B2B growth is relatively straightforward than consumer business, at least in the early days. This is especially true if you have access to your target customer base through personal networks or other channels such as social media.
That said, B2B sales can be a complicated matter if you don’t have a strategy in place or lack an understanding of how B2B sales work. Often, B2B sales require introductions and access.
For example, if you are building a real estate management company but don’t know anyone in the real estate industry, it might be wiser for you to reconsider entering that market. To that end, having a playbook for acquiring customers in the early days is critical for every B2B startup.
The predominant starting channel for B2B sales is personal networks. You reach out to your friends and colleagues and start there. As your business grows, you explore other channels to expand your reach. However, it almost always begins with your personal network.
This is where customer obsession and building a great product come into play. Once you reach out to your personal network, you convert a small number of users who start using your product. If your product is of high quality and your customers are satisfied with your support, they will tell others about your product, leading to more users and growth.
The most successful B2B companies today achieved their early growth using several strategies that have become a playbook for B2B startups. It starts with tapping into your personal network of friends, peers, and colleagues, then gradually expanding to reach customers through various channels such as LinkedIn, Facebook, community groups, and others.
Once you find a small number of happy users, the next dominant strategy most successful B2B companies employ is creating a system to fuel word-of-mouth referrals through excellent customer support and continuous product improvements.
We can break down the playbook into four parts:
The nature of B2B sales makes personal networks tremendously important. Often, B2B purchase decisions come from the top. Unless the decision-makers understand and believe in your product, your chances of making a breakthrough are slim. This is a major obstacle for most startups because, in the early days, you don’t have many credentials in the market, and people seldom take you seriously.
Personal networks come in handy here. If you know people who might benefit from your products and have direct access to them, it becomes easier to convert them into customers. This has been the case for many successful B2B companies. Founders leveraged their personal networks to bring in initial customers.
Take this example from Asana, the productivity and team management tool, on how they got their initial customers:
“Almost all of (our first ~15 users) are people we are personally close to. We're currently focused on making them really happy with their experience – rounding out the feature set, responding to their feedback, fixing bugs, and improving performance,” wrote Asana Co-founder Justin Rosenstein in a Quora answer. “As that continues, we'll continue to roll the alpha product out gradually to more and more people. There probably won't be any particular floodgate moment, more of a steady influx of new users.”
Stewart Butterfield echoed a similar strategy in an interview with First Round Review: “We begged and cajoled our friends at other companies to try it out and give us feedback. We had maybe six to ten companies to start with that we found this way. The pattern was to share Slack with progressively larger groups. We amplified the feedback we got at each stage by adding more teams.”
If you are building a B2B business, invest time in developing a personal network that can help with acquiring customers. You can also explore ways to expand your network, such as through partnerships, joining communities, or bringing in investors.
Personal networks can get exhausted quickly. The next step for B2B growth is often the places where your target customers spend their time. For example, LinkedIn and Facebook groups, online forums such as the WordPress community, and other niche platforms.
There are ample examples of companies using these forums to achieve initial growth in B2B business. For instance, Peter Reinhardt, founder of Segment, shared this experience:
“At the very beginning, we actually launched as an open-source library on Hacker News. It took off there, blew up basically overnight. Our first customers were the folks hanging out on Hacker News. It was mostly small companies—founders looking for better ways to instrument their web applications and mobile apps with analytics tracking.”
3) Referrals and word of mouth
Referrals are another widely used strategy for early-stage B2B growth. Once you exhaust your personal network and communities, the next natural step is to build a strong referral program and leverage word-of-mouth.
Referrals and word-of-mouth happen naturally if you’ve built a great product and your early users are happy with it. Some companies take a systematic approach to referrals by offering rewards, building communities, or developing membership programs. However, the foundation of any referral program is making customers happy with your product.
Patrick Collison of Stripe summarized this beautifully: “Our first user actually became one of the first employees at Stripe. I had known Ross Boucher for a couple of years. We were working on a payments system, and he needed a payments system, so I just suggested, hey, do you want to try this out? I didn’t emphasize how early on it was. What indicated to us that there was something interesting here was that our friends who were using it asked if they could invite their friends, and those people invited their friends, and it spread through word of mouth.”
Referrals are another widely used strategy for early-stage B2B growth. Once you exhaust your personal network and communities, the next natural step is to build a strong referral program and leverage word-of-mouth.
Referrals and word-of-mouth happen naturally if you’ve built a great product and your early users are happy with it. Some companies take a systematic approach to referrals by offering rewards, building communities, or developing membership programs. However, the foundation of any referral program is making customers happy with your product.
Learn more
Read Paul Graham’s Do things that don’t scale here.
From 0 to $1B - Slack's Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy here.
How to Grow Your Business: Lessons from Zero to $100k/month in 2 Years here.
Book: Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares
Originally published on December 2020, updated on 23 December 2024.
