We go from one million dollars ARR to two in six months without additional investment-we make a profit against the background of the crisis
January 2019 was marked by the release of my publication with the method of getting a million ARR in less than two years without attracting additional Finance. And it seems that the situation was developing well, but the Covid19 pandemic broke out.
Therefore, I will devote this publication to a detailed analysis of specific components implemented in order to maintain exponential growth and jump from the one million mark to the two million ARR milestone, which took five months. And all this in the context of global decline, absolutely without the involvement of paid sources.
The height of $ 2 million ARR won in crisis conditions
The indicators of our projects for may 2020 were divided as follows:
lemlist ARR: 1 million 450 thousand dollars
lempod ARR: 490 thousand dollars
lemtalk ARR: $60 thousand dollars.
The total volume of the ARR was as follows: $2 million.
And I talked about our strategy in one of my recent publications. However, if you are interested in the multi SaaS project management methodology, then I will provide detailed information on this topic below.
With the onset of the crisis, we decided to start implementing a seven-step strategy aimed at supporting exponential growth. And it included these seven stages (later I will focus on a detailed description of each of the points and give practical advice on them).
Adapt quickly by creating the right content that solves new problems.
Focus on your users.
Always look for something new.
Collect the maximum number of people to automate sales.
Together you are a force.
Together you will reach the goal.
Together, conquer new frontiers.
Adapt quickly by creating the right content that solves new problems.
At first glance, all these are General phrases, but now I will explain everything.
Since Covid19 became a pandemic a lot of people have been out of work… And given that lemlist perfectly connects people with the goal of building a customer base, I was able to help them find the desired positions by using the unusual use of cold email newsletters.
The problem was primitive. Since many people need a job, there are plenty of competitors among job seekers, which creates a fierce competition.
Her decision lay on the surface. It was enough to help applicants prove their uniqueness by going a different way, rather than sending out banal cover letters with a resume. Create a publication containing a detailed job search scheme anywhere, and distribute it everywhere!
It is logical that since our goal is to help job seekers, I have achieved with the help of a couple of SaaS companies to unite these services on a free basis, so that people do not spend money looking for work.
As a result, my publication was viewed by 10 thousand people. And many of them became employees of companies! Moreover, it helped even sellers not only to find a job, but also to become desirable clients in new companies that they managed to get on the staff of!
Although we didn't plan to do anything like this, I believe that by focusing on the benefits for people, you will sooner or later be rewarded. And this already concerns our second point.
Focus on your users.
I remember that at the beginning of the crisis, the fathers of SaaS companies included in my network did not want to have contact with customers until the subscription was paid.
It seems to me that the crisis poses new challenges for people, and we must come to their aid in solving them. This prompted us to decide first of all to establish communication with customers who could pay with the offer of free advice on increasing sales volumes.
Such letters look like this:
This helped our consultants not only collect a huge amount of information about new problems that plagued our clients, but also data on the best solutions that help our clients work.
Also, the girls from our support team really started working with the customer base more actively, which gave the company 20% more reviews with a 5-star rating.
Feedback from a satisfied customer who asked for help in the chat
Similarly, the number of satisfied customers who wrote on Capterra has increased. As a result, according to official data, we passed the milestone of three hundred reviews with a five-star rating on this site.
More than 300 reviews with five stars on the Capterra service about the company's activities
I am sure that the company's clients are the best collection of knowledge for any business. And this knowledge helped us achieve three goals:
to generate the necessary content in order to solve new problems.
add more value to the existing customer base by giving them access to information obtained through our research activities in the course of a number of important calls.
take advantage of these new weaknesses in order to find sales (and this led us to the third point).
III. Always look for something new.
In a crisis, only the best in sales strive to survive! I know a lot of merchants who are good at sales. They are really gurus of their business, like old sales representatives who take pressure and sometimes cunning to achieve the goal. It seems to me that they are very far from the circulation of a good sales representative. Honestly, the time has passed when their methods were effective. They have outlived their usefulness and are only capable of harming any enterprise in the future.
Sales should help people solve their problems
A small remark: I do not impose this thesis. I just want you to always remember him. It seems to me that by stopping the search activity, you will refuse to help people. And this is the main difference between a good seller and a bad one.
