Nikola Velkovski’s Post

🎣 Don't Pitch-and-pray. Never, ever. You are probably familiar with that "famous LinkedIn outreach sequence" of: - blank connection request - "Thanks for accepting my connection request!" - 30s later: *extremely long message where a product/service is pitched, with a calendly link at the end - each day: *5 unrelated super long follow-ups that try to get you on a call It works 0% of the time! Instead: • Try to qualify the prospect, try to understand their problem, and see if you can help (selling is about helping & building relationships) • Give value first (teach them something, show them a better way, give them valuable information) • Treat LinkedIn messages as a chat, not as a "write 1000 words essay" • Once you've qualified the prospect, ask them if they want to jump on a call, never do it out of the blue or in the first message

🤗 Exceptional customer support - the hidden growth hack Have you noticed that 90% of the reviews on G2, Trustpilot, or any other review sites are about customer support? It's the most powerful hidden growth hack, and the root of every successful product I've used. We pay great attention to our CS department, and since day 1 - I've always tried to build the company with this mentality. One of the lessons that I've learned building and growing two products, is that the most successful short-term roadmap is always built by your customers. 💡 CS tips & tricks: - Your customer would understand and tolerate "we'll fix it in 3 days, next week, next month, etc.", but won't tolerate getting a late reply. Aim to keep your reply under 15 min, genuinely try to understand their need, and communicate. And at the end, I must quote one of the best advice about customer support that I've ever received: - "You can't win just by selling the best product or the best price on the market. You must sell the whole package (product, value, support)." - Manny Medina, at WebSummit.

📍 POSITIONING: Campaign tool vs. Operations tool In the last two months, we brought our churn rate below 5%. Also, this month our MRR has grown 36% more than the previous month, and we're growing 20-30% MoM consistently for 6 months. So, what's the secret here? 👉 HeyReach shifted the positioning from just "a campaign tool" to a tool that our users integrated into their operations. We are selling mostly to lead-gen agencies (some even call us "The Smartlead for LinkedIn). This ICP is the most creative one, experiments a lot, has the highest churn (compared to sales teams, recruiters, or individuals), and has the most complex outbound stack. Most of the lead-gen agencies use 5+ different outbound tools (eg: Clay, Instantly.ai, Smartlead, Retention.com, Zapier, HighLevel, Apollo.io & some other wild animals that ColdIQ has on their site). Their outbound stack is integrated and works in perfect harmony. 🔹 We understood that if we wanted to become a part of their outbound stack (become "sticky", fix our retention, and skyrocket the growth), we needed to integrate deeply into their operations and provide the smoothest experience of doing it. We launched the most flexible LinkedIn API on the market, and dozens of webhook options to export HeyReach data anywhere. Instead of being just a campaign tool from where you can run LinkedIn outreach sequences, we decided to become "the missing LinkedIn puzzle" of the agencies' outbound stack, and complete the end-to-end streamlining of their outbound processes.

Looking for a boost in our customer support team! 🚀 PS: It's an in-office position, so only apply if you live in Skopje

🧙 LinkedIn Sales Navigator holds immersive power, like The Elder Wand (from Harry Potter). Pairing it with HeyReach is like owning the other two Deathly Hallows! Targeting active LinkedIn users using Sales Navigator is an extremely useful technique! Thanks for sharing this, Reyhan Khan!

🎉 $50K+ MRR in 10 months 🎉 HeyReach just crossed $50K MRR, 10 months after earning its first buck. This is a huge accomplishment for us, since we were 3 months away from bankruptcy back in June, and couldn't grow past $8K MRR until October. 🎓 Key lessons I learned so far: • It takes time. Trust your team, trust your gut, and just move. - Growth takes time. The stories about super-fast growth are exceptions, and you shouldn't fall into the imposter syndrome. It took us 6 months, and 597 meetings to grow above $10K MRR. It's a marathon, not a sprint. • Niche down to grow - Check my last posts - talked a lot about this. • Focus on profitability, control your growth - Forget about GaaC (growth at all costs). It's sexy and looks great, but it's super easy to burn everything you have during these times. • We can do anything, we cannot do everything (at once) - Pick your battles. Most likely, your business feels like a "leaky bucket", and there are a gazillion problems you need to solve, features to add, bugs to fix, and directions to go in. Prioritize everything, take a snapshot of your tasks for that month/quarter, and just execute. Repeat this every month/quarter. • Customer-centric development is the way to go - Your short-term roadmap should be built by your customers & closed-lost deals. It's not rocket science - once you have your first 10-50 customers, just listen to them and build the product for their needs. Hats off to the whole HeyReach team - cheers to you! 🍻 🦄 Next milestone: 1M ARR.

