Factors

Navigating Sales In Early-Stage Start-Ups

Building pipeline and scaling sales as a startup is not easy. 

Learn about the challenges with navigating sales in early-stage start-ups — and how to overcome them. Understand the power of account-based sales with Praveen Das, Co-founder of Factors.ai and Ankit Jain, Co-founder of Clearfeed. 

What we’ll cover:

• Common challenges startups face when they begin their sales journey.
• How high-growth teams like Clearfeeder overcome these challenges.
• And why account-based sales is important for early-stage businesses.

Q. As an early-stage company, you have an unknown brand. Your product-market fit is yet to be achieved. Your ICP is evolving. And there’s limited tooling and team bandwidth. Getting to those first 20 customers might seem…impossible. How should you go about it? What was that journey like?

A. Startups are like hourglasses. You start with very broad ideas and segments. Then starts the journey of going as narrow as possible: “we serve this one ICP in this one segment”. And finally, you achieve growth. 

1. We identified 4-5 segments we care about. Within those segments, we identified a list of relevant, high-level problems our technology could solve. 
2. Then, we performed customer discovery by reaching out to about 200 people in each of those segments to validate our problem-statements.
3. After these conversations, we identified a “pull” towards one of these segments (Customer success teams from series B dev/infra SaaS start-ups using Slack) and ran with it.
4. Based on this insight, we built a product that this specific niche of people loved — which gave us our initial boost in customers based on referrals and virality.

Q. At this stage, what did your go-to-market engine look like? Was it mostly outbound or inbound? How did you go about GTM? 

A. At this point of time, we didn’t have a market team. It was just the founders and a few engineers so there was no question of inbound. 

The other consideration was whether we’re creating a category or are in an established category. If it’s the latter, you can “buy your way out”. We didn’t have this back then, so it was primarily an outbound motion:

1. A list of 3500 ICP accounts based on firmographics and technographics
2. Reach out via sequences of mails, calls, and LinkedIn
3. This approach helped land 8 meets per month, out which 2-3 convert. 

A quick break from questions to discuss engagement-based sales models…

Engagement-based sales is a sales strategy that focuses on targeting highly engaged accounts and customizing the sales approach to fit the needs of each account (As opposed to a cold approach). 

For context, the “old way” involved a standard process of defining ICP accounts, researching target accounts, reaching out to contacts within those accounts, and measuring success with KPIs.

The challenge with this is approach is:

1. Researching target accounts involves several hours of tedious effort
2. Measuring success with KPIs involves pulling data from disparate sources
3. AND you’re missing out on anonymous accounts that are already engaging with your brand

This is where Factors.ai comes in. Factors identifies and unifies hidden account data across ad campaigns, product review site, website, and CRM to capture demand, monitor engagement, and personalize outreach & nurturing. 

Engagement-based sales is the new way. Here’s how Factors helps:

1. Identify anonymous inbound traffic across channels
2. Track granular account engagement to measure intent
3. Personalize outreach based on engagement and intent
4. Finally, measure marketing & sales KPIs under one roof

Ankit and Clearfeed’s experience with Factors and the new approach

“Why aren’t we personalizing outreach to improve response rates?” is a standard question amongst founders and the standard answer is usually “it takes a lot of time to meaningfully personalize outreach”. 

Then, the question was “how can we find which accounts are most engaged, so we can personalize outreach to them alone?”. Seems reasonable. So with Factors, we identified accounts from our top of the funnel awareness campaigns as well as organic traffic from educational content assets. 

This set of accounts were, at the very least, problem aware. SDRs could now prioritize personalized outreach to this set of “higher-intent” accounts. This has resulted in a 5x improvement in response rate and our ability to book outbound meetings. Real-time alerts with Factors also helps with speed to response rates. These insights are also signals on what accounts care about or why they’re visiting our website. 

Read more about how Clearbit leverage Factors here: factors.ai/customers/clearfeed

Other tips to improve outbound performance include:

1. Achieve a comprehensive understanding of target accounts through their website, customers, growth, and other signals
2. Pinpoint the exact channels your ICPs prefer (LinkedIn, mail, calls, communities, etc) 
3. Keep experiment and iterating on bottlenecks, wins, and learnings

Q. Today, Clearfeed is further along its growth journey — running ads, content, etc. How has Factors come in handy at this stage?

