An Engineer’s View of the Sales Process
Because I’m too cheap to subscribe to Marketo.com or Salesforce.com
When I launched my start-up, I really had no idea on how to get new b2b customers. Somebody on Hacker News suggested reading Predictable Revenue which ended up being hugely influential. I could have perhaps subscribed to marketo.com or salesforce.com, but being a boot strapped start-up, I decided to try to do it myself.
The big takeaway from the book is that there are 3 types of leads
- Nets — Leads generated through email marketing, conferences, or Internet marketing (wide net)
- Seeds — Leads through a long term relationship from local user groups, social media, and existing happy customers.
- Spears — Targeted leads that require individual human efforts.
I decided to take a stab at developing a system for ‘spears’
Generating your first list of spears
The first problem I had was that I had no customer leads. I generated them in two ways:
- Scraping farmer’s market websites and food awards websites.
- In person leads from local farmer’s markets.
After I got the information, I created this record
When the record gets inserted into the database, two processes kick off
- A snapshot of the site is taken via phantomjs
- The e-mail gets validated through briteverify.com
Next, each entry is manually reviewed to see if the vendor lead is relevant. If it passes the test, then an e-mail is sent out (inspired from an appsumo.com email template:
Hi <vendor name>,
I found your website and was wondering if you were in the need of any nutrition facts analysis. Shops like yours typically use analysis for <their product line>.This is a sample label that would be generated from the analysishttp://labels.menutail.com/nutrition_label.pdf
When you have a few moments, I’d love to talk to you or the appropriate person about this.
thanks,
-dan
777-777-7777
http://www.menutail.com
This e-mail also contains an invisible image which helps with e-mail open tracking. To help with the reviewing process, some business rules were created to throw out entries which weren't relevant.
Sales funnel
After the e-mail gets sent, several options come into play. As you can see in the diagram, your job is to winnow the scenarios until the vendor subscribes to a plan.
Vendor Not Interested
- No response
- Vendor says analysis isn’t needed
These are two straight-up rejections from the vendor. At this point, I haven’t really come up with a good response, but I more or less leave them alone.
Vendor Not Interested Right Now
- Vendor expresses concern on a use case
- Vendor says they are interested in the future
In these use cases, the vendor isn’t ready to make a commitment. In this scenario, I try to answer any concerns, and follow-up every 30 days.
Vendor Interested
- Vendor e-mails questions
- Vendor requests phone call
- Vendor calls
If the vendor is interested, they tend to reach out immediately. If they are comfortable with chatting on the phone, I reach out immediately and answer any questions they have.
What I’ve Learned
- Don’t give too much information at any point of time.
When testing different e-mail templates, vendors rarely read the full subject line or even the full e-mail. There often is just a small segment of information that interests them (‘nutrition analysis’ in our scenario), and then they reply back.
When you have a lead, give them one small piece of information at a time to help them with their decision making process.
- Put an unsubscribe link in your e-mail even if it is considered a transactional e-mail.
In our initial e-mail blasts, several targeted e-mails were being marked as spam. Some on the Internet suggested putting an ‘unsubscribe’ link, and we found that since then, no one has marked the e-mail as spam as long as it was a targeted spear e-mail.
- Verify your e-mails before sending!
When we first started sending our e-mails through our external e-mail gateway, we were getting bounces. Pre validating an e-mail before sending it out saves you time in reaching out, and protects your e-mail reputation with your gateway.
- Rejection does not mean a sale
Several times I have vendor leads saying they aren’t interested. But maybe a month later, I end up seeing them subscribe to the service. So always be nice to all of your leads. Even if they reject you.
We have a lot to learn, but hopefully this helps others new to the b2b process.
