Entrepreneurship is fun. If you have no money though, it is a rough thing to do.
Regardless whether you have small, local agency or you are building a scalable business - you need clients. You need a whole list of people to contact and sell like crazy until you have a reputation that people come to you. The more you want to scale, the more you feel this.
Now the best way, hands down, is using personal networks, connections, warm intros and door openers. People buy when they trust. Thus, if you can fill your pipeline using only personal recommendations, start there. This works really well for agencies.
But, assume you start like I did without a network and basically penniless.
Here's how we filled our B2B pipeline:
There are basically three ways how to find clients in B2B apart from personal connections, which tops all of them:
Google your ass off.
Buy a list.
Use a sales tool/software.
Lists?
My, yes.
There is only a finite number of companies in your market/niche, that you can target.
If you do B2C your playing field is massively larger. I think the only Company that ever ran into a problem in B2C is Facebook. Imagine running out of people on the planet to sell to... insane. Thus, B2C has other problems when starting, more on the branding and copy side.
With B2B there are only so many targets.
Let's say your niche is selling tools to tattoo studios. If I type into google "how many tattoo studios in the uk", the first hit states 2159. If we would research that a bit we would be able to narrow that down more to an appropriate estimate, let's assume there are 2000 shops in the UK.
2000 outreaches, and you went through the whole of UK.
If you expect a 5% closing rate, you will have a whopping 100 clients. If you do 5 calls per day it will take you two years (demos, follow ups and so on take a lot of time
So let's find them clients.
Googling everything
If you just start, google the location where your company is and your keyword, tattoo studio. Using google maps you immediately find a list of potential clients. That is a start.
What works really well is searching for associations and interest groups in your niche. For instance, an association of tattoo studio artists. Or a tattoo studio interest group. A tattoo studio convention, expo, annual meeting. They often have member lists you can scroll through.
The other thing that works well is going one step upwards or downwards in the production line. Thus, for instance, finding tattoo ink manufacturers, tattoo brush/needle/chair producers and skim their client portfolio. They often also have references on their pages or a list of partners.
(Depending on your product you might even have a chance to initiate a partner call with them, so you can sneak into their distribution channel.)
You can structure this approach fairly well. If you know a bit how, you will get pretty far.
And once you have some cash flow, you can start structuring the sales process and consider more sustainable or efficient sales tactics.
Buy a list from a researcher
There are a lot of research companies, that scrape through membership lists of associations and organisations and then check the companies with who is in charge, get the email and additional info and so on.
You can usually buy these lists for a set price for the first few hundred contacts, and then each contact costs something, leaving you to pay several hundred to a few thousand bucks for a list of prospects.
Depending on the niche, you can also find people on linkedin and X who created lists and want you to comment or repost to give you access to their list. These lists are most often not overwhelming, because they want to sell something using the list as their lead magnet, but it can be a good starting point.
Now there are good and bad lists, sadly, and you won't know the quality until you work through it.
The first one we got was horrible, which led to us having some rather unpleasant talks with the firm.
We currently have a great list, which saves us a lot of time not having to google the prospects individually, but being able to work through them more efficiently.
I still end up contacting only one in about 10 on the list. Using a colour code I only contact most promising and label potential for a later stage.
Everything else is not qualified.
Research using a tool/Software
The masterpiece is, of course, using a sales software.
There are several specialised web-scrapers out there with email automations included, such as salesforce, apollo, or niche ones with specialised scrapers like finding startups for VCs.
Such scrapers find publicly available data such as email adresses, profiles and more, and you can build lists to go through or automate with sequences.
Because you can also go through companies, they are really pratical to find specific people within larger companies, so you can directly contact them.
Now, we used to use such tools sparingly, mainly because we didn't yet have the budget.
If you scale your sales process and hire someone, it is very much a great way to not only find targets, but to also track the amount of outreach emails / calls done, response rate, demo bookings and such. So you can see the performance of your employee in one place.
At the moment I use apollo to enter a new market with automated outreaches, and it is pretty practical.
If you want to try one, maybe give apollo a go -> apollo.io
How we do it in early stage startups with no cash:
When working with early stages, I will always use the google search to save cash.
Later, we prefer is to buy lists from researchers. Mainly because these are one time payments that you can plan, and we can work for the next years with these lists that are for our niche. The downside is, others will also use these lists so the same people receive more outreach than when you research them individually.
To track the outreaches when we often need to create redundant systems, like excel lists, which is a massive pain and a downside I am not happy with.
So we have a sheet where we track outreach, and only eligible leads or prospects that respond at least neutrally, will land in our CRM, where we then can track the progress.
Thus, the CRM is neither all leads nor only customers, but something inbetween, which is tedious. Plus you have to manually track people in a sheet.
The sales tool makes that process a lot smoother.
You could create sequences with most CRMs, but they are pretty bad in comparison to a sales tool. So the budget will influence quite a bit how you work.
A matter of company philosophy, really
In my first company I started myself, I immediately bought a licence for apollo to find and track sales. I would only add paying customers to the CRM. I still prefer that approach, even if you might loose some customer data when transferring the client to the CRM.
The same philosophy then happened with marketing, using tools such as mailchimp for campaigns, and forms were used using a form software or google forms.
This led to having each team use software that was sort of individually tailored to their needs.
In the last company I cofounded, we used hubspot as our CRM. And because of that, we would use also its forms, its sales mechanism, its lead gen and so on. Thus, every potential lead would automatically land in our CRM, not just customers. It was an all in one solution, where all teams worked using the same tools. Even the blog, landing pages and ads were done using its features. I don't like that as much, as it fills up the CRM with dead leads over time.
Thus, I like using the CRM only for paying customers. This makes the CRM less cluttered with cold and trash leads from sales and marketing, which there are many in our niche. Plus, the info we gather in the CRM would always be relevant for key account and support people.
All the sales bickering, cold marketing leads and more that are to be targeted through campaigns stay out of the place, where paying customer data is, like apollo.io, or salesforce or whatever exists in your region.
How do you do it? Let me know.
Best
Andreas
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