B2B marketing and customer relationship management.
This week, I was looking for some experts on B2B marketing. Our revenue model depends on corporate sales, so learning this is high on my priority list.
David Haddad
David is running a B2B sales marketing company https://www.publiseek.com in Dubai, UAE, and he happened to be on Lunchback while he visiting Stockholm. He is a very experienced entrepreneur: he helped Uber with PR when they establish itself in UAE and he has founded several startups both in the USA and Europe. I requested the lunch and hoped to talk about how to handle B2B sales for Lunchback.
My question was how to find sales leads. David explained that I should try to reach the key person in the company I want to sell to by using social selling. Cold calling is out of date these days. Everyone is on social media, so it is best to reach them there. Social listening is also a good method to employ so you understand what your target people are looking for. If you watch for social mentions of certain keywords, products, or hashtags that are relevant to your business, you’ll build a picture of what people care about.
One concrete tip that I got: to figure out what companies I should target, I should use this link to see the ranking of Sweden’s 100 top companies.
The best social selling tool in David’s opinion is the sales navigation provided by LinkedIn. It costs about $100 per month, and you can target your audience specifically by company. If you want to get their email, the hack is to find out the company email format and use an email checker to verify if the email exists. After the lunch, I end up building a list of 200 sales leads using his method. I could not thank David enough for the very detailed crash course on B2B sales leads.
Alexander Slott
Alexander is a guru when it comes to customer relationship managment. He is running a startup called Top of Heart which helps other companies to maintain good relationship with their customers, and also activate potential deals for them. My question to him was this: “How can we create enough value for corporate customers that they will happily pay us for the work?”
He replied that Lunchback could play an important role for salespeople. He thinks they can find sales leads through us. He thought that community managers could also use us effectively, because they need to maintain the interactions among their users.
In both of these cases, Lunchback is a soft value. Soft values are those things that can ultimately lead to sales, conversions, and the other measurable (“hard”) values that businesses track. A sales lead is not a sale, but it’s the first step that has potential to become a sale. Maintaining a community is not a sales job either, but an engaged community of users leads directly to that critical mass of excitement and engagement that makes a platform successful.
Lunchback has the potential to add those soft value, and we are also exploring this issue ourselves. Our activation rate — the number of users who download the app AND eventually book a lunch — is not where we want it to be. Our current project is to work on helping users to have a great Lunchback experience (that is, booking and enjoying a lunch) as soon as possible.
That led to a discussion about community building, and now I’m full of plans about doing that — I’ll keep you posted.
I always learn something new each week from the Lunchback mentors, and I urge you book one. Decide on a question you have about your personal growth, or a professional challenge you are facing right now, then find someone to answer it. It’s pretty easy, and definitely rewarding.
