Veronika Riederle, co-founder and CEO of Demodesk, describes early unscalable customer acquisition tactics used in 2019 to reach initial sales milestones.
“We basically set up a fake profile on LinkedIn. It was a fake SDR, a female SDR who was running on a bot, and that bot reached out to all our potential customers. So we built a bot that scrapes LinkedIn for potentially interesting profiles that fit our ICP persona that we're looking for, and then ran a bot with that person, just called Elena, and reached out to these people automatically, and then just scheduled meetings. And that brought us to the first 25 customers.”
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More from Veronika Riederle
Insight
Riederle: $1M ARR is the primary benchmark for B2B SaaS product-market fit
“One million ARR is the kind of typical benchmark for figuring out whether you have product market fit or not. I mean, there are also a couple of other signs, but this is like the number one thing in B to B SaaS especially.”
Veronika RiederleSep 6, 2022▶ 1:45Navigating the Rocky Road from Founder-Led Sales to The First Dozen Sales Professionals | Demodesk
Insight
Riederle: First sales rep must be a scrappy builder, not a big-company hire
“I think you need someone who is really able to find their own leads, is really able to hustle, is hungry, Can live in an environment where there's nothing there yet, where there's no established process, who is really a builder and wants to build things, who w…”
Veronika RiederleSep 6, 2022▶ 8:06Navigating the Rocky Road from Founder-Led Sales to The First Dozen Sales Professionals | Demodesk
Insight
Startups should ignore unit economics and sales quotas until go-to-market fit
“Especially the first one, right, it's really important to make sure that the customers that you acquired, they are happy, They love using your product, they don't stop using your product, and they're successful with it. Everything else belongs to the second ph…”
Veronika RiederleSep 6, 2022▶ 9:07Navigating the Rocky Road from Founder-Led Sales to The First Dozen Sales Professionals | Demodesk
Disclosure
Demodesk passed the $1M ARR product-market fit benchmark, aiming for $10M
“We basically passed a product market fit stage early last year, and are now going towards ten million ARR.”
Veronika RiederleSep 6, 2022▶ 2:19Navigating the Rocky Road from Founder-Led Sales to The First Dozen Sales Professionals | Demodesk
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