With email outreach, you can only dream about the 30-60% reply rate you can get via LinkedIn as a channel (hats off to the exceptions). On the other hand, with LinkedIn outreach, you can only dream about scaling your outreach to the extent you can reach with email as a channel (unless you are using HeyReach 😜). 🧠 The biggest factor is: Replying to name@company.com vs. replying to a person. And this is my observation: - When you get a cold email from some company that you are not familiar with it's much easier to ignore it (we are used to ignoring cold emails), compared to getting a message from someone whom you already accepted in your network. The psychological background is that on LinkedIn you're replying to a person who has a profile picture, works somewhere, posts stuff on their profile, has interests, and most importantly - you decided to add/accept them in your network. On email you are just talking with an email address that maybe has a signature. 💫 In the end, the core of sales is "personal relationships" - buying and selling to people, and the next best thing to in-person relationship building is LinkedIn. PS: IMO, if you can manage to be "known" to the prospect you're reaching out to (i.e. they've seen your content, they know about your company, etc.) your overall outreach can perform much much better, regardless of the outreach channel. Content-led sales FTW! 🤘

📊 LinkedIn outreach to your free trial users: 8% to %16 conversion rate increase What if you can connect with everyone who has shown interest in your product, get them to your network, and start a conversation with them? A precious thing 💎 for a founder - right? One of our newest & gonna-become-a-go-to-campaign at HeyReach is auto-connecting with our free trial users, and reaching out to them. This campaign has brought amazing results so far and has doubled out fully-activated to converted rate. 🔗 Acceptance rate: 64.1% 💬 Reply rate: 25.3% You can do the same thing for your SaaS, and I'll show you how we do it. 🔰 Step-by-step: 1. Upload your list of free trials in HeyReach - Nikola Siljanoski adds the new free trial users in HeyReach every morning, into a list we call "Free Trial Signups". If you don't have their LinkedIn profiles, feel free to reach out to Rahul Lakhaney with Enrich.so to understand how to convert their email addresses to a LinkedIn profile. 2. Automated HeyReach sequence - We start by sending an automated blank connection request. So, the free trial user gets a connection request from the founder of the tool they'd just started a free trial. Pretty nice, huh? Then, after 4 days (enough time to play around with the tool), we send a simple automated message that says: ➡️ "Hey hey {firstName}, tnx for accepting me! How's your HeyReach experience so far?". And that's it. A simple conversation-starter that helps me get in touch with our customers. 3. Talk to your free trial users - Most of the users you reach out to reply back, and your only job here is to listen to their feedback and help them if they are stuck somewhere in their activation journey. 📈 This approach has doubled our activated to converted rate, and has helped me talk to our potential users. Check the comments for a link to the blog post, where I showcase the whole sequence! 🍻

Niche down to expand - how to do it successfully?! 🎣 Having a huge TAM is crucial for building a huge business, but finding a really specific niche is the most important first step of your journey. We started growing 34% MoM on avg. after we niched down to a super-specific audience. I do believe that niching-down will be really important in 2024, as it’s really tied to the concept of controlled profitable growth. ✨ Niche = very specific audience that’s part of your TAM, where you bring 10x value, it’s easy to sell to, the sales cycle is shorter, and they stick with you even when you are buggy. Think of it as a mini-PMF, or a single ICP (ideal customer persona) where you can kill it. 📐 Our formula for niching down to the right audience: 1. Just ship it, and reach out to your ‘first hypothetical ICP’ - Just launch your first version of your product and start reaching out to your ICP. Keep in mind that your first hypothesis of the ICP may be completely missed, but don’t feel bad about it. Just iterate until you find it (you have time until you burn out the money). 2. Talk to the closed-won and closed-lost customers. All. The. Time. - This is a continuous process that should help you determine what’s the right initial ICP (your niche). Keep attention to the deals you’ve lost, the deals you’ve won, the users that churned, and the users that are still with you. Ask them ‘why’, and ALWAYS try to truly understand them (their job position, their role, how they are thinking, how they found you, etc.). Be super specific in the details. 3. Your closed-lost deals should build your short-term roadmap - This is applicable only after you’ve found your niche. Start tracking the reasons for losing deals (features, pricing, bugs, etc.), as those things will be your short-term product roadmap. Do this until you become the go-to solution in your niche. 4. Become the go-to solution for your niche, and then expand - Stay focused on your niche until you dominate it. Build the features they need, improve their experience, and get that sweet market share. However, don’t feel too comfy, as you shouldn’t stop here. As Jason M. Lemkin says, the most important job of the CEO is to continuously expand the TAM, year by year. 💥

'Growth at all costs' mindset may kill your startup 💀 Back in the days (2020-2023), the typical advice you'd hear as a VC-backed startup was "spend more". The main approach was to be maniacally focused on growth and grabbing a bigger market share. The founders were acting like hungry hyenas pouring money into everything that brings growth, overhiring, overspending, and doubling down on untested channels that might bring growth. Growth, growth, growth! (in Steve Ballmer's "developers, developers, developers" voice) 🌱 In the last couple of months, I've seen a lot of startups going down because of this mentality. However, the 'growth' is not the problem. The uncontrolled growth and constant stepping on the gas pedal without a working engine is. It's really easy to get into this GAAC (Growth at all costs) mindset before even remotely figuring out, be blinded by the Silicon Valley stories about raising hundreds of millions in Series A, and hope that VC money will always be here to save your company when the things go south. If you don't figure it out fast, if you don't have control over the direction you are going, and if you are not obsessed with building a real business the chances of failing are pretty high nowadays. In June 2023, we were 3 months away from bankruptcy, burning $35-40K per month. It was a wake-up call for us. 🔹 Lesson learned: Keep it lean until you are pretty positive that you know what you are doing, and you have a pretty good feeling and data informing you that you are ready to scale, burn, and double down on growth. 2024 is the year of predictable and controlled growth with a focus on profitability. Even for VC-backed startups (that are in the process of raising their next round). 📈