About 16% of companies that raise seed funding succeed in obtaining Series B investments, while only 7% of those continue to raise Series C investments. The challenge is that while there are multiple contents for scaling startups, there are little to no available resources on how founders can grow more from $1 million to $25 million in annual revenues.
Now that the business has validated product market fit, not only is it time to fill key gaps in the workforce or pursue additional lines of revenue, but it’s also time to maximize strategies that enable you to grow with the least possible cost.
Fast Ways to Scale Business After Series B Funding
Thus, in this guide, we’re going to cover 4 fast ways to scale business after series B funding. This includes approaches like enhancing social selling strategy, optimizing outbound emailing strategy, developing a list-building strategy, and brainstorming ways to increase customer lifetime value (CLV).
Enhance Social Selling Strategy
Social selling allows businesses to use various social media channels to connect, build relationships, and eventually sell to hyper-targeted prospects. By doing this, businesses can stay at the forefront of prospects' minds.
Social selling is different from social media marketing because it directly interacts with potential buyers, demonstrates an understanding of their challenges, answers questions, and offers a solution to their problems. The latter mostly includes posting relevant texts, photos, videos, and other content that drives audience engagement.
While different, social media marketing supports social selling by establishing authority before even reaching out to prospects. In contrast, social selling supports social media marketing by establishing strong relationships that can increase brand loyalty and engagement.
You can leverage multiple social media platforms for social selling, or choose one platform to focus on. Ultimately, the platform you choose must depend on where your target market usually spends their time.
LinkedIn is used by 89% of B2B marketers to generate leads. This might be because 62% of B2B marketers report LinkedIn produces leads at twice the rate of the next most effective social platform.
At The Scalelab, social selling is not part of the services we provide, but it’s a practice we do for our company. For example, we regularly maintain several channels where we post our content such as our YouTube channel, LinkedIn page, Facebook page, Twitter, and Instagram. On average, we are able to sign 2 to 4 more clients per month from these channels combines.
How Effective is Social Selling?
Why is social selling fast and effective in helping series B companies scale? After generating 2 - 4 more clients per month through social selling, we discovered some of the factors that make it effective.
Beat Competitors
A brand with a high social selling index creates 45% more sales opportunities than businesses with a low social selling index. This means if your social selling strategy is far superior to competitors, then you’re essentially capturing nearly 50% of the opportunities for sales.
Another statistic shows that companies that focus on social selling are 51% more likely to reach their sales goals, while 78% of businesses that leverage social selling outsell companies that don’t use social media. In other words, if you’re not yet utilizing social selling, you’re likely losing business to competitors who do.
Meet Prospects Where They Usually Gather
With 87% of business event professionals canceling due to Covid-19, more people are migrating to a virtual format. The recent pandemic has shifted networking and relationship-building online.
Today, around 4.70 billion people globally are using social media with 65 million decision-makers and more than 57 million companies residing on LinkedIn. Thus, through social selling, we can meet people where they currently are.
Effective Social Selling Strategies
Below are some of the best practices for making social selling work for Series B companies.
Personalize Outreach Messages
When implementing social selling as part of your scaling strategies, make sure not to bombard strangers with unsolicited direct messages. Instead, connect with hyper-targeted leads, and make the interactions meaningful. This can be done by listening to their needs and positioning your brand as having the solution. Doing so can help establish both trust and loyalty.
Here’s an example of a template we use to send personalized outreach messages to our leads:
This is one of the templates that yielded up to:
92% Open rate
63% Reply rate
68% Connection acceptance rate
If you want to get access to our email template and framework for writing personalized outreach messages, go here.
While research shows that personalized marketing is used by 78% of marketers in email marketing, the same personalized approach can be applied to multiple channels such as social media. The point is that it’s possible to use demographic and behavioral data to create individualized messages for prospective clients. Doing so can help improve engagement rates, improve response, and increase the likelihood of sales.
