(Part 1/4) Snowpal: B2B Sales — How to get started
(Part 1/4) B2B Sales at Snowpal.com.
In this podcast series, we’ll take a look at some of our learnings over the past couple of months in B2B Sales. If you are new to Sales, or B2B Sales, this should help you understand some of the fundamentals (I hope!).
Part 1
Transcript
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (00:01.362)
Hey there, I hope you’re doing well. Let’s spend the next 15 to 30 minutes, give or take, talking about B2B sales. Now, as you probably already know, we’ve had our B2C products in production for a number of years. This year, we entered into the B2B space as well as a company. Towards the latter part of summer, we launched our first API, and since then we’ve done, we made quite a bit of progress, and we have eight APIs in production right now. That number is constantly growing.
At the time of this recording, that number stands at eight, but it wouldn’t be eight for too long as we keep working on these APIs. Now the majority of our time as a startup we spend in engineering, right? On engineering, just getting, creating those new products, architecting them, implementing them, deploying them, making them available for other business consumers to use it. But we also started spending time on sales, understandably so, and not as much as we would like to.
not at this point, but we’ve started doing that. In the last couple of months, we’ve actually focused some of our energies, at least some of the team members on sales. Now, as a company that comprises predominantly, almost exclusively engineers, sales is something that’s new to us. So we’ve just started to learn what that means. I mean, we believe we know the theory of it, but not the practicality, right? And we’re living and learning it. And I wanna share some of those learnings in this recording.
And along the way as well, there’s going to be a lot more than this one, I reckon. So without further ado, let’s get started. So let’s make some assumptions. Some of them are not really assumptions. They are true real-life examples of our products. But I’m going to just call them assumptions just to generalize it a little bit. So let me take an example. We have several APIs, like I said, but let’s take one API. It’s essentially a backend as a service.
these offerings and APIs is so you as a business user, as a company doesn’t spend time, energy and effort in building and standing up these backend systems. And you can focus your core energies of you, your team members and the money and everything in actually solving your core customer problems, right? That’s the idea. Now, so you can go to aws.snowpal.com and look up our APIs and stuff like that. Now,
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (02:25.854)
Let’s say we build the API, we’ve tested them, we have deployed them in lower environments, we took them to production, and then we start socializing that and start prospecting. Now that’s where this video really starts. I don’t know, I’m a couple of minutes in already, but that’s essentially the crux of it, right? What all do you need to know? I don’t know what all do you need to know, but what are some of the things we’ve had to know so far as a company who’s gotten into this space? That’s what I wanna share with you, right?
A lot of us in our company did not know this two months, maybe three months prior to this, the date of this recording. Today we can safely say that we have some idea. Sure, there’s a lot more to learn. And we know to quote Robert Frost, my famous poet, and miles to go before I sleep, right? So there’s a lot to do. But we’ve had some learnings along the way and I’m going to share some of them with you or at least the ones that come to my mind. And as we do more, I’m going to keep sharing it as a series.
Now, so the assumption and the reality so far is that we have a service and it’s in production, it’s stable and we’re trying to socialize that with customers and starting to get them. Prospects is the first word, right? Now who is a prospect? Outside of the English word, let me go into the sales terminologies. Again, for any salespeople watching this, my apologies if I get something not so right, please comment, let me know and I’m happy to rectify.
A prospect is somebody who you’re reaching out to, to sell whatever it is that you have, right? So you have a product in our case, we have an API backend as a service product, and we’re trying to reach out to customers to sell it to them, right? So we need to find those prospects. How do you find those prospects? To me, that is question number one.
I think as we go, it might actually help if I started drawing some of this. So let me actually share my screen.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (04:31.05)
Okay, hopefully you’re able to see. So I’m gonna switch to this tab here. Let’s start drawing some things and it gives you time to digest what we’re talking about here as well, right? So let me give this.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (04:52.278)
APIs.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (04:56.042)
Like I mentioned earlier, we have eight APIs at this point. I’m gonna give a…
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (05:06.99)
I’m gonna name to one of them. I’m not gonna name all of them here. You can go to aws.snowpal.com and check out that list. But this is one API, let’s give it.
Okay. And there are several others, right? I’m just going to API number two.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (05:38.638)
number three and so on, right? So.
