On the drop shipping market segment
Drop shipping segments – homogenous or differentiated products.
Africa e-commerce is a strong trend.
Value of a software company is how deeply it goes into implementing support for a use case.
Fund raising and valuation
The story and business case determines how valuable a company will become.
There are more investors chasing after limited number of experienced founders. This explains the reason for ultra high valuation.
PR and personal network helps generate warm introduction to VCs
Investors are biased towards founders who graduated from prestigious universities
The best founders are those who are willing to slog working on the same problem day after day without giving up.
On human resourcing
Engineers from second or third tier universities tend to be better hires. They have less feelings of entitlement and are more likely to have background of hardships and struggles.
The sales process:
- Step one: generate sales lead list – GetData.IO’s core competency in web scraping means we do not need to by databases but just find websites where leads exists. Hunter.IO is a good service for resolving email addresses of companies
- Step two: outreach – AB testing outreach email messages
- GDPR dictates that only work emails are allowed for such campaigns
- Utilize Calendarly to schedule meetings
- At this point emails to closing rate is around 1%
- Find iteration that drive opens, reads and appointment scheduling
- Figure out the email cadence
- Once that has been locked down start automating it using sales automaton tools like
- PersistIQ
- SalesLoft
- Step 3: follow up conversation
- Craft up sales script to close through iteration
- Find out all the different variation of rejections
- Learn how to manage them
- Step 4: closing
- Learn about actual enterprise problem
- Learn about budget
- Find a price level that works.
- Step 5: Onboarding
- Deploy success team to onboard the customers
- Successfully onboarded customers will be more likely to retain and less likely to churn.
Industrial benchmarks for cold emails
- email open rate: 15%
- open to click through rate: 2%
- landing page to booking a meeting: 5%
- book a meeting from cold lead: 0.0015%
- USD0.03 per lead = USD100 to book a meeting ( 0.01 / 0.0015% )
- Versus Google = (USD1 CPC / 5% ) = USD20 to book a meeting
GDPR does not allow use of personal emails for cold email campaign.
Lead generation process
- Buy databases to fill the top of the funnel for cold email campaigns.
- Buy ads to fill up the funnel from Google and Facebook