Tips to find potential business customers for your B2B startup

Maybe you have a product ready to sell, a website well designed and optimized for SEO, some campaigns are running on social media or search engines and you can think that it’s just a matter of waiting until your customers arrive to start selling. Do you think that is enough?, The awful truth is that it is not enough!

Every startup has a market segment defined by its business model. You can have everything ready for your customers to reach you and perhaps some could be interested, but you should always have the direct contact with potential customers within your sales processes.

At Toky, we know that while our service has a personal use for some of our customers, our main market segment is small businesses and startups. We offer services such as cloud telephony, click to call and virtual phone numbers that can improve marketing processes and customer service. It is important to define actions that help us discover leads and contact these companies that may be potential customers in an efficient and straightforward manner.

While advertising, social media marketing, and SEO can give you exposure, nothing is more effective than contacting a customer directly and start offering your product in a customized and concrete way; you can invite them to sign up for a trial period or make a demonstration, and those are invaluable opportunities for a B2B business. If your customers are businesses, you can not go out asking everybody if they are interested in your product. Where could you find customers for a B2B business?

Now we will share some ideas and techniques we use at Toky to find potential customers.

1. Knowing your customers

It is important to know your business model, value proposition and define your market segment. Having a profile of your customers, it is easier to analyze where you could find them.

For Toky, our customers are mostly small businesses and startups that require a telephone system easy to install and able to meet their communication needs at an affordable price. Besides, our target customers must have at least a website or a fan page on Facebook since our click to call options operate on these platforms. With this in mind, we start analyzing where to find these businesses and how to reach the right people to offer Toky services.

It is important to start managing your customers in a CRM system, if you use Zoho CRM you might be interested in our integration with Toky

2. Ideas to find potential customers for your startup

To find potential customers, in our case, we need to find the businesses and startups which could use Toky in its marketing and customers service processes.

It is important to bear in mind that this process even when it could generate many opportunities, you need to select those that most closely match your customer profile. It is not only a matter of quantity.

To find companies that could be customers of our service, we apply the following ideas:

Startups listings: Many startups, including Toky, try to get some extra visibility in directories and listings; but these, in turn, are a good source of leads for our service because they offer businesses categorized and some extra information that helps us to define whether our product could be useful to them. Some listings that we use, are:

• Startup Ranking It allows filtering startups by country, market segment and even suggest competitors or similar businesses.
• Betapage.co It has a good list of businesses that even when you can’t apply filters has interesting startups for several market segments.
• CrunchBase This is one of the largest lists of startups, founders and news.

Facebook: On Facebook, you can find startups and search for businesses if you know how. One way is to use groups of entrepreneurs but there is another way and is using queries to Facebook Open Graph, because with this you can find potential customers according to their interests or even reach specific contacts. You can use the following queries to find startups:

• People who like [Fan Page] If you replace [Fan Page] with the name of a coworking or certain entrepreneurs oriented pages, you’ll see a list of people interested in startups, many of which will be CEO or founders of some of them.
• People who work at [business]:By replacing [business] with some companies that you found in the startup’s listings or some that you have defined as a potential customer, people who have registered on Facebook as employees will appear.

To do Facebook Open Graph queries you must have your Facebook in English.

3. Discover emails from your leads or potential customers

Since you have identified businesses that could be clients, you need to find emails to contact them. The first source can be the website, especially search for the page of its team where you will see the list of people and job positions. If you can’t find any email there, you can use tools like Email Hunter where you can just enter the website domain and the tool will try to give you some valid emails taken from various sources displaying a confidence indicator. You can validate emails with the names of employees that you can find on the company’s website, Facebook or Google.

You can use generic emails like info@business.com or contact@business.com just in case of not finding any direct email. In small startups, these emails are usually read by their founders.

At the end, you will have one list of companies, names and email addresses where you can start sending cold emails. We recommend writing each email according to your prospect customer and you can have their business model in mind to offer your product or service in a way that is easy to understand. At Toky we know that each client is important, that’s why our cold emails are not massive; before writing to a client, we have analyzed the way Toky can benefit its business and even we mentioned it briefly in the message.

Your customers are the ones who will make your business successful and you should not just sit down waiting for them to arrive; with these resources, we think you can start to find customers; if at first, it does not work, it doesn’t matter; you’re going to improve over time. At Toky, we send cold emails weekly and although the conversion rate is not 100%, it is much higher than we would by sitting down and waiting for customers.

Finally, we invite you to try Toky and see how our great features can help you communicate better with customers and website visitors. Visit www.toky.co y try Toky for business free for 14 days.

Originally published at blog.toky.co on October 7, 2016.