One of them, then.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (05:47.906)
sake of completeness I’m just gonna make it eight and I’m gonna put a
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (05:57.003)
data out here, right? So those are the APIs. Now, the first thing we did is decide, again, each of these APIs is different from the other. You can use them independently so, or collectively as well, right, to add value. Now, I’m not gonna go into the details of this because that’s not the idea behind this recording. I’m gonna share the approach, but I’m giving you some background so you get some context to it. Now, one of the first things we did was decided
OK, which API do you want to start prospecting for? Now, we could have done it. We still do it. We still do it across those APIs. We have different mechanisms, one that’s more focused to a single API or a group of APIs, and another that’s generate all the APIs. So the first decision to make is, oops, where do you want to start with which of your products? In our case, it’s APIs. In your case, it could be something else. So we said, OK, which SaaS product do we want to start prospecting for?
given the size of your team and the tools you’re using, it is gonna take a fair bit of time. So the more specific the focus, the better off you might be. And then you can make it a bit more generic as you get acclimated to the systems and the tools that you’re using essentially. Let’s say you picked one, and let’s say we go with this one as the first API that we actually want to spend time and energy on.
This is just an example that I’m taking by the way. So if it’s not obvious already. Now you need to start prospecting. What is a, let’s go look up. I mean, again, I’m only sharing one tab so I don’t want to lose this one, but a prospect is somebody who you’re gonna reach out to. You need to figure out who, you know, I think the terminology I believe they use in sales is ICP, like an ideal customer profile. And given that I’m not a sales person, I’m probably gonna be using a lot of these terms interchangeably.
If you want the theory of this conversation, this monologue, you should just go to Google and look that up, right? So you’ll get beautiful descriptions and definitions and whatnot. I’m just explaining to you more from a pragmatic standpoint as a startup that owns products and is reaching out to prospects to sell. So you define your ideal customer profile. Let’s write it here, right? Like, let me draw.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:14.402)
This is I.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:27.31)
fails
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:32.462)
First terminology here to remember.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:45.518)
prospects and I’m going to actually
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (08:56.034)
Okay. Sorry, it sometimes takes a little bit of time to do it, but people have told me and I believe it’s true as well that it gives you time to digest what we’re talking here by virtue of the time it takes to draw these diagrams. I’m gonna write ICP here as well. So the ideal customer profile. Now there could very well be differences between, you know, the notion of, let me just.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (09:22.446)
with them. A differences between who a prospect is and who an ideal customer profile is. Maybe the ideal customer profile is the actual, persona is another word that I see used. So these are all sales terms and you can look up the actual differences, the advances and what each of them specifically mean. But as an engineering team that is also doing sales, that’s who we are, we tend to use a lot of these terms interchangeably.
not to say that they are synonymous, but we just use them that way. So IECP is an ideal customer profile. Like who’s the ideal person, the target customer that you want to be able to sell the product to, your product to, who fits into that equation, right? A prospect is similar, I reckon, but maybe a prospect may or may not have to be ideal. I mean, ideally you want to prospect folks who are ideal. I’m using all of these words in random order, but.
But hopefully that makes sense. So a prospect is someone who you’re reaching out to try and make that sale, essentially. That’s the first thing. But how do you find these prospects? Now, let’s talk about the types of tools that we use and tools that you want to look for to actually be able to prospect. Now, I’m going to draw…
I guess, I mean, I’m picking these shapes almost arbitrarily. So as you can tell, so I’m going to draw.
Okay, you’re gonna sell the products, sales. And then here, I’m essentially trying to, let’s just write tools here so we know what these.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (11:11.814)
Okay, you’re gonna need a variety of tools. Let’s just talk about a fair number of them essentially. Right? So hopefully it’s recording my screen. Okay, the first tool to prospect the one we actually, there’s quite a few tools out there, but the ones that we ended up using. And again, I’m not necessarily recommending any of these tools. I’m just telling you which ones we are using. The only one I recommend is literally our own APIs, because I can speak to it given that we own it.
and we know what we bring to the table. But these ones to the right side, let me give this the same color. The rest of it is third-party tools that we are essentially using. Some work well, some not so much, and then you just have to live and learn. So Apollo essentially, you can get an annual subscription. I don’t know if they do monthly. I’m pretty sure they do as well. That tool that you can use to prospect.
They have data. I don’t know where they pull their data from. The quality of the data, take it with a grain of salt. Sometimes it’s good. Sometimes it’s not so good from my experience. But that’s a tool we actually, one of the tools we use for prospecting. So you can go search by location, search by industry. There’s a number of filters they support. You can look them up. And you can literally, you can use them to find.
prospects and reach out to the prospects, right? So that’s one tool essentially. Now let me actually group this.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (12:57.07)
Okay, grouped it. So that’s one tool. You need to get acclimated to any tool, whether you use this one or some other tool, just to play with it for a couple hours and then you’ll have a good sense of how it does it, what data it presents and things of the nature. But let me share some of these terms that I’ve learned along the way, right? In a sales tool. Let’s actually put that in a, I don’t know what shapes to pick here, but I’m just gonna, you know what?
