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

I recently had a discussion with a professional in the field of outbound lead generation– I’ll call him John.  John was explaining how he is always doing A/B testing on small sample sizes to improve the results.  John is a legitimate expert in the field, but I suspected that his ability to generate meetings had nothing to do with his A/B testing (see previous A/B testing fallacy blog post.) So, I sat down with another fellow lead generation nerd and ran the numbers again. This time we look at Z-scores and frequentist statistics…   How many leads do I need for A/B testing my sale ..read more

Outside of BizXpand, I, Matt Mayfield, am often involved in large, VC funded SaaS companies in a role as interim Sales Ops. A constant philosophic question is ‘what is a Sales Account’.  Are VW and Audi the same Account? Is VW Germany and VW USA the same Account? Is VW Sales America the same Account as VW Service America?   Sales Account versus Accounting Firstly, an Account for the purposes of Accounting is different than an Account for the purposes of Sales. For Sales people, an Account is a single Decision entity– one decision group speaks for the entire group. In contrast, for Ac ..read more

Account Manager / Outbound Campaign Manager (m/f/d) BizXpand übernimmt für unsere B2B Kunden die Lead Generierung per E-Mail und Linkedin. Der Prozess ist hochgradig automatisiert. Sobald jedoch ein Interessent antwortet, erfolgt die Kommunikation von Mensch zu Mensch. Ein BizXpand Account Manager ist die “Stimme unseres Kunden”, wenn dieser mit einem Interessenten per E-Mail und LinkedIn interagiert.   Verantwortlichkeiten Regelmäßige Überwachung der automatisierten Systeme auf Antworten von Interessenten. Professionelle Kommunikation mit allen Interessenten (gemäß den BizXpand Vor ..read more

Account Manager / Outbound Campaign Manager (m/f/d) BizXpand does outbound lead generation for our clients using eMail and Linkedin.  The process is highly automated, however, once a prospect replies, then the communication is human-to-human messaging. A BizXpand Account Manager is the voice of our Client as they interact with a live prospect.   Responsibilities Monitor automated systems for responses from prospects. At least once every two hours, all responses must be triaged for high value responses. Professionally communicate with all prospects per BizXpand guidelines and follow ..read more