How to Market & Sell your Startup?
Okay.. So you might wonder who am I to be giving you tips to to grow your business. I don’t even have a business of my own.
But don’t worry guys. This article/ blog is a synopsis of what I recently learnt from a HelloMeets Meetup with London based Strategist and Growth Hacker & Founder of GoPinLeads, Raj Anand.
You can take my word for it, these hacks would definitely help you in starting & taking your business ahead. Here’s what Raj discussed at the event:
The most often asked question is when and how to start your sales & marketing
The first thing we need to do is to divide the process into two parts -
- Pre launch- what you should be doing before you begin
- Launch- what you should do after you’ve begun
Pre-Launch
Before you start your business, do the following:
Step 1: Make a list
List all the people you trust and believe in on a Google spreadsheet. It could be your ex-boss, your current boss, anybody you know who has a job or a business today. Make 3 columns-Firstname, Lastname & Email.
Step 2: Email the list
Here’s what your email could look like-
Hi firstname, I’m looking to start a new business but I don’t have an idea of what I should do. You know me and I would love to know what skills you think I have and what is the gap in the market today.
Send this to the list you’ve made. You could use a tool like YAM.
Step 3: YAMM (Yet Another Mail Merge) to send out emails
This tool replaces the first name from the excel sheet and helps you send out an email in seconds. You might already be using Mail merge or Mail Chimp, but they’re quite expensive. YAMM, on the other hand, is very cheap. Plus, it also tells you whether the email has been clicked on or not.
Step 4: Join various entrepreneur Facebook groups
For example: You’re looking to expand to Germany. Then you should join various entrepreneur groups in and around Germany because that way you can ask questions and eventually form a community. And it’ll cost you no money whatsoever.
Here’s a link to Raj Anand’s FB group Sales, Leads & Prospecting: www.facebook.com/group/slrpo
*Tip: Don’t join Linkedin groups anymore, they’re dead. You get 10 times more interaction on Facebook groups compared to Linkedin groups.
Step 5: Facebook Ads-Fake Product/Service
Don’t make it| Fake it !!
The biggest problem these days is that people make a product/service there is no market for. Initially, you should fake it.
Make an FB ad for a product/service and then see the number of people who click on it to buy. This way you can assess if there is a market for what you’re launching or not. It saves a huge amount of time and money that goes in creating the product or service.
Step 6: Use AYTM to conduct surveys
AYTM is a tool that allows you to conduct surveys. They charge a small price and conduct surveys for their clients. These kind of responses are very good for investors. If you do not do your homework before launching the product or service, then investors can get upset about it.
The idea really is that you need to have multiple ways to check if your product actually works before you launch it.
Don’t spend time & money launching stuff today which doesn’t work tomorrow.
Step 7: Adwords Competition-Semrush
Semrush allows you to see the cost for Adwords. For instance, if you put in your keywords and find that the cost for those is high, it means that they’re a lot of people selling that. But if the cost is low it means that the competition is low.
This is another way to gauge the market out there. You could do this for specific geographies or the whole globe.
So let’s say you have an idea that works. What do you do next?
- Find a domain name. Use Savespell for this. It’ll help you find domain names, tell you ones that have expired and ones that are currently available
- Make money from freelancing and use it to invest in your startup. You don’t need to go hunting for an investor if you require more than $100 for your startup. Sell yourself as a consulting person and do freelance work. You can use Upwork or Freelance.com.
At the end of the day, the game is to keep moving and not stand still, because if you stand still, you lose the game
Build your Personal Brand
Start presenting — networking doesn’t work. That’s what you need to make a real impact. You need to be an expert to get yourself customers.
*Tip:
- Make a list of all event organizers where you could be a speaker. Go to an FB group for event organizers — Use a tool called Grouply. It will help you scrap all the names of organizers- their first name, last name and LinkedIn profiles
- Then put that information into Hunter.io which will give you their email addresses
- After that use YAM to send them an email and ask for a speaking gig
In a world where technological advancement is happening at an exponential rate, the need for speed and agility in business and marketing has never been more important. Today, you need reliable data and robust methods of measurement in order to successfully achieve significant growth.
So here are some tools that’ll help you in exploiting growth opportunities for your business:
- Rapportive/Clearbit — They help you in knowing the profile of who’s sending you an email. By knowing that you can make a more personal pitch to the sender
- Instapage/Click Funnels — Don’t spend time on building a website. Build a landing page in about 4–5 hours using Instapage or Click Funnels. And once your business reaches a certain level, you can build your website
- Typeform — It’s a free tool to make brilliant payment forms and it also integrates with Zapier(mentioned in the beginning)
- Biteable.com — It’s a tool that helps you customise designs and make videos in seconds
- Hunter.IO
When you do a search on Linkedin, this tool helps you extract names, job titles & email addresses of those people.