Maybe this is Polo, right? So for prospecting, I’m just gonna write it right in here. I’m just gonna put in italics. Prospects, we already talked about. You’re gonna see that. Sequences, templates, mailboxes.
are some of these other items, right? I’m pretty sure I’m gonna think of maybe emails, calls.
It’s just some of the terminology I’ve actually run into. Now we don’t do any cold calling. You know, as engineers and developers who run a software company, even sending that email, like a cold email is like a Herculean task, right? It took us a lot of time to bring ourselves to write, draft that message in email and hit send because we haven’t done it. It’s not something you’re used to doing.
So you’re quite hesitant in going about that, right? But having done that for a month or maybe even two now, I think I understand that a little bit more. I’m sure there’s long ways to go, but to some extent. Prospects, we talked about. Sequences, what’s a sequence, right? A sequence is what you, again, not theoretical definitions. You can look up online. I’m just telling you the practical interpretation of these things. So please always take it to the grain of salt. A sequence is you define, if you want to sell, let’s say we are selling our API.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (14:58.27)
a building block API. Let’s imagine we are targeting the west coast of the US, for whatever reason. These are random examples. We’re going to target Seattle and California primarily. Let’s say two states we start with. And then we pick and choose the industry, say, information technology and services and some filters. And we want to be able to find prospects there and do reach outs.
by sending cold emails, for instance. So a sequence is essentially what you create and define that has a number of steps, right? Steps is, I guess a sequence has steps. So I’m gonna write it like this. But the purpose of defining a sequence is essentially to be able to drop, you know, find those prospects and drop them into those sequences. Now, I wish I could show you, but the problem is,
ends up exposing data, so I don’t want to show any of that, unfortunately, I can show you. So you’re going to have to do a bit of imagining here, right? So let’s say you have a notion of you found this, you did a filter, you searched the people, you found 50 prospects who fit your criteria, and now you want to add them to a sequence. You need to create a sequence, and the sequence can have one or any number of steps. The first step in a sequence could be…
send an email. That could be an automated email, meaning when you drop the prospect into the sequence, it starts sending that email out. Or it could be a manual email where you customize that email to say, I’m reaching out to Krish at Snowpal. So let me customize it a bit more after doing my due diligence. So I know a fair bit about Snowpal before I reach out to them. The more personalization you do, the more you learn about your prospect before you send that email.
the better off you’re gonna be. Because you’re gonna do this, if you do these mass reach outs, sending it like tens or hundreds of people without knowing more about them, there’s gonna be a number of issues you’re gonna run into which we’ll talk about in a little bit, maybe in a subsequent session. But it should suffice to know that, make sure you know who you’re sending it to, know a little bit about that company, about the person, and then you hit send. So the first sequence step could be, should probably be like a manual email or something like that, right?
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (17:20.47)
You drop the prospect with a sequence. Now the sequence can either be active or inactive. An active sequence is one that is active, meaning it’s in play. So the first step could be a manual email. Actually, why don’t we do this, right? Let’s take a hypothetical sequence.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (17:44.834)
I don’t know if this is the right choice of a shape, but that’s okay. Step one could be manual email. So you say, I’m gonna send it to Krish. I wanna learn a little bit about Snowpal, and then I go start sending those, right? Now step two, I don’t know why I ended up choosing a triangle, maybe a different shape, just because they might all look the same. Otherwise, there’s no other good reason. I love diagrams, I think very visually, but.
Am I great at communicating that visually to other people? Maybe, maybe not. Unless if you work with me, you’ll start understanding how I think till then, there might be a little bit of a challenge, understandably so. So you send the first email and then you decide, okay, when should I actually send this second email? Maybe I say,
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (18:34.638)
three days after, right? Meaning three days after you receive a response, you know what, I’m just gonna dump that, maybe pick a more ordinary rectangular.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (18:52.022)
The first step is a manual email. And you say three days after that email is sent, depending on whether you got a response back from your prospect or not, you can have a lot of these rules defined. I’m not gonna go into the details. This is not a class on…
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (19:09.594)
tools have their own bugs. Your second step could be an automated email. Let’s say somebody, and again, we have, I think, only one step in our sequence. Again, we are an engineering team. It takes a lot of effort, mental effort, not like actual effort, mental effort for us to be able to reach out to people and ask somebody more than once. It’s hard enough to ask them for us to ask anybody even once because we believe, not only believe we know we have a great product, but it’s
But we’ve realized that no matter how great your product is, you’re going to have to sell, make an effort to sell before folks know your product because this world is a huge place. That’s the reality. That’s why we are obviously starting to focus our energies more on selling as well. You need to sell. I’m upset about that. But how comfortable you are in the type of reach-outs you do and how often you reach out to your prospects.