Leverage Tools For Effective Social Selling
Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help Series B companies target ideal prospects while personalizing communications. They also help companies better understand their performance with the use of in-depth analytics.
Tools like Hootsuite streams can help you keep track of what audiences are saying about your brand, your industry, and your competitors. It can give insights regarding their requests and pain points, giving you the opportunity to provide effective solutions.
Apps like Salesforce make it easier to search and monitor new leads. The tool also streamlines communicating with potential leads, qualifying them, and adding details to existing Salesforce records to assist future conversations.
At The Scalelab, we leverage the following tools to consistently generate leads for our company:
HubSpot for CRM - HubSpot’s CRM streamlines our customer support, sales, and marketing with features like email tracking, live chat, and meeting schedule.
Taplio for LinkedIn - Taplio helps us create better LinkedIn content, schedule LinkedIn posts, connect to relevant people, and monitor results.
VidIQ for YouTube - VidIQ provides us insights and guidance to grow our YouTube channel.
Invest in Experts in the Field
Investing in social selling experts can lead to the following advantages:
Effectively track and respond to replies.
Document replies and other engagements in an organized manner to assist future conversations, and optimize social selling strategy.
More active social listening to learn more about the target market’s needs and problems.
Nobody wants a sleazy salesperson. Instead, prospects want to feel heard and understood. Thus, while it’s not a requirement, it can be beneficial to hire someone who is also a “user” of your particular product or service. This helps them empathize and relate with potential customers, making relationship-building easier.
Once you’ve engaged with your social seller, do the following:
Explain the goal of the social selling campaign.
Help them master your products or services by providing them with assets like websites, past content, and other media assets.
Give them access to your social listening tool if you’re using any, and briefly explain how to use it, and what kind of filters to use.
Brief them on how a typical conversation goes, and what questions to look out for.
If you don’t have the time or resources to train a social seller, you can hire an expert contractor or agency. Doing so will provide you with proven systems for reaching out to new leads. As a result, you'll be able to piggyback on their premium tools and analytics as well.
At The Scalelab, we do most of the social selling using our own brands and train contractors for our company page.
Optimize Outbound Email Strategy
Also known as “cold emailing,” outbound email marketing is a form of direct marketing that involves emailing people who haven’t engaged with your brand or heard about your product or service.
89% of marketers say they generate leads primarily through email. Meanwhile, 41% of marketers credit effective one-to-one outreach for generating qualified leads for their B2B businesses.
This could be because unlike spam emails, outbound emails are not indiscriminately sent to anybody. Instead, they are sent to relevant leads who can benefit from your offerings. With outbound email, you’re establishing a connection with sales-qualified leads, gauging interest in your offerings, while building brand awareness.
How Effective is Outbound Email?
Why is outbound email fast and effective in helping series B companies scale? The following are some factors to consider.
Engage With Qualified Leads
While marketing approaches like Facebook ads can help businesses reach a wide range of audiences, outbound email lets businesses pre-qualify their recipient list based on their demographic.
Before sending a cold email, businesses can research each recipient and ensure that they fit a focused customer persona. Doing so helps improve the relevance of the cold emails and boosts the odds of getting a response.
Scalable
With an effective outbound email strategy, it’s feasible to reach a larger audience with an impactful and personalized copy, and a push of a button. For as long as the email addresses are valid, target prospects are reachable. Because emails cost almost nothing to send, outbound email campaigns can yield an extremely high return on investments.
Aside from being less intrusive, it’s easier to automate compared to cold calling. Furthermore, cold-emailing can also serve as a way to “warm” leads before reaching out to them via a call.
Measurable
Investing in email tracking tools enables you to track how recipients engage with your outbound email and analyze the data provided. It’s easy to identify which approaches are most effective by looking at your open rates and click-through rates, and by identifying what part of the email readers drop off.
Effective Outbound Email Strategies
Connect With The Recipient
When sending out an outbound email, it’s important to take yourself from being a stranger to becoming someone in the recipient’s inner circle. This can be done by highlighting mutual connections or referencing their colleague or friend.
