When a start-up decides that their products/ services are market ready it’s important for them to see where they place themselves in that market for maximum effectiveness. To do this, they need to really hone down what their USP (Unique Selling Point) is. It’s imperative to look at where the competition places itself. For us, at Carbon Global, there are of course other Lead Generation and Business Development agencies out there as competition, but none of them have trained as actors. None of them have trained specifically for 3 years to communicate with different audiences or to take in, retain, and engage with information whilst making it sound like it’s the first time they’ve said it! So our USP is that we use the techniques that we’ve learnt to not only train our staff but to communicate directly with our prospects as well. We could have only found that out by understanding our market and where we should place ourselves within it. What is the selling point that your startup has that is markedly different, interesting and not easily replicable?
Systems and Processes
A pitfall that a lot of companies fall into when beginning on their journey is the thinking that you can just make handwritten notes for all your outreach, keep track of it in your head or in your diary and that something will just naturally, organically come to fruition. The reality is that lead generation, especially b2b lead generation, can take six months to implement and that needs to be trackable at any given point. So it’s well worth researching the best tools to make sure that your systems and processes are in order, not only for now but for when the start-up begins to scale up. There are many great tools out there, including ones that are free to use until your company has large numbers of employees. (Hint – Take a look at Hubspot)
Data building
Once that is all in place and the start-up knows what type of prospects they are looking for then it’s worth doing the data build as soon as possible. To go one by one can make someone lose their rhythm when reaching out to prospects so we always suggest to our clients that we build a ‘100 list’. This is a list of 100 prospects in the sector they want to target. This gives us a great foundation to work from and can be added to day or night.
Outreach
Outreach is the bit of lead generation and business development that people worry about but actually if you know the product/ service and have a good pitch, then that’s half the battle. It’s then about learning how to improvise in high-pressure situations (this again is where our acting training comes in) and being able to gather your resilience when the inevitable rejections come pouring in (again thanks Acting for providing us with thick skins). If your start-up provides a solution, the pitch works, you’re reaching out to enough people in the right way and you’re following up correctly by using a system and a process that works for you, then your start-up will be winning work in no time.
Henry Regan
Managing Partner
Carbon Global