Yes, there’s a renaissance of Cold Calling in the B2B space and the conversion rate (call attempts to qualified meetings) is acceptable if done by a professional, but there is also something negative about Cold Calling what most Business Development Managers try to ignore. 1. Cold Calling leaves a bad reputation When you look at the qualified meetings generated by Cold Calling everything looks fine. You can generate meetings with Cold Calling with around 2% conversion. But what about the other 98%? You interrupted them in their work with an unexpected cold call, got them definitely “in the wro ..read more

Today I learned a very useful tip from my colleague Aleksandra, which I would like to share here. Around 25% of the meetings we arrange for our customers come through so-called “referrals”, which means that the person we write to refers us to another person in the target company with whom the meeting is then arranged. As is the case with email prospecting, not all referrals respond to our emails. Now comes Aleksandra’s tip: She adds the original contact to the cc: in the reminder email and increases the reply rate! Brilliant, but why is that? Explanation Email prospecting has very little to do ..read more

Recently, we had a client where the salespeople suggested that they only want to talk to people like ‘Global Head of Production’ and not just individual production managers.  My response and numbers to back it up got me thinking about which cohorts of desirable targets is not suitable for outbound lead generation and how you might reach them.  There are two major classes of very hard to reach.  First, let me set some baseline data. Technical Leaders (CIO, CTO, VP Engineering) We know from experience that this audience prefers to research on their own rather than accept an invita ..read more

Hey! Martin speaking. I’m observing a growing number of companies embroiled in internal Sales-Marketing conflicts. It strongly reminds me of my early days in sales back in 2001. However, remember a period of approximately 10 years during which we didn’t perceive this conflict as prominently. Here is how I see the progression and the reversion. In 2001 The tasks within the marketing department were diverse, ranging from creating brochures to orchestrating trade shows and conferences, and executing small-ish outbound lead generation campaigns (such as event invitations, newsletter creation, and ..read more

We usually talk about industries and markets of our clients.  Today, I will talk about BizXpand and our market.   For us, the big inflection point was the “great SaaS re-evaluation” of 2022– this is when the value of growth vs profits changed completely.  The re-evaluation dramatically reduced the global demand for engineering and business development teams.  Nearly all of our engineering services clients felt the hit almost immediately and were no longer viable clients.  Apart from that, the impacts were more subtle:   Our typical client shifted from being a ‘loc ..read more

Great Outbound Lead Generation is all about providing small chunks of value to people who personally benefit from it. The rest is experience and a bit of technology. Early 2020, COVID fundamentally collapsed the way most of us connect and network with new potential buyers. Meanwhile, we all know that this ‘temporary’ disruption had longer term effects on business development and business relationship building. With the learnings from various COVID impacts (WFH, asynchronous decision making, not in-person meetings, changes in strategy and priorities) we radically adjusted our well-established s ..read more

We work with a number of industries in the German speaking market. None has changed more strongly and more times than manufacturing. In fact, our 2021, 2022, and 2023 analysis had Manufacturing as our client’s most productive industry segment and good chance it will be their 2024 winner as well.   What is going on? Traditionally, manufacturing was based on long term continuous improvement and EU manufacturing had weak investment budgets compared to their meteoric Asian competitors. This meant slow, conservative buying cycles from proven suppliers. Like other industries, Covid upended long ..read more

I have been hearing of dozens of new products and new startups being created to take advantage of the latest generation LLM artificial intelligence like ChatGPT. For those people, we have some insight if the target audience is in Germany: In the past few years, we have had quite a number of clients with AI as a major component in the offering. We have always asked ourselves the question: Is this a differentiator, a distinguishing feature? How do we communicate the benefits of an AI based solution? How do you describe an AI based solution in a short cold email? There is of course the classic cr ..read more

As you know, BizXpand helps high-tech B2B companies book more meetings in DACH (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland). All our clients use our proven and successful outbound sequence (7 touch points on LinkedIn and email over 33 days). With that approach we average a yield slightly better than 1 meting per 100 contacts. Once in a while a client asks: “This works so well in Germany, can you please run a similar campaign for us in USA?”. Every two, three years we are tempted to try out how our methods work in US but the reality is that we never had success there with our own secret sauce – What yo ..read more

Yes, 2023 was a tough one! Probably the most difficult year I’ve ever experienced in German B2B sales (since 2001). Let’s break this down a bit and see if we can learn something from it –   Sales Metrics Our clients reported that their sales cycles got a lot longer (our own sales cycles got longer as well) and conversion rates (meetings-to-close) dropped. Worst quarters were Q2 and Q3. Funnily, our own Q4 in 2023 was better that Q4 in 2022. So the trend seems to be upwards and lets me hope that 2024 will be a good year for our clients and for us.   Industries We saw that IT services ..read more