector and we were able to consult to identify the problems with them even though we did not started working that time with them. The motive was to connect with businesses, executives, startups and community to give idea about Artivatic, get feedback, correct solutions, collect data and more. This helped Artivatic in longer term lead generation and word of mouth marketing with zero budget.
2. Artivatic version 1.0 launch with media mention [without budget] — Artivatic as soon got it ready with its first version of the product, started talking to media to write about Artivatic with focus on Enterprise AI end to end Infrastructure as not many startups focusing in this space. This caught attention of media & businesses both as Unique startup — INDIAN AI Platform. The positioning helped Artivatic to get recognition as TOP AI startups in India or Top disrupts. Artivatic initialled focused on building end to end technology that can cater to all business needs, made easier for us to talk to many businesses in their different divisions. Media definitely made the lead to Artivatic without spending any budget. We did not wait for full product launch and started talking about our first version, and also future visions via various media channels. We released team video, their story and more to connect with audience.
3. Content Strategy: This was 90% focus of Artivatic as this does need budget to spend. We focused on developing various whitepapers, PPTs, Case studies, startup or personal stories, learning contents, blogs writing on different channels like Medium, LinkedIn, as well self articles on Yourstory, Techinasia, Inc42, and more. We did lots of interviews on media platforms too. We more focused on problem solving related articles than general articles and also converted all in to PPTs and uploaded on Slide-share. I personally write at-least 1 article per month on my LinkedIn which was also copied by few network platforms that gave us boost to generate leads. This was more effective medium for Artivatic to generate leads.
4. Tech Talks, Conferences [Only where to Pitch about Artivatic on Stage] and Workshops — We /Team did many tech talks in close community to large corporate to their employees to explain about AI, this helped in connecting to the businesses, attended other community talks for AI, did some workshops in collaboration with Facebook and others.This we did at little later stage of Artivatic but helped in connecting the business/tech community easily.
5. Partnerships with Large Enterprises Innovation centres, NIPP and more: This really helped to connect lots of businesses easily as we partner with IT/Tech/Business consulting enterprise who have large client base across the globe. This was master stroke to reach to so many clients easily with no budget and sales team in place. NIPP also played vital role in connecting with large such organisations and we were getting then so many direct/in-direct leads.
6. No Email Newsletter or paid marketing: We did not do any such spamming newsletter or paid marketing. The main agenda was to directly connect with businesses with their problems and talked to the right person.
7. Network/Past startup experience: This also helped a lot. As my past startups experience and connect to various communities, people was absolutely good advantage where i got lots of leads from my own network as they also helped me to connect wherever i see someone can help me. This takes time in building such networks but it pays well later effectively.
8. Social media/Engaging content: My team effectively focused on social media and try to engage with audience too with AI related news, idea, future focus, problems & motivation. This helped in providing lots of images which were effective in search engine to reach to Artivatic through most searched keywords, tags and content. All lead to Artivatic effectively.
9. Fast execution, Word of mouth Strategy: We focused on client side with quick PoC/results and this helped us in connecting with other organisations. We did pretty fast as sometime people dont believe that we are just 18 months organisations with so much of credibility in terms of technology, clients and PoCs. The credibility with fast execution built confidence among organisations and our case studies got ready fast to showcase to other clients.
Mostly, we focused on content, social media, media/news, channel partnerships and case studies to connect with large audience and the result is Artivatic is considered as TOP 10AI startups in India in Enterprise space. Lots of then mention, talks about Artivatic helped to quickly reach to more than 100 leads in just 4 months [effort of last 10–14 months] and we are growing big. Atleast each week we do get 2–4 leads directly now and yet we dont have any sales team in place. Our entire team [90% or more] is of technology people.
Problem: The biggest challenge is to convert them in to actual contract even after Pilot because of lots of compliance, process/approval. That is nightmare to get paid from B2B clients. Therefore, B2B startups needed more fund to survive before reaching to Revenue stage.
Looking to connect with Artivatic, drop email to layak@artivatic.ai [Excuse spelling mistake].
