Ep 107: How to Validate Your Offer with Apollo | Expert Guest: Liz Spektor

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Unlock the secrets to creating irresistible B2B service offers with expert insights from our captivating guest, Liz Spector of Apollo. Join me, Sarah Noelle Block, as we unravel the art of validating your business propositions and the crucial steps to achieving product-market fit. Prepare to challenge your assumptions about customer pain points and uncover hidden opportunities with the guidance of company influencers. Our conversation sets the stage for effective sales outreach and impactful marketing messaging that resonates with your target audience.

Explore the world of B2B outreach strategies, where cold calling reigns supreme in certain industries like construction. We discuss the power of a multi-channel approach, weaving social media engagement and email outreach into your strategy. Discover how building relationships with company influencers can provide a treasure trove of insights into organizational challenges and decision-making processes. Timing is everything, and we delve into when to bring in marketing resources to ensure your sales hypotheses are rock solid before scaling.

Our episode concludes with practical tips on optimizing B2B outreach strategies using Apollo. Learn to craft a precise prospect list with an array of filters, from job titles to buying intent signals, and seize the opportunities presented by job changes. Get a sneak peek into an upcoming masterclass with Liz Spector and learn about the Tiny Marketing Club, designed to help B2B service businesses thrive. This episode is packed with actionable strategies and wisdom, setting you on a path to elevate your B2B endeavors.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Validating B2B Service Offers With Apollo
• 11:36 Navigating B2B Outreach Strategies
• 20:00 Optimizing B2B Outreach Strategies
• 28:11 Building B2B Marketing Strategy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:47

Welcome to Tiny Marketing. This is Sarah Noelle Block, and this is a podcast that helps B2B service businesses do more with less. Learn lean, actionable, organic marketing strategies you can implement today. No fluff, just powerful growth tactics that work. Ready to scale smarter? Hit that subscribe button and start growing your business with tiny marketing. Hey, hey, this is Sarah Noelle Block. Welcome to episode 107. Let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 1:16

I often work with clients who have ideas for new offers. In fact, I have an entire offer ecosystem course, which you can sign up for, where I take you through how to map all of your offers all five of them that I recommend and we connect the dots, figure out how we can move people from point A all the way to point Z within your offer ecosystem. But before you can launch these offers, you need to validate them, don't you? Of course you do. You don't want to launch an offer without validating that your audience actually wants it. So today I'm talking to Liz Spector from Apollo, and we are talking about some hacks, about how you can validate your offer using Apollo. Now I'll tell you the truth.

Speaker 1: 2:07

This episode started. The interview started with us planning on talking about how to create a go-to-market strategy with Apollo. But as we were talking, I was like no, no, no, that's not what this episode is. This episode is actually about how to validate your offer. So that is what we did, and stay tuned, I'm going to share that interview in just one moment. But before we do that, let's talk about MouseFlow, saas and B2B marketers. Here's something to think about. 79% of users will leave your site within seconds because of a bad user experience. That's a lot of lost leads, but MouseFlow can help you fix that. With MouseFlow, you can track where leads are getting stuck on your site, be it abandoned forms, confusing navigation or even broken links in key areas like your signup page or demo request form. With MouseFlow's heat maps and session recordings, you'll easily understand the why behind the drop-offs and optimize those user journeys to drive more meaningful conversions. Visit gomouseflowcom slash. Try and sign up to get a full feature, 14-day extended trial, no credit card required. Hey, hey, liz, thanks for joining me today.

Speaker 2: 3:29

Yeah, very excited to be here. Thank you for having me. Can you introduce yourself to the audience? Yeah, yeah, so my name is Liz. I have been in the B2B marketing space now for almost a decade, started my career actually in direct-to-consumer marketing and then moved over to B2B marketing, and currently I am the head of growth marketing at Apollo, so I oversee all things growth marketing related. I oversee all of our paid acquisition channels and I'm really focused on building new customer acquisitions for the company.

Speaker 1: 4:02

I am excited to have you. I felt like as soon as we had our initial conversation about this, all of my clients were asking me about Apollo, creating go-to-market lists, all of the things. I was like guys, you read my mind. I have lists coming on.

Speaker 2: 4:22

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, Apollo is such a great tool really for small business owners, medium-sized business owners. It's a great way to centralize both your sales and your marketing effort.

