Salman Shahid, CEO at OXO Packaging and Noah Technologies.
Growing a B2B tech startup requires you to overcome challenges such as getting more sales, building a strong market presentation and achieving sustainable growth goals.
By developing an effective business development plan, you can draw a roadmap to achieve all your goals easily in the long run. Read on to explore seven effective business development tips that can fuel the growth of your startup.
1. Focus on audience segmentation.
It’s important to divide your audiences into distinct groups/segments so you can develop better business development strategies and ultimately increase your sales.
Leveraging data analytics can help you divide your audiences into groups and enable you to understand your customers’ behaviors, market trends and the efficiency of your tech products.
All this data can help you gather insights and make actionable recommendations through a data analytic strategy.
For example, if you have created attendance and payroll software, using data analytics can help you decide which of your tools aren’t being used by your customers. Making changes to your payroll product according to the behavior of your different audience groups will enable you to roll out better updates—ultimately enabling you to deliver a product your target audience desires.
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2. Strengthen your brand authority.
Brand recognition can make it easier for you to conquer the B2B industry. You can start by investing in customer education through webinars and workshops that can help your business reach out to your potential customers.
Influencer marketing is another great way to take your product or service to your target audience easily. Put simply, reaching out to influencers and developing a strong relationship with them can be difficult. Employing engagement strategies like sending PR boxes to influencers can help you get more influencers to talk about your brand.
Besides that, appearing on podcasts and attending tech business conferences can also strengthen your position as a thought leader and help you get more eyeballs from people in your target audience.
3. Offer a free trial version.
As a B2B tech startup, attracting potential users and convincing them to try your product can be the most daunting task. You can easily tackle this challenge and other problems, like finding the product market, by offering free trials.
Applying the free trial business model for your startup can help you convince B2B audiences to try your product. As the buying process in B2B industries is more tedious and contains a lot of stakeholders, unlike B2C buying behavior, I believe you can get better results with the free trial approach.
A free trial can help you get more qualified leads and make it easier for you to provide focused support—both of which can result in a higher conversion rate and better upselling opportunities. You can also offer free trials in tech exhibitions to demonstrate product value and enhance market presentation.
4. Use an account-based marketing strategy.
Adopting an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy can allow you to create personalized experiences for your audiences and help you develop an effective strategy to boost the growth of your startup.
In simple terms, account-based marketing is a specialized B2B marketing strategy that allows you to market your products and services to a specific number of prospective customers who might be interested in what you offer instead of pitching your offerings to everyone.
To develop an ABM strategy, here are a few steps you can take:
1. Define your ideal customer profile.
2. Select high-value business accounts.
3. Ensure personalized outreach.
4. Collaborate with sales and marketing.
5. Engage each high-value account.
6. Measure the engagement level.
7. Build relationships with potential customers.
After creating and adopting an ABM strategy, you can easily measure the success of your strategy with the help of any CRM tool by tracking the number of meetings booked, engagement rate and revenue generated from high-value accounts.
5. Focus on thought leadership.
B2B audiences will be more likely to try your offerings if you establish yourself and your startup as a credible option.
Your brand credibility builds reputation, shapes perception and engenders trust among customers—factors that can lead your tech startup to success.
You don’t necessarily have to hire a reputation management firm to establish yourself as a thought leader. Strategies like content marketing can help you establish credibility as a thought leader in the long run.
To get started with content marketing, you can perform a competitive analysis to know what type of content is fit for your audiences and how your competitors are trying to present themselves online. Explore the leading marketing channels such as social media, search engines, email and websites.
6. Keep improving your R&D.
Consistent R&D can help you secure your competitive edge as a B2B tech startup and ensure you’re the early adopter of new trends so you can meet the ever-changing needs of your customers.
The famous "No Software" campaign of Salesforce is a primary example of staying updated with trends.
Instead of launching another boring DVD box, Salesforce pushed their internet-based enterprise services, which helped them become an edge alternative to traditional players in the B2B tech industry.
Take-home point? You should keep analyzing the products and practices of your competitors to get a competitive edge in the market. There’s no telling when you could find your "aha" moment that could potentially propel you into being the most reliable B2B tech startup.
7. Diversify your lead-gen streams.
Getting new qualified leads is not an easy feat. Developing sustainable lead-generation streams is the only way you can nurture ABM strategies and ensure you modify your offerings according to the changing needs of your audience.
Creating persuasive lead magnets like courses, ebooks and templates can help you find leads. For example, if you have a business intelligence tool, you can create a business intelligence checklist and provide it to prospects in exchange for their email to get started on email marketing campaigns.
You can also run ads on LinkedIn and other platforms to meet your lead generation and brand awareness needs.
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