One of the biggest challenges for startup businesses is limited time, money and resources. Startup business owners typically wear many hats which can be stressful in itself. When operating on a low budget, as many start-up small and medium-sized businesses are, you’re always looking for ways to save money while generating new business opportunities.
Sales and marketing departments typically feel these financial pinches most. When building sales pipelines and practicing lead generation, money shouldn’t stand in the way of accumulating more revenue.
When you’re under budget constraints, the last thing you want to do is launch a marketing campaign that doesn’t convert leads into customers. That being said, how do you ensure that every sales pipeline investment you make contributes to building and filling up your funnels? What distinguishes a successful campaign from a failed one?
When you outsource your B2B lead generation efforts, you have the opportunity to focus on the business itself rather than generating leads. Keep reading to learn how outsourcing your lead generation efforts help you build a sales pipeline for your startup company.
Why Is Building a Sales Pipeline Essential for Startup Businesses?
Every business starts with an idea that offers a solution. Regardless of your industry, your products or services strive to solve your target market’s problems. To achieve this objective, you must first define your audience, then communicate your vision, and finally convince them to invest in your product or service.
Building a sales pipeline involves pitching your company’s product or service to prospective businesses and convincing them to partner with your company. This is usually one of the most challenging processes for startup companies.
Not every product or service appeals to a wide audience, which means you need to develop a target audience that would most benefit from what your company provides. Identifying a target market ensures that your sales and marketing campaigns appeal to those who have the authority to invest in your product or service. The process of identifying and pitching businesses that might be interested in your company’s offerings is known as lead generation. Unlike fully established organizations, you don’t have a loyal clientele yet, so you need to build up your client base.
How To Build a Sales Pipeline for Your Startup Business
Now that you understand why building a sales pipeline is crucial, how do you go about it? Here are four steps to building a sales pipeline for your startup business:
Step 1: Identify Target Prospects
Who are your target buyers? As we said, you cannot have a product that targets the entire population. First and foremost, you need first to identify and narrow down your ideal prospects.
The process of identifying and narrowing down your target buyers may seem daunting when you don’t have an operations team to develop a model. However, it doesn’t always have to be challenging. Start by discovering common trends in your target market. Some of the areas you can check for similarity include:
- Industry: What industry do they work in? How is pitching this industry different from pitching other industries?
- Company size: What is the size of the organization? By asking this, you have a better scope to gauge how much profit the prospect could bring your business.
- Geographical location: Where is their office located? This determines if the prospect is in the market you want to reach.
- Decision-making capabilities: What is their involvement in the decision-making process? This ensures that you’re talking with someone who has the authority to purchase products or services for businesses.
- Social media engagement: Which social media platforms do they use? Do they frequently click on ads?
Step 2: Build a List of Potential Buyers
Once you’ve identified common buyer personas of your target prospects, use this information to generate a list of potential buyers. Here are some things to consider when building a list of prospective businesses:
- Fit: Look for similarities in industry, location, and social media engagement. This enables you to develop a lead generation strategy that aligns best with the prospects’ interests and how they engage with other businesses.
- Intent: Here, the focus is on behavior patterns. For example, how often do they visit your website? Which pages do they view most? Have they liked, shared, or commented on any of your content? These details help you determine the intent of their visits.
- Opportunity: What solution does your business provide for the prospect? Why should they invest in your product or service? Identifying how your company aligns with their business goals shows them what opportunities are available.
Step 3: Develop Relevant Marketing Content
With a thorough understanding of your target market, the next step is to create marketing content that is relevant to the prospect. Like any other lead generation strategy, developing marketing content requires extensive research of your target market.
How does your business provide value for the prospect and what do they risk losing if they don’t have your product or service? Without sounding too salesy, create content that shows the value of your product; don’t focus on why it’s so great, but highlight what prospects risk if they don’t have it.
Developing marketing content also allows startup businesses to build brand awareness and gain recognition from other businesses in the area. This enables startup businesses to have top-of-mind awareness if something goes south with their current B2B provider.
Step 4: Put Your Lead Generation Tactics to Work
Next, it’s time to put your lead generation strategies into action. Taking advantage of both inbound and outbound lead generation strategies ensures that you cover the full scope of lead generation. However, it’s important to make sure each lead generation approach is detailed and aligns with the wants, needs, and desires of your target audience.
Here are some examples of inbound lead generation strategies to increase profits:
- High-quality website design and development: Develop an eye-catching and user-friendly site that matches your target market’s wants and needs. A business website should be easy to navigate and readable whether someone is looking at it from a desktop or smartphone.
- Use SEO best practices: With more people turning to the internet to search companies before making purchases, positioning your site at the top of search engines is essential for building leads. There are various ways to optimize your website, including using competitive, high-ranking keywords and linking relevant external and internal blogs and pages.
- Pay per clicks (PPC): Investing in paid Google Ads for your most competitive keywords brings more traffic to your websites.
Is Pipeline Building Too Expensive?
The truth is, building and sustaining a sales pipeline can be expensive, especially when you do it all by yourself. However, lead generation is a necessary component to generate new business opportunities. For startups, handling this in-house isn’t financially logical and it requires a lot of time to plan and implement sales and marketing strategies.
Key Takeaways
B2B lead generation can be stressful and overwhelming for any business, especially for startup companies. These tips and tricks help you understand how you can generate leads and determine what B2B practices are most effective.
As a startup company, you already have a lot on your plate. By outsourcing your B2B lead generation efforts, like appointment setting and digital strategy practices, your startup company has the opportunity to save time and money to build a sustainable sales pipeline successfully. Outsourced providers like Abstrakt Marketing Group employ experienced sales development representatives (SDRs) and have all the latest tools and technologies available to build prospect lists and effectively pitch your startup company’s product or service to potential clients.
If you want to free up your time to focus on your company’s day-to-day operations, contact one of our reps to learn how we could be your partner in lead generation!
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