Visit their LinkedIn profile accounts and other business accounts. You can find common ground with the recipient by learning more about them, and their company.
Leverage Email Tools
An email outbound software can help B2B businesses send outbound emails at scale. Here are some of the features that the tool can offer:
Email Warm-Up
Outbound email tools help ensure that your message won't end up in the spam folder by warming up the email account first.
Email Scheduling
To increase open rates and reply rates, send the outbound email at an optimal time. This will depend on who the target audience is. For B2B leads, the best time is at 10 AM on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. With an email tool’s scheduling feature, outbound campaigns can be scheduled in advance.
Personalization
Regular salespeople often get a lead list, mass email, and then hope for the best. But it’s essential to connect with prospects on a personal level. Thus, what successful salespeople do is select top leads based on intent or research. Then, they work on unique messaging for each lead. Finally, they re-engage them thoughtfully on other channels.
If you think that this seems like a lot of work, an outbound email tool can help in sending personalized emails at scale. An example of an email tool that enables personalization is Lemlist. Its features include having a personalized photo with the prospect’s name, personalized videos, and even personalized email templates.
Automated Follow-Ups
According to Head of Sales of Vulpi, Thiago Dantas, he won at least 15% more deals just by implementing follow-ups. In this case, multiple touchpoints are often necessary before building trust and closing the sale. An outbound email tool can help in sending automated follow-up emails.
Reports and Analytics
Outbound email tools have analytical features that help you learn how recipients engage with the email, making it easier to optimize the campaign. They can inform businesses with metrics like open rate, reply rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate. Reply is an example of an email tool that provides analytics and enables A/B test email sequences.
Outsource to Established Experts
If you don’t want to spend up to 50% of your time searching for prospects, then one of the best options is to outsource your outbound email strategy. An established lead generation expert, like The Scalelab, can help generate sales qualified for you by:
Defining your target personas
Creating a large prospects list based on your target personas
Crafting unique messaging sequences
Engaging with prospects using your email address and/or LinkedIn account
So you can focus all your efforts on selling and harvest the results right from your inbox.
Here’s how The Scalelab process works:
1. Conduct detailed prospect research based on your target persona.
We generate a clean database with multiple data touchpoints, such as LinkedIn profile, company names, job titles, names, emails addresses, location, and more. Here’s what the database could look like.
Once the database is created, we use it to write creative messaging that combines email and LinkedIn interactions to get a high engagement from their prospects.
2. Visit a given prospect’s LinkedIn profile automatically
As you can see in the screenshot below, the task is assigned to me because the campaign is for The Scalelab. But, if we do a campaign for your company, this would be assigned to you. Thus, your profile would be visiting a given prospect’s LinkedIn profile.
3. Send them a meeting request over a coffee
After automatically visiting a prospect’s LinkedIn profile, we immediately send them a personalized email requesting a meeting.
We offer them an actual coffee using a picture of myself (which could be a picture of yourself), holding a cup with my name and a cup with “first name.” This means that a prospect's first name is going to be inserted automatically into that picture.
4. If they haven’t replied, send them a message over LinkedIn.
If you're already connected, we’re going to send a simple message. But if you're not connected, we’re going to send a connection request with a note.
5. If they haven’t replied, revisit their LinkedIn profile
If they didn’t respond, we can revisit the LinkedIn profile. For the example below, I assigned this task to my business partner, Arnaud.
This is just to show you that for one given prospect, you can have multiple people in your team engaging with that person.
6. If they haven’t replied, follow up via email.
If they still haven't replied at this stage, we follow up in a very human and approachable way on the coffee request and ask them if they preferred tea.
We can say something like: “Hi {First Name}, I think either my email slipped through the cracks, or you prefer tea.”
We add the same picture with the cups upside down, and their first name on one of the cups. Then, we give them access to a calendar and they can choose their ideal date to meet.
