Growing a B2B electrical equipment company (Details Below)

[zemastruve]

Hi All,

I have the opportunity of receiving equity in and working for a company that supplies a product for energy infrastructure projects (I'm being intentionally vague on what the product is). I would be in charge of increasing sales through marketing and sales (details below). The customers are other businesses either electrical contractors or electrical equipment distributors.

Company Details and Background:

- In operation for 6 years

- Revenue = $1M 2020, 1.1M 2021, projected revenue of $1.3M 2022.

- Customers: B2B - Electrical Contractors and Electrical equipment distributors

- Active Salesforce: None, $0 spent

- Marketing: None, $0 spent

All our business has been word-of-mouth and the company operates with 3 employees 1 runs design/ engineering, 1 runs accounting/billing, and another runs customer management/operations.

Questions:

If you were to run a b2b business that has seen steady growth, and has spent $0 on marketing and sales, and would like to increase revenue, what would you do?

Here are my thoughts, let me know what you think:

1. Create Linkedin marketing campaigns targeting Electrical equipment suppliers and electrical contractors. Our customers tend to be very active on Linkedin as opposed to other social channels.
2. Email marketing: Run an email marketing either with CTA to go to our website and/or educate potential customers on our product.
3. Sales: Actively call electrical contractors and distributors and pitch them our product.
4. Build out an ecommerce store and retarget existing customers.

Thanks everyone, and any input is much appreciated.

 

[michael1982]

@zemastruve Create brand awareness

 

[lanel]

@zemastruve Here’s one way to think about it:

Baseline - I’d reaffirm the credibility you already have with some branding. That can be a sharper website, LinkedIn, adding customer reviews or testimonials, or an e-commerce store.

In other words, get ready to wooo customers before you actually try and discover them.

Market Knowledge - make a list of all the reasonably possible customers. Keep that list updated and use it to guide your Customer acquisition.

After those - then go to actual customer acquisition! I think you have some good ideas to do CaC. Without knowing more, I won’t speculate which is ideal. I think the most important thing is tracking the customer stats across methods, so you can later concentrate.

Last thought, make sure you can handle an influx of new orders! You don’t want to be swamped, and it’s easy to be should you not have a plan.