London-based B2B Boosted has rolled out its sales support service for B2B startups across Nigeria and Africa at large.
Specifically, it helps sales leaders in emerging market startups to create B2B sales opportunities at scale, helping to find, nurture and close leads for their clients.
Discovering the problem
“I discovered this problem through firsthand pain and frustration,” Edidiong Ekong, the head of growth at B2B Boosted says. He explained that at the peak of his time at Klasha and Alerzo, he was responsible for the B2B go-to market strategy across West Africa, East Africa and beyond, and one of his biggest problems was generating B2B leads for the sales team.
He initially started out solving this problem through SEO and organic marketing, but as the team grew, Edidiong realized that it was heavily manual to generate and nurture leads.
“As we got bigger, it became incredibly hard to scale B2B revenue, and I started seeing different talent gaps on the team, not just in Nigeria but across our portfolio in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda,” Edidiong said.
At the same time, Tim discovered this problem first-hand whilst consulting Startupbootcamp portfolio companies, realizing that a lack of sales know-how was the limiting factor for lots of businesses with a great product.
Not to mention that hiring more salespeople to generate these leads was proving overly expensive. According to IBISWorld, an average cost per lead stands at $198 for B2B startups targeting clients in the US. With a 2% conversion, that means that acquiring 30 B2B merchants could cost a startup upward of $300k. It was time to change that.
Solving the problem
“It became obvious to me that we need to build something that helps startups to scale their B2B sales, but we have to do it in a way that is more lean, automated, and cost-effective,” says Tim Yakubson, their director of client services.
“We’ve redesigned the sales process into four main components called LAPS, which stands for leads, appointments, proposals, and sales. We then added a healthy balance of automation, in tandem with the expertise of hiring enterprise-level sales folks, who would, on a freelance basis, sell on behalf of these smaller B2B startups. This is a win-win for both with salespeople making extra commission and startups benefiting from their expertise” says B2B Boosted’s website.
How does B2B Boosted work?
Most startups tend to lack a scalable sales process, spamming hundreds of prospects via cold emails and lacking differentiated messaging, not booking enough sales meetings with qualified leads.
Typically, every sales hire has a different approach to doing sales with little on-the-job upskilling. That’s where B2B comes into play…
B2B Boosted acts as an extension of your sales team, without needing your startup to build a large internal operation and endlessly struggle with trial and error.
B2B finds, nurtures, pitches and closes B2B leads for your business using open-source software for lead generation & CRM (incorporating other APIs such as Linkedin Sales Navigator, Hubspot etc.), and then brings in the human touch and top talents in tech sales to close those leads.
“In a nutshell, we feed people into your business, showing you, exactly, how to sell to them so that you can get warm leads and turn them into prospects, which means that your sales team can rely on us to do the magic and get them meetings, whilst also nurturing and closing the leads for you too. We also help to build scalable sales processes and workflows along the way, training your sales team so that they can improve their sales ability too” explains their website.
Guarantees
Further, B2B Boosted boasts a satisfaction guarantee for B2B clients that feel that they didn’t get their value’s worth out of their service.
“In 14 days, if you wouldn’t jump into shark-infested waters to get our service back, we will return every dollar you paid. That’s our mentality and the reason that over 50% of our clients are coming from referrals. Give us 14 days to impress you and showcase our services” says Tim.
Given the track record of the B2B team members taking startups from $0 to over $5m in revenue within two years, this sales enablement business model looks like a real alternative to hiring more sales reps, as an average employee takes around 75 days to fully onboard and hit their sales quota.
Cohorts
Worth noting that B2B is selective about the startups that it partners with.
Each month, there is a limited number of places to onboard for each cohort, and clients are selected based on two criteria; the strength of the client’s value proposition to the end customer and the total addressable market of the business.
For more information about B2B, visit their website B2B Boosted