Note that there are many pictures we could use depending on your industry and target market.
Tip. Schedule the emails strategically.
Depending on where your target market is and where your company is located, we can schedule a more strategic time to reach them. The aim of this is to improve the deliverability of your emails.
Here are a few of the responses that we got from clients:
Just to show you how people typically react, here are some of the typical replies we receive from prospects and clients.
The first picture shows the response of the global head of a large insurance company.
The second picture shows the response of a C-level executive of a large bank.
Now, I also want to show examples of prospects who haven't necessarily accepted to meet but still replied in a positive way to the outreach. Because the truth is, the impression you leave with prospects matters, even if they don't want to engage with you.
The picture above shows the reply of a general manager of a large company.
This last example shows the response of the Director of People at a large HR company.
These are just simple examples to show the kind of outreach we do here at The Scalelab - hyper-personalized, very human, and approachable. This kind of approach allows people to actually get back to you because you connect with them in a human way.
If you’re interested in the kind of outreach we do, drop us a line at hello@thescalelab.com.
Develop a List Building Strategy
Building a list refers to collecting email addresses from visitors, customers, and other patrons of a business using a website, social media accounts, and even events. By doing so, a subscriber database will grow and future business communications will be more effective. In fact, a study shows that 64% of B2B marketers say that their email marketing strategy was effective for meeting business goals in 2021.
How Effective Is List Building?
According to DMA Marketer Email Tracker, for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average expected return is around $42. This is a big contrast to other channels such as PPC advertising, which only reaps around $2 for every $1 spent. In contrast, marketing your offers through an email list reportedly brings an ROI of 4200%. This is how effective list building is when it comes to ROI and scaling one’s business.
Lower Chances of Getting Marked as Spam
Building a list or growing a newsletter is often done by offering a lead magnet. This can be in the form of content, videos, valuable ebooks, and even free tickets to an online learning event. Because the subscriber provided their email address and gave permission to receive emails and other promotions in exchange for value, they're less likely to tag your emails as spam.
Connect With Prospects On a More Personal Level
Statistics show that 56% of customers stay loyal to a company that “gets” them. That means you must connect with your prospects on a more personal level by understanding their needs, addressing their pains, and showing them that it's possible to solve these problems through your product or service. This can be done through story emails where you talk about your brand's expertise and the stories of people it has helped.
You can also listen more to their usual replies to your emails, and see how you can optimize your offer or service to meet their needs. Once you have more people on your list and they're properly nurtured, it's easier to establish trust and less costly to push more sales.
Effective List Building Strategy
Leverage Surveys and Other Relevant Incentives
Nobody wants to “sign up” or subscribe to more “junk emails” that they’re never going to read. Thus, when inviting prospects to join your list, it’s important to communicate the value that you can give them.
Outline the value you can offer upfront, whether it’s an exclusive e-book or a free 3-part course. Then communicate this value by using words like “Exclusive,” “Access”, “Featured,” or “Download” in your call to action.
For example, you may write the following:
“Join our FREE webinar to learn more about…”
“Download our special e-book”
“Access all exclusive offers at a discounted price”
Your viewers need to know that you can offer something unique and exclusive content that can’t be found elsewhere on your website. Maximizing surveys and quizzes that offer personalized advice can help you qualify the leads that go into your list. Surveys can also help you learn more about their challenges in relation to your offer.
Send Emails Regularly (Not Just When You’re Selling)
Most people don’t like being sold to. And while it’s important to broadcast sales events or promote products, it’s important not to do it in every single email.
Instead, balance the promotional emails with insightful emails about your company and offer without simply announcing a sale. Plan content that’s proven to be valuable to your audience. This will help you nurture the relationship, and make them more likely to buy when the time is right.
Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Customer lifetime value (CLV) is a business metric that shows how much a business can earn from the average customer over the course of the relationship.
To measure the customer lifetime value, determine the following values.