Speaker 1: 4:33

Yeah, when I'm working with a client, I always go to Apollo and give them and download a list of what I feel like would be replicates of their dream clients, so they have somewhere to start. And we're going to touch a little bit on that go-to-market list, but first let's get into how this all works. So let's say a founder has a salesperson or a biztub person in-house, or maybe they're that person and they have a contractor who is maybe doing some of the outreach which happens a lot because that's a ton of work. So let's dig into that. How do we get that to work? Well, because it can be really disconnected. First, initial thoughts.

Speaker 2: 5:23

Yeah, this is a great question. So I think there's a couple of things, especially as an early stage founder, the main thing that you want to establish is product market fit, and the best way to do that is through outreach, so kind of creating a bunch of different messaging concepts, offers, and testing them against the target audience that you think is your target audience right. Because that's the other thing that sometimes, initially, when you start selling your product or your service, you think you're going after X persona and then it ends up being Y persona. So this is a very pivotal time in the company's journey and in the founder's journey to challenge their hypotheses around who is my target customer, what are their pain points and is my solution solving their actual pain points? Point, and is my solution solving their actual pain points? And that setup is so important and so foundational because that will then set the tone for everything to come in terms of sales outreach, in terms of marketing messaging, in terms of website messaging, offers that you create. So setting that up and creating hypotheses and then testing against those hypotheses is extremely important and not being afraid of failure there, you know, because most times when you are developing a new brand or a new service, you come into it with certain convictions, you think you know, you think this is how they're going to play out.

Speaker 2: 6:52

Oftentimes, through outreach, through talking to existing customers, through just talking to people in the industry, you actually start to learn that there are maybe some other pockets of opportunity that makes sense to capitalize on.

Speaker 2: 7:00

And I've heard the story so many times in my career where companies are so focused on selling to the decision maker or to the person that ultimately will, you know, sign the contracts, really close the deal, but then they miss hitting on the folks that are actually influencers in the deal process.

Speaker 2: 7:18

So, for example, if you're, you know, just as an example, if you're selling a marketing service and you really want to focus on, you know, selling to maybe the chief marketing officer or the CEO, depending on the company, but then you're neglecting the pool of people that are actually influencers in that decision, who are like your performance marketing managers, your digital marketing managers, kind of all those people that are actually on the front line.

Speaker 2: 7:43

Yeah, you don't include them in that decision or at least put the word out there about what your product or your service do. It kind of comes back to you and shoots you in the foot a little bit because ultimately your CMO, your CEO, will then come to those frontline folks regardless and ask their opinion on the decision you know in most cases. Yeah, really important to kind of nail that down and figure out what is your value prop for both your decision makers and your influencers and does your solution match their pain points and the way and figure out what is your value prop for both your decision makers and your influencers and does your solution match their pain points and the way that you're communicating those pain points you gave so much gold right there.

Speaker 1: 8:20

I want to work through some of that. I need to process all of that gold that you gave me. So let's start first from the hypothesis of your dream client. When you are starting off with a new offer or you're launching your brand for the first time. Yeah, you're guessing. You're guessing at who would need your service best, and I'm glad that you said that hypothesis. It's an educated guess, but it's a guess nonetheless.

Speaker 1: 9:50

That's what I always tell my clients, too, is you know this is an educated guess where, as we do gateway offers and like those low ticket offers, that's how we start to discover who are we serving, who can we serve best and who is getting the easiest transformation from what we do exactly. But doing a lot of testing will help with that and I want to go into. You mentioned that you should do a lot of outreach for this, with different areas that you're hypothesizing would be good clients. So how do you do that approach and get them to actually respond?

Speaker 2: 10:34

Yeah, that's a great question. So I think you have to think creatively and you have to use a lot of different mediums. So if you're going to say, hey, I'm just going to send a bunch of emails to 100 people and I'm going to sit here and wait for them to reply, you are wasting your time, because the chances of them replying and also the chances of your emails even landing in their inbox right, that's like the first step, which is like most of the time we're reaching out to people for the first time, they don't have your email recognized in their Gmail or whatever email provider they're using, so they can go to spam. There's a million things that are essentially standing in the way of your email landing in their inbox. So it's really important to use a multi-channel outreach approach. So what that means is you should absolutely still run email campaigns. That's your biggest and probably fastest way to scale outreach but also incorporating things like, for example, if you're selling B2B services, you want to be sending messages on LinkedIn, so in-mail messages to the people that are potential customers or in that potential ICP of yours.