We, for example, were constantly in search, having adapted our post to the maximum using the entire knowledge base obtained from our communication with users, as well as in the process of making strategically important calls.
Our first outreach was aimed at evaluating and giving advice, with the aim of establishing a dialogue and setting up a meeting to help establish a dialogue:
First attempts to organize Email newsletters
the lemlist advanced personalization feature allowed you to quickly change the user's display name when they clicked on this name and redirect them to personalized pages where people could make an appointment with our representative.
Dynamic target page with a video clip and integrated calendar.
See, the calendar is located exactly under the video, and the target page contains dynamically changing fields (the user's name, the logo of their organization, and so on....)
And even if the user has not made an appointment, they will receive an Email after a few days via our thematic Email newsletter.
Our first letter
This approach allowed us to accept orders for more than a dozen demo versions weekly.
IV. Gather the maximum number of people to automate.
From the very beginning of our work at lemlist, we have sought to help sales departments around the world work more closely with their customer bases in order to establish long-term partnerships. Therefore, we have created the widest possible community on the topic of automating the sales process.
Sales automation community
As a result, five months of work allowed us to naturally expand our community from 3 to 7.5 thousand people. Moreover, it specializes exclusively in helping lemlisters (the name of our lemlist users, as well as members of our group) create an optimal outgoing process. And this group helped us very much to focus our efforts on all the necessary integrations and functionality.
Public opinion polls
And she also helped in getting a lot of insights that have become the main best manuals for our users.
Moreover, three-quarters of all the group's publications were created by users themselves.
And since we always paid attention to the little things, we were able to have top-level dialogues!
And since some of our guides worked for companies like Pipedrive, they helped us to assess the situation soberly.
Our agents at Pipedrive have been very helpful in sharing content with their group
And since the strength of the group is determined by the joint contribution, we ventured to attract the best of the lemlisters in order to collect top chips and tips for increasing sales! And in order to continue this joint activity, we launched the weekly column "Lamister of the week."
Examples of top campaigns lemelshtrich
Actually, every week is a choice of lemystere achieved significant success in the promotion of your ad and explains what led him to success. This can be either copying or targeting.
Top Email from a favorite lemlister
Consequently, people may follow the example of successful activities with other lumisterol.
Thus, we have discovered a wonderful method of getting closer to our user audience in parallel with increasing the value of information.
But for lemystere of the week is a wonderful chance to purchase a Grand reputation.
In addition, we witnessed a great informal success story of lemlister who sent a personalized invitation to the wedding process via lemlist, which brought him 95% of clicks.
A message in our group from Yuri, who used lemlist to send out wedding invitations.
We managed to become more than a group, and perhaps even a family, which we become at online events organized by us. They are always filled with a great atmosphere.
V. Together, you are a force. Use LinkedIn to promote and distribute content.
Everyone who tracks me on LinkedIn knows that I generate a lot of content. And I love LinkedIn because It allows you to share valuable information not only with your customers, but also with a number of other users.
During 2019, my publications were viewed more than a million times, and I wanted to build on this success in 2020.
And as our team grew, we decided to adopt a new tactic of posting messages on LinkedIn, when each of our team writes posts at least three times a week. And Nadia and Ann will publish working recommendations for increasing sales for those who are looking for a way to increase them.
This is what a Naga post looks
like. look, this type of post is effective for at least three reasons:
Since the post starts with a question, it motivates users to find an answer to it in the post.
The publication is short and effective, without water and reveals the topic.
Mentioning someone who is a sales leader will inspire more confidence in your posts.
In addition, such a valuable post, as in our example, allowed Nadia to create strong business relationships and conclude a lot of deals.
An example of a message that came to Nadia after her publication
, but Ilya and Vuk were assigned the task of writing posts about growth-promoting guides and buying tactics.
And this is one of Ilya's publications
. Look, Ilya's post was commented on 1500 times, creating a huge engagement. There are several reasons for this:
clear structure of the publication, which makes it interesting, because most of its items are unique " growth methods";
encourage users to leave comments under your posts - this is a great way to significantly increase your reach. After all, the more users comment on you, the more people will see it;
ask users to get in touch with you if they have valuable information so that they can mention you.this is a great way to build trust and demonstrate how to add the best user advice to your post.
