March Report
Wednesday, 4 April 2018
I’m going to start with the numbers, then tell you what I think they mean, then tell you what my plan is to grow them in April.
Metrics
Number of Clients: 80 (exceeded goal by 5)
CAC: roughly $20-$40
LTV: $637 (including prebuys)
Churn: 6% (Since Sep 2017)
March Revenue
February Standard Revenue: $1,489
Bulk Prebuy Revenue: $11,500
New Client Revenue: $3,750
=$16,739 for Feb
Narrative
Our March Revenue is $5K lower than our February revenue.
This is partly due to the Feb revenue being inflated by our Moby Dick upsell operation, which means our client base has many hours to work with and are unlikely to purchase more in the following month, until they work through all their hours.
Knowing this, our March Sales plan was to leverage referrals.
The referrals came through, but all our new clients selected the minimum prebuy tier at $250, leading to less revenue than expected.
In April, we’re going to fix this in two ways:
— We’re raising the minimum purchase from $250 to $1000. So if we onboard 25 clients that’s $25K in NEW revenue.
— And we’ve increased our support team’s size and systems and training, which should increase our ability to touch and upsell clients.
— And as always, we’re improving operations so that we’re moving through hours faster.
Delta from Last Month
The onboarding form automatically charges the client on Stripe on the spot, ensuring no free work.
We’re using Hubspot to track Sales emails so Support teams can reach out with context about the client.
Client dashboards log the dollar value of hours used that week, and ping the client automatically to buy more when they run out.
We have a referral program in place: inv.tech/refer
Where is sales going?
Short Term
We’re hiring an SDR to take over email outreach and the sales calls.
We’re systematically mining Invisible’s 2nd degree network for personnel that fit our picture of clients that need us.
We’re building personalized case studies for each process.
Medium Term
Know exactly what external indicators on the web (company size, job postings, job titles) are linked to internal needs that we know can use Invisible help (calendar, funnel management, data scraping, etc)
Long Term
Huge waitlist, aggressive targets, regular prebuy, network mined out, deals structured upfront, regular new markets, copious collateral, great referral incentives, big team, everything automated, regular introductions.
Onboarding
Onboarding was handed off to Support, because onboarding a client and supporting them are two sides of the same coin.
Sales is now responsible for everything up until the Onboarding Form is filled out, and Support is everything after.
So, look for more Onboarding information in the Support Report!
Infinite Lead Generation: The Growth Plan For Q2
Our growth in the coming months will come from us applying the same lead generation processes we use for our clients, to our own sales needs.
Here are my first hypotheses about how to find these clients.
As we test conversion rates for each keyword and A/B test personalized templates, they will evolve.
A priori reasoning
What are the externally visible indicators, that indicate internal company needs that Invisible is well suited to?
There are 3 criteria in that sentence: external indicators, internal needs, and Invisible expertise.
External Indicators — Job Titles and Roles Wanted
These are things we can see from outside and are publicly available online, likely at Crunchbase and Linkedin, etc. Size of the company and funding round and whatnot are only vaguely helpful, so I think we need to go deeper.
We know we want companies that are roughly 2–50 people in size, which corresponds to Seed or Series A funding. I believe the most valuable data here will be Job Titles they’re hiring, and also Job Titles of existing employees
Every employee at a company fulfills a need, and if there’s someone in charge of an Invisible capability or something adjacent to it, I’d bet they could use some help.
Internal Needs
Given that our expertise is Calendar, Research, and Data Entry, those are the needs we want to identify in companies.Therefore, we need to find Job Titles whose responsibilities overlap with these needs.
What are those Job titles? We’ll have to research what keywords the real world use, but I believe they will be related to the following words:
- Founder, CEO, COO, CMO (for Calendar, as they grow and don’t want to do things themselves.)
- CRO, SDR, Account Manager, and so on for Research and Data Entry (for lead generation.)
Invisible Expertise — Calendar, Research, and Data Entry
Operations tells me that we are best at Calendar, Online Research, and Data Entry.
Once we find these individuals, what will we send to them?
A case study tailored to the above 3 needs, that I will create myself, similar to our old lead generation case.
A posteriori reasoning
What existing clients have obvious glaring needs, that they’re willing to prebuy large amounts of hours for in order to solve?
That would be our clients who have already demonstrated their need is great enough to prebuy large hours from us.
If we can find the commonalities amongst these companies, than it should be easy to find more like them.
The job titles of the clients who have large needs or purchases with us, who didn’t do it off of their relationship with our CEO, are the following
Vice President of Marketing, Marketing / Communications,
Quality Assurance Associate, Product Manager,
Venture Capital Investment Analyst
Founder, Growth, Co-founder
Innovation and Growth, VP Growth and Business Development
Business Development Associate, CEO
Director of Strategic Relationships
Head of Sales & Partnerships,
Operations Analyst, CEO and Founder
CEO+Vision
Initial Sales Targets
Therefore the most fruitful keywords may be: Analyst, Founder, CEO, Growth, Partnerships, Sales, Business Development, and Operations. These are the job keywords, at the appropriately sized companies, that we should reach out to. Therefore our search should look for these roles, in all 2nd degree connections to us, for companies sized 2–50 employees.
I believe the Analyst, Growth, Operations and Business Development keywords will serve us best, as those people are closer to the pain and receiving fewer cold emails than the CEOs and Founders.
But stay tuned to see the results of that assumption!