Speaker 2: 11:36

Cold calling is a great way as well, depending on your industry. I know there's a lot of conflicting opinions about cold call but again, depends on the industry that you're in. Like, for example, I've had friends that have worked in the construction space and in the construction space it's actually very common to cold call, like a lot of contractors will cold call for bids and stuff like that. So if you're selling a enablement tool for them, you know cold call is received much differently than say, a cold call for selling, you know, a SaaS product or something that's maybe not as relevant. So I think cold calling is still very much relevant.

Speaker 2: 12:12

And then there's a lot of different ways that you can engage with prospects, all the way down to, like finding these folks on social media networks like Instagram and commenting on some of their most recent posts. Of course has to be super relevant context there and has to make sense. But even sending people DMs on those channels, figuring out where your audience is going to be the most responsive is really important. And I think email will always be the cornerstone. You always want to be leveraging that channel a more friendlier way in, versus sending an email where, depending on, again, on the industry, on the service you're selling, some people don't check their emails as frequently or they're being inundated by a bunch of cold emails all the time and they're filtering them out, so it's really important to develop a multi-channel approach to sending that outreach.

Speaker 1: 13:07

Yeah, the first thing I do when I'm making a list is I start following everybody or connecting with them on LinkedIn and ringing that bell. So I'm engaging with them regularly, so I start to become warmer to them. They recognize my name because I'm showing up there and then I might approach them on another channel where it would be more direct communication. Now, the other thing that you talked about was who to reach out to. So I love that you pointed out that the influencers are so important within a company, especially because they're often the ones being tasked with making that shortlist of who they should be working with. If you try and go straight to the CEO or the decision maker, you're probably getting deleted. You need to go to those influencers and the people surrounding them, because they're the ones that need to sell you to the CEO. They're busy, they don't want to hear from you, they don't want to respond to your email.

Speaker 2: 14:16

Yeah, exactly, and I think a big part there too is that they're more willing to talk and have the time to talk and kind of communicate maybe some of the challenges that they're facing or some of the challenges that the company is facing, and I think those unlocks, like they're sometimes more important than even the outcome, right, so maybe the outcome is, you know, making a sale or making some sort of deeper connection within a company, like those are really important outcomes.

Speaker 2: 14:42

But talking to the right influencers can seed so many ideas for a founder or a salesperson about their company that they might have not even been thinking about before.

Speaker 2: 14:52

Like, for example, you know, you might have a pain point that somebody talks about and then it's actually a really quick iteration for you to add that offering to your product and you can completely repackage your whole offering and then upsell, you know, into different offerings from there or create, like a, you know, a different go to market plan based on those pain points.

Speaker 2: 15:13

So having those conversations early on I actually think is more invaluable than even making the sale itself, because it sets you up for so many different things, I mean all the way down from the offering to all the way down to pricing right, like maybe your pricing is too high, maybe your pricing is too low, right. That's another thing that I feel like a lot of founders kind of take a guess on or an educated hypothesis on in the beginning is like what is the perceived value of my service? And sometimes that doesn't align with the perceived value that the market wants to pay for that service. So I think having those learnings early on can really set you up for success versus fighting an uphill battle of trying to kind of mesh the demands of the market to your product.

Speaker 1: 15:59

Essentially, yeah, that's a really good point. I've seen a lot of people lately in this world offering an interview in exchange for a consultation for B2B service businesses. So creating that list on Apollo of people that you would offer this to makes a ton of sense, because you're getting that information that you need in order to home in on what your offer should look like. Those conversations are so valuable and anytime you can have a one-on-one conversation, learn about your ideal client's pain points and what they really want from an offer that's going to help.

Speaker 2: 16:43

Yes, very much.

Speaker 2: 16:44

So.

Speaker 2: 16:44

Yeah, and I think that's a great point to start thinking about.

Speaker 2: 16:47

If you've already brought in, if you're a founder and you've already brought in your first salesperson, this is a great opportunity to have a tag team effort on building these types of offerings, testing the messaging, testing all the hypotheses and then if you're at the point of you know, understanding and validating some of these hypotheses, that's when I feel like it's a good time to introduce either a marketing contractor or your first marketing hire, because you don't want to jump the gun and hire a marketer before you have that validation, because what's going to end up happening is you might end up spending a lot of resources on, you know, creating maybe some sort of video content or creative that's not aligned to what the market actually wants to see and hear, and having those foundations built is really important so that you can then have your marketer come in and build on top of those things.

