I built a tool to help B2B Indie Hackers sell
Check out the Landing Page here
I’ve realised that we, Indie Hackers, absolutely love building. But selling? Not so much.
Every other post nowadays seems to be of an Indie Hacker with a beautiful product, talking about having difficulty getting customers. Heck, some of us haven't even gotten the opportunity to speak to customers and get iterative feedback. Selling isn't easy and it's not everybody's expertise.
So why not let somebody experienced sell for you?
Introducing SimplySales - a tool to help B2B Indie Hackers book more sales calls. For a monthly fee, access a marketplace of experienced, elite sales reps that will help you book calls on a pay-per-meeting basis. Pay a commission of your choice, only after a meeting has been scheduled and completed.
It’s time to get customers. Save your time and money by outsourcing your sales function.
Keen to hear what you guys think of this concept!
Interesting concept! To be clear - the sales reps will find leads for you based on your product, not actually complete the sales call for you, right?
Yup, spot on - the goal of the sales rep is to schedule a meeting with yourself (ie. product founder) + an interested customer.
Logic behind not having the sales rep just take the call is because you probably know your product the absolute best + it’ll be difficult to quantify call performance of the rep.
I just scheduled a call. Love the idea.
I’m curious how you will handle the pay per lead component. Will you be using some type of escrow system?
Thanks for bringing that up!
Currently (ie. before we have a platform): It'll be manually recorded and invoiced on a monthly basis.
In the future: I think a strong platform reference to learn from will be Clickbank. SimplySales is in a way, Clickbank for B2B businesses after all. So it'll be some variation of a tracking link to a calendar booking system + auto-payout for each sales call booked.
Hi Sean, this is such an interesting tool. As a way of intro, I am an ex venture capital investor and my co-founder is a payments expert. We have been experimenting with a few ideas and wanted to try out your tool:
Hope to hear from you.
Thanks
Hi Ramani, thanks for reaching out and appreciate the feedback!
2.1 Re. Full-time - Currently, the SDRs we have onboard are working part-time. We’ll have to make an assessment as we go along, whether or not we require full-time reps, but I’m leaning against it considering it seems more scalable to operate as a marketplace of SDRs vs an agency of SDRs. Your concern then might be “How can I ensure these freelancing SDRs are helping me outreach?” - (1) firstly, the pay-per-meeting commission will serve as an incentive to all SDRs, and (2) secondly, you will also have an assigned SDR that will be attached to you and guarantee a min. outreach count every month.
2.2 Re. Screening process - To be honest, the SDRs onboard currently, are individuals I personally know, and have experience doing outreach for businesses/startups. However, moving forward, as we scale, we plan to implement a robust application process to ensure we onboard quality SDRs. I am already setting up meetings with sales experts in the coming weeks to discuss.
Feel free to ping me at sosimplysean@gmail.com - would be more than happy to talk through it in greater detail and answer any other questions.
Very true.
I'm curious why you didn't go with your own domain name?
Not a huge priority for me at this stage - still early days so looking more to validate and pre-sell
Interesting concept
One question...do you generate the leads or are they given to you by the clients ??
The SDRs on the platform will be sourcing and generating their own leads!
This is interesting, but I would have a few things I'd be concerned about, both linked:
1 - If you're charging for the booking, that means you'll be doing a lot of calls and getting a lot of rejections on the clients behalf. That may save them some emotional pain, but what about the learnings on why they're rejecting? The incentive here for the sales rep is to get through as many calls and get as many bookings quickly to get paid, this doesn't (shouldn't) align with the business' interest on wanting to learn about the reasons for rejection, capture this learning, and improve.
2 - If a product isn't yet ready to scale because they have a lot to improve, the companies with low conversion rates won't justify as much effort for your sales reps booking calls. Consequently, they'll work on them a lot less. Then with fewer bookings, they'll eventually cancel. You might end up with some companies that are close to product-market fit, and they'll be happy, but the rest won't.
Overall for a founder, this avoids pain but creates bigger problems down the road. For your business, it means you'll likely have mostly short contracts with customers, and a few that do well infrequently. But happy to be proved wrong!
This is such good feedback, honestly. I'll be the first to admit the idea isn't perfect and needs adjustments.
(2) is something I've been thinking about, and is actually the reason why I implemented a vetting process for products - it’s to ensure that we take products that we know we can sell, if we put in the effort. Additionally, products with low conversion rates can also consider setting a higher commission rate to incentivise SDRs to sell for them.
(1) is a tough nut - if we cater to products that can sell, the outreach is now more focussed on actually scaling a product vs getting feedback; but it’s not a perfect solution.
Throwing out some other thoughts.
• It is possible to have SDRs capture rejection reasons, and for it to be provided in the custom report at the end of the month, but this doesn’t seem scalable. There’s no incentive. We become more like an agency.
• There could be an option to indicate whether a company is looking for sales calls or feedback/validation calls, so the SDRs can cater accordingly
• We could introduce pricing tiers and experiment with a freemium model. That way, products which have a lower conversion rate can play with the commission to drive results and won’t have any upfront cost from the monthly access fee
Hey, thanks for getting back to me and taking the feedback in the spirit it was meant!
Ony your thoughts:
I agree a SDR capturing rejection reasons is unlikely to be accurate as the incentives aren't aligned.
I do think having an option of a service where you are getting teammates to go out and get product feedback and try and convert a sale, but if not learn from the client interaction as a service could be very well taken up. Particularly from well trained people. Creators often have huge blindspots on how people see their product, often don't know how to get good feedback, and nearly always shy away from it (myself included) because someone telling you your baby is ugly and unlovable is like a dagger to the heart... You also have many part time creators who don't have time to go and do this on top of their day job. So I would definitely experiment with this as a product offering, and see what the take up is.
Don't do freemium with this service, you'll just get swamped with rubbish/unready projects filling up your time. If you want to give people on a budget more flexibility, give them chance to buy a preset number of calls (with a minimum of 150 for example), so they can get an initial test of how it's received. Those calls can be either sales or feedback calls (probably at different rates, as feedback ones will I imagine end up having a higher average call length, and certainly have a much longer write up length)
Hopefully that's helpful!
Why only for Indie Hackers? If I have a digital business and I don't know what an IndieHacker is, I would bounce on your website and I won't be back again.
I suggest you to change that headline.
Great point Fabri - initially wanted to focus on Indie Hackers since I think this is where the problem is the most evident, but might expand to include more B2B businesses.