Leveraging your data by building your own sales tools

NewCo Amsterdam Ewout Meijer

Director of Business Partnerships

Springest, the public version of the site 3.000.000 unique visitors per year

When you want to sell trainings, you find out that large companies are the main customers: The person taking the course, is not the one paying for it

We built a white-label version of Springest That way, the company could pay for the courses easily, and have more control over which courses are booked.

!This also meant we had to sell B2B

Challenge: How to effectively target

this new group of potential customers?

What will have the most impact?

We solved this by sticking to three guidelines

2Proving it live, even over Doing it live

AKA: Prove that it can Scale or let it Fail

3Focus on small, lasting, scalable improvements,

even over creating a big & bold project, and especially

over growth hacking.

And we use our developers to create sales tools too, rather than just the product

We approach all new tools, products, services and features in the same way: the build-measure-learn feedback loop

If you want to learn more about this, make sure to read “the Lean Startup” by Eric Ries

By using ASQ, an open source application, we can quickly and cheaply build sales tools

We’ve sold lots of trainings, and gathered data on the email domains of the companies the customers work at

How could we leverage the data we already have to create new leads for our new product line?

First we filtered the data, to take out any public email service

Then we built the corporate tracker: Tracking the usage of our public site by large companies

Then we looked at the biggest users, and approached them first they clearly had a need for our product

To find the right person at these organisation, we used Salesloft

It allowed us to find the ideal customers quickly

Salesloft also helped us in finding the contact details easily

Cold-calling the leads would not be effective, but providing them with valuable insight would prove our value to them right away. Again, we got to leverage our data, by

showing which providers were used by their employees

We measured the effectiveness of this strategy, by using Streak, a free tool, we got insight into opening rates

and kept track of responses

So we first built the tool, then measured the effect, and based on what we learned, we improved our approach

We built a Call-to-Action that would be shown to the corporate users, to tell them about our new product, and made it show the companies name to increase click rates

We measured everything we could, to gain insight into the effect it had

When we noticed how effective it was, we set out to automate the way we added new companies to the tracker. This had previously been done manually.

And again we measured the effect, including which companies used us most during a certain time frame

Because showing potential customers the data we had worked, we decided to dig deeper.

We added data about the number of members, reviews and more

Providing insight into this data works, but it was always based on us reaching out. So we built a way for users to find this themselves.

This shifts the way we do sales from outbound to inbound

But we also built a tool to use the data in our outbound efforts

A crucial part of the process of developing new tools is to share what you learn with the team, so together you can improve the processes and tools even more.

Ewout Meijer ewout@springest.com