That’s entirely up to you, right? I don’t know if there’s a right or wrong answer. I’ve had good salespeople tell me that they actually have a sequence of six to seven steps and others tell me they have at least have like four steps and some have probably a lot more than that. We started with two. We honestly only execute one of them. We hear back from the prospect, then we follow up, after that initial response. If not, we don’t most of the time. Rarely do we find ourselves sending the second email, which may wanna be the right thing to do because…
I’ve been told that people see this, even if they do see the email, they may be busy with something else and they may want to come back to it later except that they’ve forgotten and they never come back, but they had the intent to come back so the reminders actually make sense. But that’s a sales discussion. I’m just going to tell you some, I’m not going to go into the details of it, right? There’s a detailed discussion in itself. So the second email could be an automated email that says three days after sending the first manual email,
Why don’t you do a follow up if the prospect had not responded, right? So you say, okay, there is an automated email that’s being sent out. Now let’s keep going, right? Now your third step could be call. Now again, we’ve never called our, we’ve never done that. And I don’t expect the way we’re gonna do that unless they’ve actually shown interest and reached out to us, right? In that case, sure, they would have shared their phone number and do it, makes sense.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (21:33.79)
not otherwise. But you could have a third step that says even try because you know I get these cold calls all the time. We’ve all gotten those calls. The rules of when or who you should call. I’m no expert. I’m not going to even try you know speaking to it. You could have those steps. But let’s say call me. I may not be a step right. Let’s say somebody responded to it. Responded to your email. Now when they’ve shown interest by virtue of responding,
What might you do? Your call could say, only call the prospect if they responded to one of your emails, right? Now, if your first email got a response and you don’t need the automated email at all, so you go to step three, all of this depends on how good the tool is and which tool you’re using, right? Each tool is different from the other. We’ve not put Apollo to its test. This point, we use the minimalistic features. It works okay.
It’s just one of the tools in our repertoire for doing these recharts. But depending on the tool and how well it works, you may have to define these rules. And I think it’s another terminology that I wanna share here. I’ve seen something called sequence rule sets, right? Yeah, so I think there’s something called rule sets. These are standard sales terminologies. No matter which product you use, I have a feeling that it’s gonna probably have something either exactly the same or very similar, right? So you can define
rule sets, associate them to sequences, you know, do other things, right? So we talked about sequence. Let me put a title here.
the sequence with steps. And you’re gonna have multiple sequences, whether how many of them are active at any given time, that’s entirely up to you. But the reason you may need multiple sequences is like we have our sequences, separated by the geographic locations, right? We have different sequences for the US, say we reaching out to South Asia, we have folks we’re talking, we’re engaging. There’s a different sequence because you want
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (23:42.026)
these emails we sent out at certain times of the week and days, right? There’s holidays. There’s different time zones. So in our case, we have multiple sequences. And I believe we have multiple rule sets as well. So let’s say, with Southeast Asia, you want to send the emails at, let’s say, 10 o’clock Asian time versus 10 o’clock US time, right? You can make those separations by
using by virtue of using sequences. We talked about emails so far. You’re sending out cold emails, doing cold calling if you’re able to bring yourself to do that. Templates, what are templates, right? Now, when you send these emails out, it needs to be, you know, needs to look personal. It should be personal really, but sometimes, you know, you can use these tools to do mass email re-charts, whether it’s a good idea or not, it’s all at the scope of this conversation, this monologue, but you could do it.
You can decide how many you want to send, when you want to send those. But even then to customize, you can create these templates and you can, when you have this email step, like manual email, automated email, you can create that based on those templates. You can either, let’s say I have a template that says, hey Krish, here’s our tool. You want to try using it as an example, right? I can put that in a template, associate that to these sequence steps. So it gets picked up.
but I can have it either referenced or decoupled, meaning I can either have the sequence use those email templates as is, which means if I change the template, it’s gonna affect the next email to get sent out through that sequence, or I can create the base email on step one using a template, but you can choose to detach it and customize it further to this sequence. You can have the same template, but when you associate that into multiple sequences, you can customize the text, right?
