You can use startup data to increase sales and improve the efficiency of your sales process.
If you are running a startup PR agency or selling anything to startups, this blog post could
ignite some thoughts.
Four months ago, the founder of the company doing PR works for startups contacted Datahut asking for help with sales leads. The email was very interesting and we got talking. The team heard all their problems and suggested a solution. They implemented it and revenues increased by 3 fold in less than 90 days.
1) The lead generation process was manual and the lead list was a very short one.
Put your lead generation on autopilot – Angellist and Crunchbase are the most famous startup directories on the internet. They were collecting data from different startup directories manually. This is a totally inefficient method and they were employing a dedicated resource paying $30 per hour.
The first step in solving this problem is to automate the data collection from different startup directories. Different methods, tools, techniques & software exist for automating data collection from websites. People make a choice based on the type of the websites. Angellist and CrunchBase has API’s but scraping is the way out in most cases.
2) The response rate for their emails was too low.
One reason for low response rate is because their targeting was dead wrong. By analysing their CRM data, we figured out that the following things:
Best deals they closed were growth stage companies.
The best person to contact is the founder in charge of marketing.
The companies they closed raised a single round of funding.
The three findings above was gold because it defined what a perfect lead is. We then processed
the data so that there are only relevant lead data. We also advised them to use an email tracking service like sidekick or yesware.
3) They couldn’t find email addresses of many of the people they wanted to contact.
Even if you have names and linked profiles, it is still worthless without email. We used Leadintel, another technology developed by Datahut to find the email addresses of the founders from the data we processed earlier.
4) They were not using a marketing automation system.
You can’t accelerate your growth without automating things. If you are doing an email marketing campaign, you have to use a marketing automation tool.
From the time, we advised them to use a marketing automation tool and as they implemented it, the results were mind-boggling. A subsequent increase in the sales was visible. They are happy taking our services and we are obliged that we gained a good friend for rest of the life.
Do you have any interesting use cases or stories where you used startup data?
Share it to hello@datahut.co.