Learnings from contacting first 500 potential customers
Setting out on my goal to find the early adapters, the right customers and companies for Talbit, I figured that if I reach out to 500 potential customers, I would gain a pretty good understanding.
To challenge myself, I set a target of reaching that goal before I start my summer vacation. Without a background in sales OR customer acquisition, I had no idea, how challenging the task would be and what kind of CRM tool would suit by needs best. But I was pretty fired up to find out.
My ultimate goal was to find the companies that are willing to digitize their HR -processes, especially those that had to do with developing, engaging and empowering employees.
The market research my team and I conducted in spring 2017 for my Aalto EE MBA Business project gave me some insight on the market situation. Although it only included 14 companies and 60 employees, it was a good start. The work to create a good understanding started.
About 120+ contacts into the project, I realized that excel was not going to do the trick; it was too static, it didn’t remind me of upcoming tasks, it was hard to enter all the comments received and see the whole picture at one glance.
Time for a CRM-system
It was time to find a suitable CRM -system. After trying out a few, I selected Hubspot mainly because of its UX but also the free of charge -option. Hubspot’s user experience was very intuitive from the start. It didn’t take too much time to learn how to download the current database from excel or how to create new ones from scratch. Uploading the contacts into excel worked also very easy. My team has access to the CRM, which helped our communication and transparency.
As we are a young startup, the free of charge -option works perfect for our needs right now. What I like is that when I create the contacts and companies, the logos and general information are generated automatically. With one glance to the to do -list and I know what my day looks like. The reminder of upcoming tasks works perfect for a person with a million things on her mind. Reviewing the activities and accomplishments with my team via the Dashboard allows them to gain the understandings of the market we are working in.
Gaining the knowledge about the early adopters
Reaching a 500+ customer base requires time, patience, hard work, a lot of thinking and even more searching. I wanted to start out wide to get a good understanding of different companies, how their HR functions work, what their thoughts on employee development were and build a good understanding on who would be the first early adapters of Talbit. Within this wide range of contacts, there are bigger players such as cities and municipalities and then smaller players such as design and software development companies. In addition to checking out the company webpage, I used Asiakastieto.fi and Finder.fi to gain insight on the company’s revenues and number of employees.
By contacting so many customers within such a wide range, the early adapters are those who
- have HR functions in excel
- spend too much time searching data from those excels
- believe in creating a meaningful environment by wanting and allowing the employees to develop and grow according to personal preferences
- have a growth strategy
- are looking for a more successful strategy implementation using the OKR (Objectives & Key Results) -framework
If the early adapter descriptions seem familiar to you or you are in the same situation with talent management as I was with CRM, let’s connect! Talbit may be just the tool for you. My contact details are below.
Kaisa Savola
Founder & CEO of Talbit
kaisa.savola@talbit.fi
+358 44 7961261
https://twitter.com/kaisa_savola
Talbit is a cloud-based service designed to capture, visualize and measure employee development plans — both business and personal.
With Talbit, each employee has a clear view on how to develop into a talent, taking the team and company strategy forward in ta structured way.