Average Order Value - What is the value of the average sale per year?
Average Number of Transactions Per Period - What is the frequency of the transactions every year?
Customer Retention - How long does a client engage with your company?
Then, follow the formula below:
CLV = (Average Sale) X (Annual Transactions) X (Years the Customer Was Retained)
For example, if the average client spends $2000 per month on your business, and they typically engage with your company for 3 years, then the CLV is $72,000
CLV = $2000 (average sale) x 12 (annual purchases) x 3 (years) = $72,000
The Importance of Increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Here are some of the advantages of increasing customer lifetime value:
Lower Costs
Focusing on increasing the customer lifetime value allows a business to invest more resources in retaining current clients and increasing their value. Because acquiring new customers costs up to seven times more than it costs to retain current ones, then focusing on increasing the customer lifetime value is more cost-effective than acquiring a new one.
Increased Profitability Overall
Many of the strategies involved in increasing the customer lifetime value include increasing average sales, increasing the number of transactions, and improving retention rates.
Study shows that when the retention rates are increased just by 5%, companies can improve their profits by up to 95%. Thus, improved customer lifetime value means improved profitability overall.
How to Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
Here are some of the ways to increase the customer lifetime value (CLV).
Target “Low-Hanging Fruits” From Your Campaign
A “low-hanging” fruit is something you can obtain with minimal effort. For example, let’s say you send 100 cold emails and it resulted in 80 open and 10 replies. What can you do to make something out of the 70 that did open but haven’t responded?
At TSL, we believe that we can target these low-hanging fruits by re-engaging them on another more direct channel like calls. Cold emailing is an important service as it warms leads up and brings context to the call before a salesperson even engages them.
To sum up, to increase the customer lifetime value of your brand, it’s important to maximize the possible profit per lead that you can extract.
Learn How to Cross-Sell and Upsell
One way to increase the customer lifetime value is by increasing the average sale. Cross-selling and upselling are ways to do that.
Upselling is the process of encouraging clients to purchase a comparable higher-end offer. This process can increase revenue by up to 30% on average, and it’s 68% more affordable than acquiring a new customer.
On the other hand, cross-selling involves encouraging them to buy complementary offers. This process can increase sales by 20% and profits by 30%.
Improve Retention Strategy
Customer retention is one of the biggest factors that impact the Customer Lifetime Value. In fact, a study shows that 65% of a company’s business comes from existing customers. To improve retention, here are some of the things you can implement:
Customer Support
93% of customers are more likely to purchase again from companies that have excellent customer service. At TSL, we always aim for faster and more helpful client support. We encourage our team to listen actively and learn from every client interaction. That way, we can learn from their encounters and brainstorm ways to enhance the overall client experience.
Knowledge Base
Having a knowledge base on how to maximize your product or service can improve the experience for clients. For example, a SaaS company can publish content that answers commonly asked questions and explains how to use its tools. Doing so leaves the impression that the company is committed to the client’s success, thus fostering trust and loyalty. In addition, when clients can get the most out of your product or service, they’re more likely to stick around and continue using it.
Private or Support Community
A brand’s private community can encourage loyal clients by establishing a sense of belonging. This can be done through knowledge-sharing between other people who engage with the company.
Give incentives to loyal customers
Loyalty programs reward frequent purchases and keep clients engaged. B2B loyalty programs can be in the form of exclusive memberships, discounts, point collections, rewards, exclusive offers, and personalization.
For example, a subscription-based SaaS company can offer a 15% discount for those subscribing to their annual plan instead of their monthly plan.
Scale Your Business Today
Want to generate more leads to help scale your business? We at The Scale Lab have decades of combined experience in cold outreach and sales. Our team has helped companies land appointments with top-tier businesses such as Google, Nike, Citibank, and Samsung. Our lead generation campaigns consistently deliver warmed-up and highly qualified sales leads that directly increase your pipeline value.
Come and say hello or drop us a line at hello@thescalelab.com