Another Rollercoaster Week at a Rapid-Growth Startup in Germany

It was another intense week at work with lots to do and it doesn’t look like next week will be different–working in a high-growth Series A Startups comes with high highs, low lows and everything in between, as the company looks to iterate and validate its product in the market. The company I work for taps into an acute problem in Germany, blue-collar labor shortage. Thus, we’re experiencing fast growth on the revenue side, but growing pains as well.

As more and more clients get onboarded we have to figure out how to ensure that they are happy, so happy they become brand ambassadors and our biggest fans. We do that by providing them with the best talent in our worker pool. We no longer talk to clients, where we’re not certain we can give them an optimal client experience. This is determined by how many users we have in each region. If we have too little, or if the region is too competitive, we exclude it from our lead list. This narrowed focus naturally means our addressable market shrinks. 

Good businesses say no to clients. This is what we’re essentially doing, when we’re not confident we can make them happy. At the same time, we are extremely revenue-driven, so saying no isn’t as easy, sometimes. Before we narrowed down our ICP, I called companies en masse. Now, I find myself becoming much more intentional in who I approach and how, mapping out stakeholders and identifying buying triggers with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Using LinkedIn has helped me become more intentional and effective in my pipeline generation activities

LinkedIn is not just a networking site; it's a dynamic ecosystem that, when utilized strategically, can transform your outbound sales efforts and yield substantial results. Outbound has become less powerful as it becomes harder for buyers to filter quality products and companies from spam emails and calls. Avoid becoming spammy by becoming intentional in your outreach, gather insights before the calls and show them you understand their priorities. That's how you can differentiate yourself right from the get-go. Also, connecting with prospects allows them to put a face to the name when you call them. This dramatically increases trust in the interaction, something that is hard for sales people to build up because we struggle with a bad reputation.

Aside from changing my outbound strategy by leveraging LinkedIn as my primary source of leads, I changed the way I frame my offering. I try to minimize the time, showing features and maximizing the time of telling a story—a tale of the problem at hand and how they could solve it for themselves with our platform. At the end of the day, people don’t want to be pitched anything–they want to come to the conclusion themselves, and you do that by narrating them through a storyline that captures their attention. Doing this is easier said than done, but crucial to boosting conversion rates. 

And these two improvements have made all the difference--I'm excited to take them into the coming weeks as we edge closer to the end of the fiscal year.

Hope you took value from my week in review. If you like this content, please don’t forget to share it with any one who might like it too!