Speaker 2: 17:42

So it's almost like you're taking those one-to-one connections that you're making as a salesperson or as a founder and then you're bringing in a marketing resource to scale those. So you don't want to start scaling until you've had some wins and some validation on your hypotheses.

Speaker 1: 17:53

Yeah, I think that this conversation has gone. I have a new title for this. We're gonna it's gonna be how to validate your offer before you go to market, because that is that's the goal that I've really gotten from this is not to go all in on your offer until you have taken the time to validate it, test it, make sure that you're talking to the right audience and get that information before you're like this is my thing and this is all I'm selling. It doesn't work. The audience will tell you no, no, that's not what I want.

Speaker 2: 18:34

Yeah, yeah, and it's definitely best not to spend money and resources on that until you know that you validated it.

Speaker 1: 18:41

Yeah, definitely. So let's talk about creating that list in the first place. So we haven't talked Apollo specific before, but now let's get into Apollo because, frankly, you guys have an awesome free version of it. So anybody who's listening to this can implement what we're talking about immediately. So what is the first thing that they should do when they're creating a go-to-market list?

Speaker 2: 19:11

Yeah. So there are a lot of filters that are available to you within Apollo, so it is very customizable based on your service or your offering. There are filters for things like job titles, company sizes, industries, keywords. You can even add on buying intent into your list. So there is quite a lot that's available just out the gate and for free, which is really awesome. The cool part about using Apollo for your list building is that, especially for small business owners, it gives them access to enterprise level list building for free, essentially. Yeah, they start it. So that's a really, I think, pivotal change from what's been available for SMBs in the past, or just like smaller businesses that they haven't really been able to use those tools that, like the fancy or you know tech companies had been using and things like that. So, thinking about all of those filter opportunities, you might start thinking about different ways to build your list. So the most typical way is you know a lot of people build lists based on job titles or departments, you know. So, for example, if you're targeting everybody within sales at a specific company or everybody within marketing, those are really great ways to target your audience.

Speaker 2: 20:24

If you offer a service that's geo-specific, meaning like it's only in a specific state or a specific country. You can also limit your searches for location-based searches. We also have revenue filters, which is a great one as well. So say, for example, you're selling a service that you know a company that's making I don't know, maybe under $500,000 a year will be able to afford. You can filter out those companies that are making that revenue amount and really focus in on the revenue sizes that you like. And then for founders or for salespeople that are getting into Apollo and maybe they're just like, not sure of any of those things, right, that's definitely one too.

Speaker 2: 21:05

There are a couple of filters that you can start with, so one that I find that's really good as a starting point is buying intent. So buying intent basically means what happens is it scrapes the entire Internet. You know all the different searches that people are making. It's not, it's anonymized, so you're not. You're not. There's no, you know first party data being shared there, but essentially it's just based on like cookie data of like what folks are searching for, what pages they're looking for, someone that is, you know, has a buying intent for buying a marketing service, Like they're looking for marketing agencies on Google or they're reading things about marketing agencies on other channels.

Speaker 2: 21:46

You can actually use the buying intent filter and type in something like searching marketing agencies, searching no agency, something like that, and then see what the results come back to you with.

Speaker 2: 21:56

And you can actually see the results in the database and go one by one in spot, check a couple and see if there's any commonalities there. So commonalities being company size, industry is another one, and that's a great starting point to then start filtering down the list because maybe not everybody in that list will be sellable for you. Like again, say they're maybe out of the country that you sell in or they're out of the company range that you can. You know, maybe you don't have enough employees to support a company of 500 people, things like that. But that is a great starting point for those that are just like overwhelmed by the job title filters, industry filters, all of those. So you can use things like buying intent to kind of work as the starting point for yourself and then build on top of that based on the commonalities that you see within that list, and that would work really well too.

Speaker 1: 22:47

If you have no hypothesis, you're not sure at all who your ideal customer is. Starting there and going through it and looking at like who has commonalities with people I've worked with before, did I like working with them? Would I want to work with someone like that again and you could start making your list that way, just to ideate on who your ideal client is.

Speaker 2: 23:10

Yeah, yeah, and there's a couple of other ones that I think your audience would find interesting. So, like there's, we have signals for funding. So say you're looking for or you feel like you'll have more success with companies that have just recently acquired a new round of funding. That's a great signal to reach out to those companies again, depending on your service, but it's always a great time when there's a cash refusion that comes into a business where they're ready to bring on a consultant or an agency or a partner, whatever it might be. So I think that the funding is another great filter to use. And then the other one is job changes.

