I'm curious if anyone has any experience with a B2B startup? Particularly, how would you go and acquire businesses to be your customer. Thanks!
best advice i could offer in this situation from an appregatta perspective is get yourself positioned with someone that already has access to the customers you're trying to reach (a consulting firm with domain expertise, a reseller, etc.). ask them to be your product experts and hook you up with just a few prospects. there are real tricks to this to get it to work but it's doable and i see it work all the time.
another often viable option is to sell a very small piece of work as a consulting deal, and provide the prospect with real and tangible deliverables in terms of what they will get... if they get to "try out" a product also, all the better for them. but the deliverable is often an assessment and process improvement recommendations. if it's a real problem, they're likely to be willing to pay $500, $2,500, $10,000 for a consulting gig if you're team is credible and the pain is real. done right, mini consulting gigs can be easier to get meetings for and get deep into dialogue about nature of the probs at the very early stages.
so much is situational with B2B selling, it's borderline not even appropriate for me to offer much. but hopefully this gets you thinking and pushes your process forward a bit.
congrats on the biz and best of luck!
The most effective way I've found is to find some keywords that these businesses are searching, then start an aggressive SEO campaign on them.
Also, contacting them (By phone not email) works well too.
Is there some way to validate what these businesses are searching for? Also, did you think of making the product and then go out to find the businesses or did you identify some inefficiency that these businesses have and exploit them?
Yes I have heard about cold calling though I'm wondering if there are any techniques for getting them to switch over. I suppose if some are locked in to some sort of vendor contract then it might be challenging.
Use Google keyword tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
Enter some words/terms/phrases related to your products/service that you think your potential customers would be searching for.
Look (closely) at what suggestions it comes up with, dig deeper, always keeping an eye on monthly search volumes etc. - I think that'll do the trick. :-)
>Also, did you think of making the product and then go out to find the businesses or did you identify some inefficiency that these businesses have and exploit them?
About a decade ago, I did the latter and grew the startup from 0 to ~$2M revenue/pa in a bit over two years, finding customers (businesses) only via cold calling until referrals started pouring in too.
Your mileage, naturally, will vary, depending on the business sector you're targeting and/or your product/service.
HTH
At first, I thought - man, this is SO not sexy... but over time, I've realized that we can be ourselves and be fun and still cater to businesses. Our previous name was Transparent Financial Services. We have now changed to FeeFighters and have a ninja logo, and our customers have raved to us about the change.
In terms of tactics, we use a lot of SEO/SEM, being at the right conferences, and partnerships with other companies working for small businesses (this is a large opportunity that is under-tapped).
What kind of businesses do you want to sell to?