Referral Marketing & B2B SaaS Outreach with Vaibhav Namburi

How has your referral & affiliate marketing program for Smartwriter impacted your business?

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Significantly, in B2B word of mouth is what causes the initial spread of your product. It reduces your CAC as well as helps you avoid the “education” and testimonial “cavity” you have when you begin. In addition, having an affiliate model, creates a 2 way incentive where you can partner with course creators offering education in the same space you’re building your solution for. This leads to added revenue for the course creator, and embedded long term dependency of the students of the course on your tool.

How is your startup preparing for a cookie-less future? What first-party strategies / tactics are you utilizing to generate more leads and convert more customers?

Cookie-less future will require all advertisers to reinvent their acquisition models ground up, especially if you depend heavily on retargeting and classification advertising, for which we’re putting all our energy into “intent” based growth, partnerships and building out sustainable cold outreach systems.

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SEO and Organic Content marketing is the single most important form of marketing any business should focus on in my opinion, especially B2B. This also includes avenues like Podcasts which have shown to bring in signups years after the podcast launch too. Additionally, creating partnerships with authority leaders in the space is a great way to build long tail growth. And lastly, before the “experts” yell cold emails don’t work, creating efficient and scalable cold email systems that let you do outreach at scale without spamming people is crucial for us and any B2B business trying to enter the market. We’ve built smartlead.ai for just this, and grew our business to the initial 15k accounts on our platform with cold outreach systems.

How has Smartwriter & Smartlead impacted the sales of B2B and SaaS companies? What are some best practices with AI outreach that you’ve seen that startups are undertaking?

Outreach has turned to be a much more important and sustainable avenue moving ahead. However traditional email systems made it extremely expensive or difficult to beat email limitations for cold emailing.

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Which is why we built Smartlead to allow auto-rotating unlimited email accounts when sending outbound campaigns without charging per sender account. This is cheaper and easier.

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In addition, smartwriter’s data aggregation helps make those emails stand out by creating personalised icebreakers to improve the outcome of your cold email campaigns.

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Startups that use intent signals to find leads, this could be data scraping, LinkedIn, Apollo’s “intent” signal, or builtwith to find competitor tools users; then personalising those leads emails at scale using signal variables, and sharing a clear value proposition in your outbound email; are the ones absolutely crushing the game right now.