B2B Prospecting 101 with Sopro’s Ryan Welmans

They are totally different from a customer’s perspective. There are probably two main reasons driving those differences. One is the regulatory landscape—there’s a big difference in data compliance and consent requirements for storage and processing of personal data. In most countries, it’s very easy to store business data and to contact businesses about a product or service without needing consent. That makes direct outreach a practical marketing option in B2B, which is not the case in B2C. Then there’s the marketing communications regulation—for example, in the UK and many European countries there are strict rules governing when you can send an email and when you can’t. So, you have this compliance landscape that completely divides the advertising methods used in B2B versus B2C. But even setting that aside, product value plays a bigger part. The vast majority of B2B sales tend to be for high-value products and services. Even if I were selling a low-value item, say a photocopier, it’s typically wrapped up in an office supply contract that includes additional products, making it part of a high-value sale. By contrast, consumer marketing, like for clothing or everyday consumer goods—you see ads on Facebook for, say, a $100 mouse. You can’t pay someone a high marketing cost to sell that product; the human-to-human sales relationship just isn’t there. In B2B, larger products can tolerate a higher cost per sale.

To throw some numbers in: let’s say Sopro generates sales meetings at between $35 and $50 per meeting, and businesses typically convert one in three of those meetings. That gives you a marketing cost of up to $150 per meeting—fine if you’re selling a B2B solution worth $100,000, but if your product is under a couple of thousand dollars, that cost starts eating significantly into your margin. Essentially, product price dictates the method of sale. That’s why low-value items often use Facebook ads with a click-through, buy-it-on-the-website approach—a low-cost sales process. I have a funny story: I received a phone call this week from someone trying to sell bespoke suits—a tailor based in London calling from a call center. I could hear other people making calls in the background with beeps. The service offered was a tailored suit. From what I know of telesales, the cost per unit at each step of the sales process is high. Typically, telesales generate appointments costing between £20 and £100, and they might convert one in three of those calls into a customer. If you’re buying a suit, its price would have to include a marketing cost somewhere between £600 and £1,200 before even considering the production cost. I don’t know how expensive your suits are, Shane, but that’s certainly not a price I can afford.

That’s a key difference between B2B and B2C, and as you know, we work exclusively in B2B.

Yeah, email is a no-brainer. We use a full stack of both above-the-line and below-the-line strategies. Everyone has a social media strategy—they’re posting on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.—but when it comes to delivering results, email is key. Are you going to rely on LinkedIn? I don’t know what your inbox looks like, but I’d say steer away from over-automating LinkedIn connection requests followed by a quick sales pitch. That can do more harm than good. I think LinkedIn is better suited for developing relationships rather than for immediate selling. And then there’s cold calling—which we’re breathing new life into. Most cold calling these days is about volume—100 calls a day, quick 60-second research, and so on—but that’s generally not very effective. The last time I was sold to over the phone was, believe it or not, in September of last year. The gentleman who called was incredibly informed about who I was, what our business did, our competitors, things I’d written, awards we’d won, press releases—all casually woven into the conversation. That transformed the call from a sales pitch into something entirely different, and we ended up writing a huge check. That experience led us to restructure the Sopro platform to include a comprehensive company profile view.

Now, every prospect interaction is tracked—emails delivered, campaign clicks, which pages they viewed, even if they check out our pricing shortly after a call. It provides 60 seconds’ worth of research at a glance. This approach has really reinvigorated our telephone-based outreach. Ultimately, though, many prefer to outsource their cold calling to a call center if they aren’t comfortable with it. But there’s definitely mileage in B2B cold calling. It all comes down to the lifetime value of the client and the overall cost structure.

And touching on events—since COVID, events have been almost off the radar for about 18 months. We had a busy schedule before: trade shows, conferences, exhibitions. Recently, we’ve had two events in the last four weeks, targeting larger businesses and opportunities. However, events are expensive—hotels, drinks, food, covering the bar, etc. From our recent events, the total spend came in at about $1,000 per qualified lead, which is significantly higher than our digital channels. Digital channels cost us roughly 5 to 10% of that per lead over the last 18 months. So, while events do generate clients, they’re expensive and depend heavily on your product or service value.

There are so many facets to crypto that interest me. Trading crypto is a bit different from trading Forex or stocks. For example, the best way to trade crypto might be to simply buy some and then hold it for 10 years rather than actively trading it throughout the day. That’s not really my cup of tea—I don’t have the time for it. Our technology has evolved organically, and you have this mysterious creator—or group—behind Bitcoin, and then all the blockchain protocols that follow, each doing their own innovative thing.

What Bitcoin gives the world is a store of value that might outperform traditional fiat currencies over time. I think anyone who’s concerned about their savings losing value should consider adding some Bitcoin to their portfolio, along with other smart platforms like Ethereum that are doing amazing things with smart contracts.

And then there’s the Wild West of NFTs—non-fungible tokens. NFTs create scarcity out of something that might otherwise be mass-produced. For example, a CryptoPunk might sell for half a million dollars even though it’s just a 200-pixel image. It’s all about holding value in scarcity. The evolution of this technology is happening at a breakneck pace—faster than anything we’ve seen before. The new financial world is being built right in front of us.

I think that’s probably the easiest question you’ve asked me. Right now, given the current level of my business, my involvement in crypto, and the number of incubator businesses we’re running, my mental bandwidth is maxed out. I need a holiday—a beach holiday with no internet, not a city break. My wife and I did an exercise years ago, and if I had to choose a place from space where everything else falls away, we picked an island called Borabora in French Polynesia. That’s where I’d spend the $100,000—at a beautiful location, a million miles away from it all, without our laptops or any distractions.

First of all, thank you for having me—it’s been a pleasure. If you’d like to learn more about Sopro, go to sopro.io. Also, my marketing team will kill me if I don’t mention this: use the code “pod01” at sopro.io/offer to get a discount. If you’re considering outbound B2B prospecting and think we might help, we’d love to start that conversation. We even publish all our client stats live on the website so you can see how Sopro performs before you take the plunge. And, of course, you can contact me directly—my details are on the website.