How to Attract B2B Customers to Your Startup

1.  Have a clear product offering and value proposition: if your product is too complicated to explain, offers too many things to too many customers, or fails to explain why it’s really needed, the odds of another company buying it become lower.  At the ground-level of your sales and marketing strategy, you need to package your product or service in a way that is easy to understand very quickly: does it save your client money and time? does it help them generate new revenue?  does it simplify or improve a previously cumbersome process? what exactly are they paying for? There has to be a clear value proposition.  Also, your client must easily understand why your offering is better than your competitors’ and than free products in the market; and from the worse enemy of all: why it’s better than “Do Nothing”.

Once you have a clear value proposition, you can move on to actually attracting clients:

2. Direct Approach: the most obvious way to reach B2B clients is direct approach: identify companies that would likely benefit from your product or service, and then find the executives within those organizations who have the decision-making power or influence to close a deal with your company.  This can be done through your personal and LinkedIn network, attending conferences, or looking for executive quotes in relevant articles and press releases.

However, while direct approach can be a very effective and low-cost tool, sometimes there are execs who are harder to track. Also, timing can be an issue if you happen to approach them when they are too busy with other projects, have already committed their budgets, or started working with your competitors. In these cases, here are other ways to help get your message in front of the right eyes, in the right timing for B2B opportunities:

3.  Build a Reseller Program: the companies you are trying to sell to have surely bought something from some company at some point. That means there is a relationship in place between those two companies. Try to find the vendors that offer services or products that are somewhat complimentary to yours, design an attractive incentive plan, and let their sales force do the job for you. If the compensation is good enough, and the offering is easy enough to explain, your resellers should have no problem pitching your product as part of their portfolio.  This is what we did in the web design firm I founded a few years back. Through two such partnerships with companies that sold different products to the same types of clients we were targeting, we got a continuous flow of new major clients for several years (I left the company when I went to business school, but these reseller relationships actually still drive business for the firm to this day).

4.  Google AdWords: in B2B, where there’s almost always money changing hands between two parties, it’s very easy to make the case for a cost-per-click campaign.  Setting up a Google AdWords campaign can make sure you show up when your potential clients look for products like yours. But don’t stop with bidding on keywords that relate only to your product: place AdWords bids against the names and industry terms of the established companies that your product is trying to disrupt (as well as other competitors), and against keywords relating to products complimentary to your own.  Basically, you are trying to hone in on that specific decision-maker, whether they’re looking for a product like yours at that moment, or for something else. Once you’ve selected your keywords and bids, make sure your ad grabs their attention through that clear value proposition we defined earlier.

5.  Establish Authority: make noise out there. Blog about your products and industry, twitter about them, do some free direct PR, and turn your website and blog into a resource center that helps educate your potential clients about everything relating to your product and industry. This will not only help with SEO, but also help establish your position as the company to turn to in your industry.

Then, once you’ve reached potential clients or they found you, make it as easy as possible for them to work with you:

6.  Write the business case for your client: large companies often take time to make decisions, and need someone within those companies to make the case as to why this is a good idea (see Dilbert strip at the top). Especially when you are talking about a new technology that may require new behaviors, there’s a lot for your client to figure out. Help your client by providing them with all the data they need:

a.  Create the financial models for them with the variables relating to your product and to integrating it: i.e. show what kinds of revenues or cost savings they can expect by using your product. That way all they need to do is plug-in their own numbers in the model instead of building one from scratch.

b.  Educate the potential client on the entire process they need to follow to benefit from your product. I.e. not just how to use your product, but how to set all the pieces in place that would enable them to start using your product and benefiting from it. This way you eliminate a lot of the work and uncertainty on their end, and free them up to just sign the contract.

Have you used any of the above? Feel free to comment.