A. As a founder, I always want to know what’s working. With Factors, we can see what accounts that have converted interacted with pre-sales. What are their touchpoints? What pages have they visited? What topics resonate most? and more. This helps guide our content strategy, paid strategy and beyond. 

The Factors advantage for engagement-based sales may be summarized as…

1. Unified account data and scoring: Qualify and target the right accounts based on website engagement, intent signals, and firmographics
2. Advanced analytics: Optimize demand gen and content marketing investment‍
3. Real-time alerts: Stay on top of new ICP accounts and closed lost accounts showing engagement

Now more than ever, B2B deals involve shrewd, inquisitive buyers. Generic marketing strategies are no longer sufficient to capture customer attention or loyalty. Instead, marketing personalization plays a crucial role in building trust and intent amongst buyers. 

B2B marketing personalization is about creating tailor-made user experiences that convey a feeling of empathy and validation. It's about replacing broad, generic messages with personalized marketing efforts based on your target audience. The following article explores several ways to personalize your B2B marketing efforts. 

B2B Marketing Personalization 

Personalization is quickly becoming a buzzword in the industry but with good reason. It's a powerful marketing approach that drives better results and builds stronger connections with your audience.

Imagine you walk into a cafe, and the barista greets you by name, asks about your day, and already knows your usual order. You’d feel special, wouldn't you? You’d probably be encouraged to become a regular customer. This is, in essence, the objective of personalization; it makes customers feel valued and understood.

To personalize your marketing efforts, the first step is to gather relevant information about your customers' demographics, pain points, use cases, concerns, engagement behavior, and more. Once all this data is in place, it can be leveraged to customized experiences on your website, emails, social media, and ads.

To make the data collection easier, you can build a custom software tool that collects data of users who visit your website and integrate it into the website. Of course, there are software outsourcing companies you could task with this. The tool should be such that when users visit your website or interact with your ads, it will collect their behavior and preferences, like what they click on and what they aren’t interested in. You can then use this data to target the ads you show to them. This leads us to...

Personalized Targeted Advertising

One of the most common use cases of personalization is targeted advertising. Have you ever searched for a product online, and suddenly, ads for that exact product started following you around the internet? That's not a coincidence; it's targeting.

A lot of advertisers are now using tracking technologies to gather engagement data and leverage this information to display ads that are more relevant to users.

But personalization goes beyond just ads. It extends to the entire user experience. This level of personalization makes the shopping experience more convenient and enjoyable. And most importantly, they can sell more because of those strategies. 

Personalized Mail and Content marketing

Email marketing is another opportunity to leverage personalization and enhance user experience. Do so by segmenting your audience and sending them tailored messages based on their engagement. This is far better than simply sending generic mass emails to all subscribers, regardless of their differences.

You can also leverage personalization in your content: think blog posts, videos, and social media posts. When you’ve gained insights into your audience's preferences, challenges, and goals, you can create content that resonates with them on a deeper level. This will help establish your brand as a trusted resource and help build a loyal community of followers. Even in the case of eCommerce, users delivering personalized content is the key to generate more sales. You can do this by leveraging merchandising feature of the best digital experience platforms out there.

Personalized Website Experiences 

With the advent of GenAI, chatbots and virtual assistants work better than ever to provide personalized assistance based on user inquiries and previous interactions. By understanding the context and history of a customer's interaction with the brand, these AI-powered tools can offer tailored solutions and recommendations, thereby enhancing the overall customer experience.

Personalized Social Media Experience

Social media platforms also offer opportunities for personalization. Start by delivering targeted content and advertisements to the right users. Not every social media user cares about that paint ad you recently published. When you target the right ads to the right audience segment, you increase the content's relevance and maximize the impact of your marketing efforts.

Prioritize Privacy While Acquiring Data

It's essential to strike a balance with personalization. While customization can enhance the user experience, it’s of utmost importance that you respect user privacy.

Let your customers know how their data will be used and give them control over their preferences. Respecting boundaries builds trust and ensures that personalization remains a positive experience for both parties. Implementing personalization strategies requires combining technology, data analysis, and creative thinking. 

Wrapping up

Leverage data and technology, and you’ll be able to deliver targeted advertisements, personalized website experiences, tailored content, and customized customer support.

However, never forget to strike a balance between personalization and privacy. Respect user boundaries and ensure transparency in data usage.