Suddenly from being a prospect, you can have an initial discussion with them. But, often people think that once they have an email address they can sell their product to those people. That’s not the case. You need about 7 to 11 interactions before people are ready to buy from you.
Don’t sell on Day 1 and spend time to build trust
So don’t sell stuff earlier in the discussion. Build a rapport with them. And once they trust you, they will automatically buy from you.
- Grouply — like mentioned earlier, helps you scrape data from facebook groups
Suppose you’re targeting all the entrepreneurs in London. You join an FB group of London entrepreneurs. Install Grouply on your Chrome extension and download the names and Facebook profiles of these people.
Then you go to Hunter.IO and put in this data and you get the email addresses of all the entrepreneurs.
- Linked Helper — helps you send bulk emails from Linkedin
Its the equivalent of MailChimp, but inside Linkedin. So it can send emails to all your 1st connections as well as to people who you want to add to your network.
So now with the help of these tools you have a landing page, a form for payments & a video explaining your business.
An entrepreneur must keep learning always
In this game, you have to keep learning every day or you’ll lag behind by miles. Make sure to keep your headphones near you at all times.
For Accelerated learning use — Convert2mp3.net
While travelling you’re in a car or in the metro, try and listen to youtube videos so that you learn on the go. Use your phone to convert videos into audio using Convert2mp3.net. Instead of doing nothing when you’re stuck in traffic, find some good YouTube channels like Stanford Online, YCombinator, etc to accelerate your learning
How to create content for your business?
Nowadays, as a business, a startup or any company, we’re all media companies. Every startup that does well has to be their own media company.
We all need to write and produce new content almost every day for newsletters, blogs & even Facebook. There are times when one wonder’s what should I write about. For that you can visit sites like BuzzSumo and Reddit. Enter your niche in the search and see what people are talking about. It’s a great way to get new ideas when you’re falling short of coming up with your own.
- Grammarly — Helps you to proofread your language-the grammar as well as the spellings. It’s a fabulous tool
- Canva.com
Designers are useful and necessary people. But when you’re starting out you can do without one. Use Canva.com to design your visiting cards, banners & posters for social media.
It’s a tool to figure out your competitors’ traffic, its source & whether it is organic or paid. This helps you in planning well in time before launching.
If you understand the market & the competitors then you’re in a better position to go ahead with the people & the best way to launch a product is to build a community around it. Don’t ever worry about people taking your idea away.
Launch
After you’ve launched your product/service you need to create an awareness about your company and what you’re doing.
How do you do that?
- You can get a list of 3,500 journalists with their names and email addresses
Go to www.facebook.com/group/slrpo — Sales, Leads & Prospecting is a group which Raj Anand handles and once you join it, there’s a post where you can find that list.
After that you can use YAM or MailChimp to send them all an email about your product.
- Increasing your presence on Twitter —
Roundteam.co is a tool that allows you to make a list of people and then retweet their content
When you retweet content of experts, people start thinking of you as an expert too. This helps you in gaining followers.
How to send sales emails?
While sending emails, use content that is natural to you. Don’t make up stuff which is not for real. Sales emails should be like writing an email to a friend.
Start with a Hi and then write 3–4 lines. That’s it. Nice & simple. You could add your company logo too along with the signature at the bottom.
How to reduce costs?
Suppose you have customers in Europe and USA asking you to call them. This tool gives you a number for the country you want to call in. It gives your customers an impression that you’re a big company to afford such calls.
- Hire Freelancers
In the UK & US people hire freelancers from other countries where the cost of hiring is low. You can use Upwork & Freelancers.com for this.
How to be efficient?
These are automated time scheduling tools to help book time slots for calls and meetings.
If you have a team of Alpha testers you can put them on these sites. They help you manage projects better.
- Flock/Whatsapp Group
Put all your team members on a WhatsApp group. It’s the easiest way to connect with them.
Bonus Tip: What are the top 3 paid tools a startup should invest in?
- One tool for emailing people: MailChimp, EmailOctopus, YAMM
- Hunter.io for leads
- Make sure to keep some money aside for FB Ads
Make sure you also have the following :
- Gmail Account — tool of choice for Growth Hacking
For any Growth Hacker it is essential to have a Gmail account. There is so much you can do with it. Most of the tools in the market today fit into Gmail in one way or the other.
- Linkedin — is not only important for your CV, its a great tool for B2B selling and and having conversations for engagement as well
*Tip: Never use a URL in your Linkedin status update. Do that in the comments section.
- Zapier — an integration tool that helps you link all other web applications together without the use of coding. Incase you have zero understanding of coding, Zapier is the tool for you. If not it’ll still help you integrate everything in one place
Hope you liked reading this. Would love to hear your comments! :)