And the way you personalize it, you can use these flower brackets basically, right? I mean, they support, you know, you can replace the first names and the last name, you know, every tool does it ever so slightly differently, but this is the idea from what I’ve seen, right? You can just say, you know, you can, smaller, you can say, replace the first name, you can make it part of the email, and then you can put a name of the company and things of that nature. Now this is how it has been, I believe for a while.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (26:07.19)
But given some recent changes in use I saw, where Google and Outlook, they’re all gonna make it much tighter. Starting next year, how easy or difficult it’s gonna be to do reach-outs through emails is something we’re gonna have to figure out. It may work, it may not work, it may work not so well, even if it does, assuming it works reasonably well today. There’s gonna be changes coming, as I understand it. So I’m just speaking to what you might encounter if you were to onboard and hop on these tools as of today.
As things change, you know, I’ll try to keep it posted here So we talked about templates and there’s a lot of other terminologies, right? But I think prospect sequences rules set steps templates mailboxes emails and calls is a fair number of them mailboxes We didn’t talk about it. Let’s go to the next one, right? So here maybe I can make this
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (27:00.578)
Write that sequence. Let me actually.
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (27:10.614)
That’s not looking that pretty, the diagram, but that’s fine, right? I’m gonna put tools outside. Okay, prospecting, right? We talked about one of them. Let’s go to more tools, right? I’m just gonna say, just to keep it generic.
prospecting tool, right? Because these terminologies are pretty generic and you can use whatever tool works for you, right? Or try more than one. Some of them are really expensive, some are affordable. And this is a business, right? You can work with companies who do this for a living who literally help you find prospects. If you have the money to spend on those services.
or you find value in the services, right? So you should definitely check them out as well. Okay, let me see. I don’t wanna move anything here because I’ll have to group it and beautify and everything. Yep, I’m not gonna do that. Okay, the next thing is what is the next tool you could possibly look at? Just like, okay, let’s go mailboxes before I do anything. I forgot mailboxes. Now you need, you know, there’s a broader discussion about email. When you send emails, whether or not the emails end up in inboxes,
on your prospects inboxes is driven by a number of factors. One is what the reputation of your email is essentially, right? That I think warrants a separate session altogether. So let me do this. Let me just say, before I, I guess I’ll delete this and I’m gonna, make this bold, oops. Make this bold.
I think we are kind of half hour in here almost. Let me wrap this up and I can pick this up in a subsequent podcast, right? So in this one, we talked about, you’re selling a B2B product, you have to start selling it. We talked about prospects, ICP, who your ideal customer profile is. You have to know that. It’s not an easy question. And that is fluid as well. That ICP could continually change based on the market, based on your product, your features, demand, competition, and N number of things, right?
Krish (aws.snowpal.com) (29:20.938)
So it is a fluid thing, but make sure you have a good sense of who your ideal customer is and define that ideal customer profile because all the rest of what you’re trying to do has to be in perfect harmony with the notion of that ideal customer profile. And then you pick sales tools to do prospecting. We talked about some of the terminologies you will encounter in a lot of these sales tools. Now I had not, for someone who did not know the actual terminologies, it takes you a little bit to get used to these terminologies.
But once you pick up a tool and start using it, you understand it, right? Of course, the first sequence that I created, it was just us, the family, extended family, our friends, trying to understand how the messages get sent out, what works, what doesn’t work, what looks professional, what looks not so professional. You’ve got to live and learn, but you can’t do it. You need to have some tests run. And you need people.
who you’re not actually selling to, right? To facilitate that. So, you know, we used folks in our network to check these messages out, and then optimized it to the extent where it is today, and then we are using it, correct? So we talked about prospecting tool, prospect sequences, rules, head steps, templates, mailboxes, emails, calls, the steps in a sequence, you know, how you can define the rules around this.
how you’re dropping a prospect into a sequence and a little bit around the, along those lines. That’s a high level introduction, right? If you had never done B2B sales, you’d not know how these tools work or what these tools could be. Hopefully this, the last 30 minutes give you a reasonable introduction, right? Like a sales 101 coming from an engineer, if you will, right? Hopefully that helps. Let me continue this.
in a subsequent podcast. Let’s call this one of N as I always say, I have no idea what N is gonna be. It’s gonna be some hopefully finite number and at the end of it, you’ll have a good sense of what all of this is. And my hope and intent here is to share my learnings with you and if you find that things are different, how it should be different from what I said, et cetera, please comment, let me know, reach out to me. I’d love to have the conversation with you as well. Thank you.
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