Your business just hurdled over the hiring process and assembled a strong team. Now it’s time to fine-tune the details, including a crucial one: clients.
Startup clients come in different forms: consumers, big brands, and maybe even other young companies. But with all customers, it takes a certain technique to reel them in. We caught up with Spindows, Centzy, and Firehawk Creative to hear how they reached their clientele in the early stages of their businesses.
Get crafty and use social media
Spindows founder and CEO Clay Hebert says “it takes more than just sifting through Linkedin profiles to find people aligned with what Spindows is about. My business is more of a B2B enterprise, servicing large organizations and companies, and the titles of the people I need to reach include Director of Internal Collaboration or VP of Innovation.
I’ve invented a trick called the Barnes & Noble hack. At a bookstore, I pick up a book on collaboration or innovation and look at the people who commented on it. And often times, they work at the kind of brands that Spindows targets. So not only do I have their name and title, but I know that they endorsed this book so it gives me a reason to reach out to them.
Nowadays, people live in the public because of social media. I found Twitter is a great way to engage them. If I’m at a thought leadership conference and I search for #collaboration, it could pull up profiles of executives.
But I don’t just immediately try to make a sale. I comment on their tweets. I take the time to know them — you can find out a lot of things about somebody from their last 500 tweets. It’s about being human, because I’m not just an avatar on Twitter — and neither are they.”
Go directly to the source
Centzy CEO Jay Shek tells us “it’s always good to know how your consumers think. Since most of the businesses in Centzy’s database are health and beauty services, our consumers are mostly urban females ages 18 to 34. With our search engine, they can find things like the cheapest haircut within walking distance or what dry cleaners in their neighborhoods are open on a Sunday.
We wanted to understand our target demographic, and what they wanted to know about local businesses. Since starting Centzy two and a half years ago, we’ve talked to hundreds of people. Initially, it was just friends and family. Then we did outreach through sources like Craigslist and Taskrabbit. We also did on-site surveys and focus groups now and then.
Through the interviews, we found that everyone is price-conscious to some degree. When people go in for an oil change or go to a dry cleaner, they don’t like to ask about prices — it makes them feel cheap or like they aren’t knowledgeable about costs.
Now we still interview people; we reach out to those who actually use our site. And we’ve recently started testing out promoters, a quick way to get consumer feedback.”
Build a presence and deliver all the goods
Firehawk’s cofounder John Petersen says he’s “a big believer in what Frank Kern calls ‘stacking the cool‘: Add a tons of things onto your product or service so by the time your target client gets to that decision-making point, the purchasing decision has already been made.
One example of that method is when I cofounded NY Tech Day, what we called the science fair for startups. We reached out to a tremendous number of startups to participate in this huge one-day event, and first told them we’re bringing in thousands of people — including students and technical talent from all over the country.
Then we said, we’d throw an exclusive press and investor talk for all of the startups. On top of that, an exhibitor pre-party would let them meet other exhibitors and our sponsors. Those were all included and free as part of the admission for the entire event, which cost under $400. By the time we were done with our sales pitch, they said: “I’m totally down for this.” We sufficiently “stacked the cool” so they essentially sold themselves.
Firehawk takes a similar approach. We bring as much value to the table as possible for early stage startups, who often don’t have the technical background to do build their great ideas.”