Is lead generation worth it? Or other ways to find early/first B2B customers?
I'm about to launch my first B2B SaaS product under my own company which I've built during the covid downturn with the help of a business partner, and now we're looking for a good way to get some early customers in through the door. I've been looking at some offerings for lead generation and it does cost a bit (about $150 per booked meeting) and I'm not sure how well those meetings will convert to sales.
Is it worth it or should I look at other strategies? Any recommendations?
Some background:
About 1.5 year ago, about a month after posting here for the first time (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/35a215387b) I started my own business, I've been primarily working as a consultant on the local scene as the remote market seems quite hard to get into, which is a bit unfortunate since my primary programming language is python which isn't very popular around here, so I've worked mostly with JavaScript & C#, I do feel that I have a fair bit more to bring to the table if I could find good python roles.
Anyway consulting have been great financially and it was going better then I had imagined when covid hit. At that point it looked like I would either have to cut my rate quite significantly and take on work which I didn't really find inspiring, where they also were looking for a long term collaboration. Since my heart wasn't in it and I did have a quite sizeable buffer at that point I instead looked at taking the leap into building in-house products as that's been my long term goal since the get go, and I also needed a bit of rest after an intense year.
I found new work rather quickly when I started looking for new consulting contracts again after the summer and took on a two days a week contract for half a year while I continued to build a product with my business partner on the side. A couple of weeks ago I was asked if I could consider doing four days a week until the end of the year instead of two, and I jumped on that opportunity since the core code base for the MVP of our product is almost done and I was excited to be building some buffer cash in my business again (two days a week kept me afloat but not a lot more then that).
Since you’re in the B2B sector, going for lead generation strategies such as lead magnets, landing pages, or other offerings can go one of two ways: it either does not work at all because B2B prospects don’t sign up for marketing emails or it will cost you a lot so that you can come up with some lucrative offering, either one of them will not do much good for the ROI on converted leads. My personal suggestion would be to go for brute force lead generation. Just get a tool like Aeroleads that can help you in generating an email list of thousands of prospects and doesn’t even cost as much. Aeroelads also has a verification system in place that makes sure that quality information is being passed on as sales intelligence. It is what I use for my B2B firm and that is why I can speak for the quality of leads generated from it and the potential for generating sales.
I hope you find it helpful!
When it comes to finding early B2B customers, lead generation is definitely worth it. It allows you to target specific businesses that may be interested in what you have to offer, and it gives you a way to reach out to them directly. Other ways to find early B2B customers include networking, online research, and word-of-mouth. Whichever method you choose, the important thing is to get out there and start connecting with potential customers.
Use Facebook groups - https://pepper4fb.com/pepper-sales-page-main?fpr=jeff11
Worth it or maybe I'm biased because I found SD Marketing Suite. We primarily acquire customers by cold emailing prospects from our software. We aim at personally onboarding 1 individual/company per day.
But to really answer your question I would ask you more questions. What is this client's worth to you? What's your LTV? What cost will you pay if you acquire using other channels? Can you do it yourself, is your time in getting 1-booking less than $150 then?
For example, if you say your LTV per client' at $360 then I would recommend experimenting this channel. You can also check out Orapa.co from @stanrym, if I'm not wrong they let you pay after a sale is made.
IMHO, I don't find the background info helpful. It's nice but doesn't help me analyse how I can help you more.
Thanks, I'll skip the background info the next time if it's mostly noise for the readers.
We haven't launched yet so we don't have a LTV but we are targeting business customers so we aren't planning to cater to audiences under $100-200/mo, so any customer who actually converts and stays around for a couple of months would be worth it. But we'd much prefer to have fewer long term stable customers then high churning ones.
Orapa.co looks like an interesting option, I like that you don't pay for bad meetings. I'm saving SD Marketing Suite as well, will check that out later.
You might find this checklist of "sources to find your first 10 customers" from my Sales for Founders course helpful...
Thanks, have read it through and I'm saving those links in our planning board.
Among the some of the top B2B comapanies they mostly got their first customers from one or more of 3 channels
Personal networks
Companies like Slack, Asana, Stripe, Airtable, etc reached out to friends, family, friends of friends, and past co-workers to signup for their new tool. This, like most of the others, is in the name of "do things that don't scale". Try and talk to 100 people you know in a casual way and ask them to try out your product. treat them like gold. Get every bit of information/feedback from them
Seek out your customers where they hangout
I know, it seems obvious and unhelpful. Dig deep into the communities where your customers both hangout AND talk about the space you're operating in. Shopify got their first users from a Ruby On Rails community. Find a community that is built for your target user, join their community, participate/contribute, and then ask
Press
this is part of designing a legit launch. Find journalists who write about the area that your building in and pitch an article to them.
Generally speaking, option one is your best bet. People you know have trust in you at the very least. If you decided to do direct sales with people you don't know, they have no trust in you or your product. Ads are incredibly hard for B2B and particularly work well at later stages in the funnel. SEO is a long game and won't produce immediate responses.
Tap your network. Past clients, friends, co-workers, etc.
Thanks for your valuable feedback. I've been planning a long these lines but it's nice to get some validation on the approach by others.