If your company hasn’t staffed an offshore team to build a B2B house file and make calls, you should start to consider this as an option. We went the route of a managing a dedicated team versus outsourcing because we saw the long-term advantages of investing in skills development and lower turnover. In comparison to call center outsourcing, direct staffing takes more time and effort and reduces call volume. However, in the long run, if you’re a B2B solutions provider, developing front line personnel for sharp discovery skills will be worth it.

So here’s the economic argument and meat behind my recommended B2B Growth Hack. Given a base cost of $1.50 – $4.00 per hour and free cost of Google Sheets, this is definitely one of the best B2B Growth Hacks I have to offer businesses of any size. And the best part is you can get this rolling with only a day’s work. All you need is a process, a shared Google Sheet, an account on Elance or Upwork to source you team, and an activity dashboard to avoid reporting drudgery and maintain accountability. For instruction I’ve prepared the following materials:

1. A video summary video of how to setup your Google sheet and a Sales Development Rep activity dashboard.
2. A sample Google sheet that you can make a copy of.
3. A few resources we’ve used to build our pipeline.

Instructions’ Video

To work on the process during this video tutorial, you can use our sample Google Sheet. Click here and find your sample sheet.

Staffing Options:

For the sake projects, you can hire resources from the following portals.

  • LinkedIn
  • Elance
  • Upwork

Lead Generation Resources:

Whether your just getting started on looking for solid alternatives to test, we’ve worked with all of these resources and recommend given them a shot. In an upcoming B2B Growth Hack we’ll show you how to dashboard the performance of these resources.

Here are our top recommendations that are all under $1,000.00 per month:

1. Business 2 Community

Pros:

A fast economical way to get your content syndicated and build about 10 new leads per day.

Decent firmographic information you can use for targeted messaging and prioritize follow-up

Con:

You’ll get a lot of anonymous email addresses (e.g. gmail.com addresses) and the veracity of the self-reported firmographic information brings validity into question.

2. Datanyze

Pros:

Solid capabilities with firmographic looks ups, a flexible query engine and the ability to query if your targets are using competing products is pretty awesome.

Cons:

It takes a bit of effort to pull the data, but we’re still getting used to the tool. The price of $10,000.00 is a con if you’re not prepared to systematically work these contacts.

3. LinkedIN

Pros:

Inexpensive way to methodically build a highly targeted contact database and test introduction messages.

Cons:

LinkedIn connection building is clearly overused so you’ll need to be targeted and thoughtful with connection messages.

4. Lead Ferret

Pros:

For what you pay the data is definitely solid enough to test your messaging and make inroads into target accounts and industries. In fact we use it to augment what we don’t get from Datanyze.

Cons:

There’s not much left to be desired given the low cost, but it could use more functionality for pulling list queries.

We will keep on posting such growth hacking techniques on the regular basis and help you accelerate your business growth. This is part of our Makesbridge Education program, where we’ll help business professionals to upgrade their knowledge and grow business fast with the use of technology. If you want us to touch a particular area or topic, don’t forget to share with us.