How do I approach new clients?

Online Marketing 101:

• Get Linkedin Sales Prospector + Dux-Soup (or an alternative), and push personalizes messages to your prospectors -> You can do this for free, albeit manually. Do it for Linkedin and Facebook.
• Lookout for free PR coverage in relevant mediums
• Write up a testimonial for your site, write a Use Case or Whitepaper. Gate the content and push that to prospects
• Have a nurturing campaign in place -> Prospect fills out form -> Lead -> Rate the lead (as simple as you can) -> Nurture automatically or follow up personally
• Get your Calendly in order. Have prospects be able to select their own time and date for a demo
• Talk to a sales pro (a friend doing sales even). Their view on things may be invaluable. If you ain't got Sales friends check out Steli Efti online. He has a great free downloadable collection of sales material, pitches, etc. which is super simple to use. Copy/Paste that.
• Don't push to hard. Take smaller steps and A/B test your pitch. You don't want to burn all prospects at once. Maybe try Motorcycle shops in different areas in your country. For good measure reach out to international Motorcycle shops. They may have a different view on your product and could give hints at what may be missing or what is important.
• When you have your Landingpages, Forms, Gated Content and Sales pitch figured out (and somewhat working) it's time to spend money.
• Spend money on newsletter blasts (external newsletters you know your prospects are reading), attend trade shows, meetups, etc.
• Spend money advertising on Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram (maybe?). Then minimal Google Ads and make sure you have your Retargeting in place from day 1 (even if not using Google Adwords). All your traffic to your site needs to be retargetable.

Obviously there is way more to it than this. Copywriting, clear Call to Actions, tracking, etc. But in a nutshell it's better to just start than to not start at all.

Before you dive into selling, the first thing you want to do is work out what your goals are.

Secondly, you'll want to break them down into actionable steps.

For example, you have one paying customer. Do you fully understand...

• why that customer gets value from your product?
• What objections did they have, that you had to overcome before they agreed to buy?
• What is their top priority and how does your product fit in to that?

If not, talk to them and find this stuff out before you try and do any more sales. It'll teach you most of the stuff you need to know about...

• where to find new customers
• what makes someone likely to be a good customer
• what you need to write in your first message to get them interested
• and what objections you need to overcome to get them to buy

This sales stuff is pretty simple, but it can feel very overwhelming to founders doing it for the first time - I remember learning these lessons the hard way via months of mistakes.

If that describes you, I think you'd get a lot out of my Sales for Founders podcast - where I sit down with successful bootstrappers and sales experts to help people in your shoes learn sales and grow to $10k in monthly revenue.

You might also like my Sales for Founders course - which opens for earlybird enrollment on Wednesday.

If you have any questions about sales, or find yourself stuck, just shoot me an email - I love helping founders :)

Why should they ignore you if you provide value? Moreover, you already have a customer (don't forget to mention it, social proof is powerful). Talk about their need and how you can solve it. Be brief, provide contacts. Of course many will ignore you, but they ignore you today already :)

I think there's a lot of great information here (I've saved this to parse later) so I'm not going to repeat what others have said.
I just finished reading Tell to Win by Peter Guber. The book essentially makes the point that data does not evoke emotion and rarely anyone acts on data. Whereas telling a story of why you built the product or why that first customer signed up is far more likely to win future customers.

I will, sort of, repeat what someone else said. For my startup I am specifically looking for customers in my local area. In the very early days building personal relationships with customers will get you better feedback and they will be more tolerant of bugs/changes.

In terms of "I'm afraid that they might ignore my message", ignored messages are not so bad. You can follow up on an ignored message in a month or two. What would be worse is someone saying "don't ever contact me again" or "we already have a solution for this problem". I'm currently reading Lean Startup and it provides great info on A/B testing. So, don't reach out to every target customer all at once (you don't want to onboard them all at the same time anyway). Reach out to 2, measure the success rate & feedback, alter your pitch, reach out to another 2, and so on. Bottom line, all feedback is valuable even if you don't enjoy it or like it.

Finally, a while back I read Book Yourself Solid and it made the point that to enjoy being busy you need to enjoy your customers. I think that is even more true of startups, I suggest you carefully pick your first few customers. Pick ones who are tech-savvy, have a real need for your product, and understand that you are a growing company. The last thing you want to do is get 10 customers and 9 of them call you every day asking for tech support.

Hope that helps and good luck,

Oh also, people working in an industry often know others in the industry. Offering "1 month free for every successful referral" or asking your current customer for introductions will allow you to walk into a warm intro rather than cold calling.

Hey,

Congrats on your product launch and your first customer. That's a big deal.

You have a paying client. I think interviewing them to learn more about how they found you, what terms they were searching for and the pain-points your software solves is invaluable. One client is not a big data pool to work with, but it's better than no clients.

Once you know why they bought, in their own words, you can use that copy material to attract more clients similar to them.

As others have said, you're going to get a lot of "No's" when you're cold prospecting. But with a big enough list of qualified prospects, even a 0.5% or 1% conversion rate will result in a decent chunk of change.

What I did to promote my business, as dakl said, was using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to compile a list of qualified leads. It will take some time to filter out the bad leads. Once you have super solid leads, you can get started on an email campaign.

You want to treat it like any other sales funnel, by offering value first and then pushing them down the funnel.

Create a White paper and a body of content that maps out the sales funnel. These pieces of content should offer your product as a solution to the pain points your current client mentioned.

Use a CRM to track your open, click and response metrics. It will also be useful in keeping track of which stage of the funnel each lead is in. Personally, I recommend NetHunt if you are just getting started.

Also, do not blast your whole list at once. I had a list of about 1,200 business. I would send out around 40 emails for outreach campaign. I would test and track different subject lines, body copy and email sequences with each one. After a couple hundred, you should have a good idea of which combination performs best.

Make sure you have a decent website and a contact form with some qualifying questions. Then, follow up with the leads that fill out the form and pitch them.

Once again, you'll get a lot of "No's". And you'll get even more people not even reply before you get a "No". But the great thing is you only need a couple of "Yes's" to be comfortable for a while.

If you have any questions, feel free to pick my brain.

Good luck.

-John