I would advise you to write about life hacks regarding launching sales and creating a customer base.
This is what one of my LinkedIn posts looks like
For the most part, I post videos on LinkedIn, because I think they are great for establishing more personal contacts with your customers.
By distributing topics to all members of our team, we managed to reach more than 100 thousand people. on a weekly basis, while maintaining the extraordinary value.
In addition, we managed to promote our webinar, which allowed us to establish closer contacts and improve relations with our partners.
Work on creating maximum engagement on the product page through live interviews
VI. Together you will reach the goal.
I like co-marketing! I like it because of its win-win! You give materials to your users or someone else, thereby ensuring the development of your business and joint growth with them!
This prompted us to create a series of interviews with the leaders in the sales industry in our group!
our guests were experts such as Jill Rowley, Morgan Ingram, Aaron Ross and others! During these online conversations, we talked about many things related to sales, trying to provide these conversations with useful recommendations and tips as much as possible! And since, perhaps, you are concerned about attracting these luminaries to our events, we will share with you a template created for this purpose by me and Vuk:
The template used by us to establish contacts with the giants of sales
And that's why it worked:
{Tag {Tiramisu}} we decided to replace the compliment to our interlocutor, made from the heart. Usually, it was a text of up to three sentences, in which Vuk spoke about the work he had done the other day. And in the next sentence, he mentioned the admiration of the addressee of the appeal.
{{Tiramisu2}} we also changed it according to the theme. In short, this is what would be the topic of our webinar with clients.
Our goal was to show customers their role in exposing us to our user audience, which would have a positive impact on their brand.
Success is achieved through trust! It is important for us to convey to everyone that we are doing our job to achieve real results.
Therefore, try to work transparently, answering every question from the audience and informing them of your future intentions.
And already this campaign was the first to have a 70% booking rate, and it was great.
So, after booking our guests, we wanted to make their lives much easier by sending them detailed emails with the information they need a few days before the event.
The text of the newsletter to all our respondents on the eve of the start of Facebook Live
See, the text of this newsletter has an excellent structure, containing:
a list of questions for future interviews that can be changed or commented on;
link to the official event page;
promo logo suitable for use in social networks;
a copy of the mailing list text that is suitable for further use, which its recipients could distribute in social networks.
A number of my expert interlocutors willingly distributed a link to this event among their audience, thereby increasing the number of viewers of the live broadcast.
Example of posts shared by our interlocutors in social networks
Each of our broadcasts had about a hundred participants. At the same time, our experts were so valuable that we decided to create a special section on the site so that users could rewrite their lives on YouTube.
Recordings of our webinar broadcasts are available on lemlist
As a result, my publications in conjunction with LinkedIn content became an occasion for an invitation to speak at several international events, including a number of SaaStock with the participation of prominent personalities from the world of marketing.
Invitation to speak at top events, such as SaaStock
All the interviews I have conducted have brought me tremendous benefits, in terms of discovering something new thanks to the marketing guru, as well as in the direction of building long-term business relationships.
At the same time, Aaron Ross himself invited me to tell at his summit a recipe for building a B2B outbound sales strategy from scratch!
Another top event from the Aaron Ross team
All these routs were a good example of getting new users, which eventually led to an increase in opportunities and, accordingly, profits!
However, we would not have achieved all this without a great team leading us to the final part of our publication.
VII. Together, conquer new frontiers.
I have already mentioned how important it is to hire employees only when necessary.
It's true that we managed to reach the $ 1 million ARR milestone with just seven employees, which is a great way to be flexible, adaptable, and flexible!
And it's also extremely important to manage your spending properly at the start of the campaign. This skill determines success!
However, given our low profitability (we do not spend money on paid sales sources, which makes our expenses minuscule), we decided to start expanding our team.
And five months later, we had not 7, but 14 employees who helped us quickly grow to the level of $ 2 million ARR.
And in the future, we have plans to get the title of the best sales automation platform of all time. That's why we need a very talented team.
Therefore, if you want to become a part of our team, whether you are a developer, marketer or sales Manager, write directly to my email: guillaume@lemlist.com
With respect.
