How we helped an Indian startup find its first US- and UK-based customers through social selling on LinkedIn
The client
AccountIfi is an accounting automation startup incubated at IIT Madras.They are a team of 20+ members offering robotic process automation solutions to SMEs and accounting firms.
The company, being only 2 years old in the market, was like a newly joined student in a school; they had no introduction in their target market and potential customers in the market did not know about them as well.
Their biggest worry
At the heart of every business lies sales and AccountIfi was no exception.They needed a successful sales strategy that, being a startup, they could afford.
Automation of manual repetitive processes is not new to the world, yet AccountIfi wanted to expand themselves in the UK and US markets, where there was a concentration of big companies providing the same services. So, AccountIfi had to be unique in their strategy and noticeable in their communication.
How Tellable brought in continuous sales enquiries
Enter Tellable
Before we started communicating on behalf of AccountIfi, we did rigorous research. We identified similar businesses like AccountIfi and studied how they were able to market their services to the world. We found that they were established companies who have been investing in traditional content marketing (informative blogs and videos) to attract customers for years. This involves a substantial amount of costs and time which AccountIfi couldn’t afford at their early stage of growth.
An attractively cheap and proven alternative to achieve sales success is cold emailing. But being a creative communications company which uses storytelling to help businesses grow, we did not want to resort to the beaten track of cold emails. We decided to take a creative route towards winning sales for AccountIfi.
Based on our research, we concluded that the people who would appreciate and need the services of AccountIfi would be Chief Financial Officers of small businesses and owners of Accounting Firms. In order to convey the offerings of AccountIfi to such professionals, we decided to go where they are - LinkedIn.
What Client Says
"Tellable has been a great team. They understood our requirements and were quick to act and ensured our story was coming out."
Pritesh Mardia
Business Head at AccountIfi
Tellable's messaging for AccountIfi
Since not all people might understand the import of accounting automation, we may not be able to reach professionals who might actually be in need of AccountIfi's services. To counter this, we decided to simplify AccountIfi’s communication so that everyone could grasp what AccountIfi has to offer.
When we studied the world of accounting automation through the eyes of AccountIfi, we found that their services led to a massive reduction of time and energy spent on manual accounting tasks. We wanted this to reflect in all our messages and that is how we came up with the story - making life easy for accounting and financial professionals.
We reviewed this story with AccountIfi and agreed to communicate it through personal experiences, anecdotes, news articles, etc. in different themes such as
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hardships in an accountant's day-to-day life
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growth prospects in career
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making sense of industry news and events
The strategy to deliver the message
We knew publishing creative content alone will not help. We also had to ensure our intended audience was seeing the content. So we subscribed to Sales Navigator to connect with decision makers in the accounting profession who fit our bill. It is a fact that LinkedIn shows one's content to their new connections.
We made a list containing tens of thousands of professionals who would be interested to know about AccountIfi's offerings.
So we mapped two ways in which AccountIfi will showcase their value:
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Send connection request to 10-15 professionals every day using PhantomBuster, an automation platform which would give the requests to our curated list of decision makers on Sales Navigator. In parallel, post creative content which professionals could resonate with.
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Since we were already using Sales Navigator, we wanted to leverage its other insightful features to pick out professionals who have recently changed their jobs and professionals who have recently posted on LinkedIn to initiate genuine conversations with them without ever mentioning AccountIfi's services.
How did this help AccountIfi grow?
By conveying a message of relief and hope, we were able to garner the interest of professionals. Some of them engage regularly with AccountIfi's stories and messages conveying that they were helpful to them.
We also win leads for AccountIfi on a monthly basis.
After we entered, the business head's SSI increased by more than 50% illustrating that we have been effectively leveraging all features of LinkedIn for successful social selling.
Client recognition
The passion to tell a business's genuine (not commercial) story on a professional platform and help other professionals along the way was not unnoticed by the business head. The management has expanded our scope by granting us an opportunity to tell AccountIfi's stories on other social media platforms.
With this, we aim to reach a wider audience and expand the client base of AccountIfi by consistently communicating what it stands for - making life easier.
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