Issue 009: 10x Your Business Growth 🚀
We also talk about a mind-blowingly successful outbound strategy, unique holiday discounts, and how to quickly grow social media followers.
November 13, 2024 | #009 | Free Version
Hi friends and happy Wednesday!
Welcome to Startup Blitz, a weekly newsletter full of timeless ideas and insights you can use in your online business.
This week, we discuss –
💥 Outbound strategies that can break B2B sales
🎉 Why offering discounts on christmas & new year isn’t smart
♻️ Growing your follower count using a pyramid scheme
📈 How to 10x your business growth by doing less
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The Outbound Strategies That Can Blow Away Your B2B Sales Target 💥
Traditional outbound tactics like LinkedIn DM, cold email, and SMS marketing often feel like an uphill battle.
Everyone uses them. So it’s extremely difficult to stand out and grab prospects’ attention.
So, what can you do differently? 🤔
Some savvy entrepreneurs are testing unconventional strategies and seeing fantastic results. One great example comes from the fintech startup Brex.
After its launch in 2018, Brex had around 30 employees and almost no revenue. Then they ran a mind-blowingly successful outbound campaign (75% demo rate and 75% demo-to-close conversion).
📝 Here’s what they did:
They used Pitchbook to identify startups in the Bay Area that had raised funding in the previous 6 months. They had a list of around 300 companies.
Then they sent each CEO a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne, along with a handwritten note from the Brex CEO congratulating them. Each bottle cost around $50.
Shortly after delivery, the Brix CEO followed up with an email asking if they’d be open to a demo. 75% of recipients agreed, and 75% of those demos turned into new customers.
They brought in 269 new clients for just $19,000. 💰
Another good example comes from Yotpo, an eCommerce marketing platform.
Instead of cold email, Yotpo’s CEO is offering a $1,000 reward to anyone who connects them with the brands they want to reach.
The days of “spray and pray” outbound tactics may be waning. We may soon look back and marvel that we once spammed thousands for a single meeting.
👉 Instead of sinking funds into overcrowded channels, consider following the lead of Brex and Yotpo. Try something bold and memorable.
🎓 Scientific Research: Offer Discounts on Unique Holidays to Boost Sales
Most brands offer discounts on common holidays like christmas or new year. Instead of fighting for attention on those days, offer discounts on quirky, lesser-known holidays. This will make your offer stand out.
🔬 Researchers ran a field experiment and found that:
– Promotion emails centred around unique holidays had 2x higher click-through rates
– Recipients were also 25% more likely to make a purchase
Rather than doing a generic one-day sale, connect your offer to an existing niche holiday. The more creative and relevant, the better!
✋ Careful: When a special day becomes too common in the marketplace or lacks a meaningful connection to your product, its impact fades. The promotions become no more effective than traditional one-day sales.
Treat Social Media Like a Pyramid Scheme to Quickly Grow Your Following 🚀
Whether you’re trying to grow your LinkedIn, Instagram or TikTok followings, there is a simple and free strategy that can be very effective.
Treat social media like a pyramid scheme.
👉 Here’s how it works: Find people in your industry who have a similar following size to you. Follow them and regularly like and comment on their posts. Spend 30-45 minutes per day doing this.
After consistently engaging with someone’s posts for a while, send them a DM. Ask if they’d be interested in mutual engagement and cross-promotion. Many people will agree.
As you continue doing it, the algorithm will detect that your posts are receiving regular engagement. It will then start showing your content to a wider audience. This will help you gain organic followers. ✨
When you comment on others’ posts, avoid generic responses. Add thoughtful comments that bring value to the conversation. If you leave value-adding comments, their followers may check out your profile and follow you.
♻️ Once you’ve built a following of 500-1000, users with fewer followers will start engaging with your posts to grow their own accounts.
📖 Book of the Week: 10x Is Easier Than 2x
In their book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x, author Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy share how to achieve 10x growth in business and professional life.
⏰ They emphasize one key point: the importance of rest days. Without them, you’ll struggle to generate great ideas, solve difficult problems, and reach the next level.
“Sound judgment and thinking through bigger and more complex challenges or opportunities require more brain power, more time, more fermentation. You can’t do this if you’re always busy at work. You can’t do this by jumping from task to task.
“One study found that only 16 per cent of respondents reported getting creative insight while at work. Ideas generally came while the person was at home or in transportation, or during recreational activity. “The most creative ideas aren’t going to come while sitting in front of your monitor,” says Scott Birnbaum, a vice president of Samsung Semiconductor.”
“As David Keith Lynch explained in his book Catching the Big Fish, ideas and opportunities are like fish. If you stay at the surface level, you will only be aware of the small fish. It is only by going deep into the water that you catch the big fish.
“Being busy is staying at the surface.
“To find big ideas, you need lots of free time. But also, higher quality time. Lots of time where you’re rested, relaxed, and open.
“Your best and most innovative ideas will occur while you’re unplugged from the busyness of work and able to really expand and contract your thinking— going hyper-micro and hyper-macro — expanding the vision, coming up with new ideas, etc.”
“This is how Bill Gates famously got most of the big ideas that led to Microsoft’s exponential growth in the 1990s and early 2000s. He would take “Think Weeks” where he’d totally disappear for a few weeks, totally unreachable by anyone and without distraction, and just read countless articles and books. He’d then just think, reflect, ponder, visualize, and ultimately get incredible ideas and breakthroughs.”
Interesting Articles We've Read This Week
🤖 How Duolingo grew its TikTok to 6.6m followers
📞 How to do sales with no experience
🔍 SearchGPT vs. Google vs. Bing: search results review
💔 The super satisfying way to deal with hate for your business
😌 Four ways to calm your mind in stressful times
Thanks for reading, until next week!
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