The most effective method of B2B sales is direct sales. However, too few people respond to proposals sent to unfamiliar individuals 🙁 It would be great to find someone who could introduce you to a potential client — then the chances of closing a deal increase 10-fold! The popularity of platforms for finding such intermediaries is growing. And this particular feature will make working with them even more effective.
THE ESSENCE OF THE PROJECT
In 2023, an average of 27 touches with a client were required to close a B2B deal, starting with the initial cold contact. However, the percentage of deals that originate from a cold contact tends to be quite low. After all, a cold contact is a cold contact
Introw suggests that sellers start their sales not from cold contacts, but from warm ones – through referrals from people already acquainted with potential buyers. The startup claims that the chances of turning a warm contact into a successful sale are 10 times higher than a cold one.
The challenge now is to find a way to get more of these warm contacts 😉.
Introw offers a set of tools to help achieve this:
- Deploy a form on your website that can be filled out by people who can introduce the company to a potential client.
- Send messages via Slack to people who can introduce the company to potential clients.
- Safely share with another company targeting the same audience, data about potential clients from your CRM, to find overlaps and opportunities to meet a potential client through someone else’s contact.
Of course, these people and companies will introduce you to potential clients for a reason – for a bonus from a potential deal.
Still, such offers must be sent out wisely so that they don’t appear as spam. An AI engine, integrated within the platform, takes care of this – it searches the internet (LinkedIn, social networks) for mutual acquaintances with potential clients and companies that aren’t direct competitors but sell their products to the same target audience.
All the data from the forms placed on the company’s website and the responses received from the company’s requests, Introw automatically adds to the seller’s CRM. Moreover, it does so in a smart way – not creating a new contact each time, but trying to find a match between the existing contacts in the CRM and the received information about the potential client.
Whether a new potential client contact is created or an existing one is updated, the name of the intermediary willing to assist in the introduction to the potential client is added.
This allows the seller to organize joint actions with the intermediary for sales and track the effectiveness of the process – in order to distribute rewards among intermediaries for successful introductions and assess the overall effectiveness of this sales method.
Introw originates from Belgium and was only established in May of this year. However, they have already raised their first investment of 1 million euros.
What’s Interesting:
Platforms for organizing partner B2B sales are becoming quite popular. Different startups approach this market from various angles.
The first type are platforms where sellers can share data from their CRMs to find opportunities to sell their product to someone else’s clients through their contacts and mediation. Among them:
The second type are specialized CRMs for partner sales, which have emerged into a separate PRM (Partner Relationship Management) category. Examples include:
The third type are advertising networks where sellers can find other sellers willing to advertise foreign products to their audience. Such networks are becoming popular for D2C manufacturers selling products under their own brands. Examples:
- Partnar (my review) – raised $379,000.
- Re:invent (my review) – raised $150,000.
So, Introw has managed to enter this growing trend with its platform. However, they have another feature that caught my attention.
This feature, which the startup called “co-selling” (joint sales), allows for the organization of joint actions with an intermediary that contribute to the conclusion of a deal.
Say, for instance, someone sends a seller the contacts of a potential client. The seller replies with “Thank you.”
But how will the intermediary stay informed about what happens with the passed-on contact later on? How can they be sure anything is happening at all? 😉 After all, their potential earnings depend on the seller’s activity. Therefore, they might even assist if something goes wrong.
For this, Introw automatically sends updates to the intermediary about changes the seller makes in the client’s card in their CRM. For instance, if the potential deal conclusion with this client gets postponed by six months, the intermediary can ask the seller about the arisen issue, get an answer, and take some steps on their end to help solve the problem.
This might seem trivial at first glance. But I believe such automatic notification processes of counterparties (intermediaries, clients) about ongoing long-term implementation (in long sales cycles or work on a client’s task) are a very important feature that many companies underestimate.
As the startup Hona claims: “An informed client is a happy client.” If they understand what is happening, they won’t be nervous or irritated. And this means that they might come back later with a new task and new money.
Hona has created a platform for legal companies, which does just one thing—it automatically sends notifications to clients when the status of their case changes in the company’s internal project management system. This allows the company to keep clients informed about what is happening with their cases—without spending time sending notifications and especially without manually answering the endless client questions of “what’s happening with my case?”
And this very simple, but useful feature, implemented even in a rather narrow legal niche, allowed Hona to raise 2.6 million dollars in investments.
About the Company:
Introw
Website: introw.io
Last round: €1M, 19.10.2023
Total investments: €1M, rounds: 1