Speaker 2: 23:45

Job changes is also a you're able to track job changes within Apollo and see when someone has moved from for example, you know a role at their company into another company or has changed their title, you know a role at their company into another company or has changed their title.

Speaker 2: 24:02

And that happens to be like a really great time to first of all reach out to someone and congratulate them on the new role or the accomplishment in their career. So it kind of feels a little bit more personable, like you're not just reaching out to them like hey, I'm selling you something You're acknowledging that they've gone through a life change and it's also job changes that that category of like searches tends to be highly converting. Because when someone starts a new job, like usually the first 30 to 90 days is a very, you know, pivotal point for a new job. You want to make sure you're bringing in the right people, you're setting up the right goals, you know you're selling in the role. So that's often when people are very open-minded to bringing on you know again agencies, partners, new services, things like that. So I think that's another great one. If somebody is just feeling lost on where to start in terms of building their audience list, that's a great one to use.

Speaker 1: 24:51

I like that, yeah, and they usually have some sort of goal like I need to accomplish this. So if you combine that along with like buying intent, you could find some real winners there. Some like flags hey, I'm going to be buying soon.

Speaker 2: 25:12

Yeah, yeah. And the other thing like beyond just list building in Apollo is that you can actually connect your list building to your outreach seamlessly in the platform, so you can send those folks that you identify as maybe the you know, the folks that you want to reach out to. You can connect them directly to a sequence within Apollo and actually use Apollo to send that outreach as well. So that eliminates the need to purchase, you know, like a SendGrid or any of these other like one-off email tools, not to say like again, the services are very similar, but having it all in one place is really something special because you're able to, like, quite literally, select the contacts that you want to add to that sequence and drop them in and then automatically set up a multi-touch outreach campaign. So what that means is, like we spoke about earlier in the conversation, you're sending an email, you might be setting up a task for yourself to, you know, make a cold call. You can also actually automate LinkedIn tasks within Apollo, which is very cool, yeah, so you can scale that out. You can actually send connection requests from Apollo, which is really awesome. I didn't know that. Yeah, it's a great personal touch. You know before, maybe you send. Maybe you send one email and then you send the LinkedIn connection request or you know however you want to sequence that. But yeah, you can integrate that directly in there and it'll help you scale.

Speaker 2: 26:35

The more you automate and I know some people are automation has a bad rap. Right, because people are scared of it going wrong. It just you know spam, canoning, things like that, and I've been there on that very skeptical end as well. But if you automate to, you know a smaller audience that you feel really comfortable reaching out to, it will help you get that scale that you need to get those answers faster. If you're going to manually send the emails manually, send the connection requests manually, try to do all of this.

Speaker 2: 27:05

It's going to take you, maybe you know, three, four, five, six months to get any sort of answers on that hypothesis that you had set out to answer, and you know time is of the essence for any founder, any business that's starting out. So I think that automation piece is really important, where you can start seeing those signals within the first month, month to a half. Again, it's always different. I try not to put a timeframe on it because it could be different depending on businesses and just kind of like the list of your outreach and stuff like that. But it will just help you get those answers quickly and also it will allow you to understand which engagement medium works the best for you. Like maybe your reply rates on email are going to be super high and your connection requests are not really being accepted on LinkedIn, like maybe that's just not a viable channel for you, or maybe it's the opposite, and then you can take those learnings and quickly optimize your sequences based on what's working for you.

Speaker 1: 28:01

Yeah, I like that. It's a lot of testing, seeing what works and then optimizing. That's the way to do it. So Liz is joining me for a masterclass where she's going to teach us how to create a go-to-market list when you're launching a new offer, and I'm excited about that. So this was a little teaser into that. I'm going to have the link to sign up for it in the show notes. And is there anything else you want to share before we wrap up? Where can they find you online?

Speaker 2: 28:37

Yes, yes, so you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Liz Spector on LinkedIn. If you have any questions on, you know, getting started with your go-to-market motion, getting started with Apollo, validating your offers, anything related to that, feel free to send me a DM and I try to respond to all of them. So, yeah, feel free to reach out.

Speaker 1: 28:56

You love all things tiny marketing. Head down to the show notes page and sign up for the wait list to join the tiny marketing club, where you get to work one-on-one with me with trainings, feedback and pop-up coaching that will help you scale your marketing as a B2B service business. So I'll see you over in the club.