Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Customer acquisition strategy-wise, what works for you the best?

Andrew Witkin: I’m in a few tech groups that are very strong SaaS businesses. For them, it’s very much that whole customer on ramping process. Of course, the sales team is very much responsible for that. They need to acquire customers when you’re a SaaS model because the value of each customer is so high. We’re more marketing-driven to send traffic to inspire people to come to the website and realize the solutions they can now afford using our platform.

Marketing is really there to drive a lot of that awareness and mid-funnel conversion whether it be through search. Our sales team is not built to go out and cold call. Once people come to the website and they want help, we built up a team to be able to, one-on-one, accommodate a customer’s unique needs. Sometimes people just want to talk to somebody. They just want to feel comfortable. That’s probably about 25% of our business. 75% is all automated.

We had to realize that even though some initial business advisors were saying, “You need a great head of sales that can acquire important customers.” That wasn’t our core customers. Our core customers were small businesses. To spend the time on the phone to make them aware won’t work out.

Sramana Mitra: Your business is a marketing business. It’s not a sales business.

Andrew Witkin: Right. If anything, we’re like an online customization retailer. You then realize that it’s more of a marketing effort. Strategic side is, we look at segments. We look at photographers. We look at food makers. We find these very unique markets and segments based on orders. When we can aggregate trends that go across a unique segment, we then think about how to market to those segments as a collective as opposed to individual companies. That comes back down to marketing.

The only other thing that I can offer at the top of my head is when we first built our website, we had this very clear view of what we thought our customer was. We built all these creative features that took months of extra development time and money. The irony is that had we just simply allowed people an upload button and nothing else, we would have been able to do our development in about a quarter of the time.

We could have iterated from there based on what people wanted. Instead we tried to out-think everything and made it so elaborate. In hindsight, that is one of the silliest things we ever did. If you’ve got an idea, just distill it down to a very simple thing and start with that. That was a big lesson learned.

Sramana Mitra: Great! Thank you for coming. Good luck!

This segment is part 7 in the series : Morphing a B-to-C Idea to a B-to-B Business: Andrew Witkin, CEO of StickerYou
1 2 3 4 5 6 7