What a startup owner shall do when the product is ready but the sales process is not yet initiated?
The typical mistake of early entrepreneurs is a thought that sales is a difficult process with a lot of preparations, however it is not.
The truth is that you don’t need to make even a website. A good way to bootstrap the sales with limited budget and human resource would be a facebook/instagram targeting ads.
A new facebook tool called “lead generation” will help you to either test a new marketing niches for existing businesses or obtain first clients from scratch.
First, set a new facebook group with attractive name, background picture or video and logo. The logo can be done easily through the platform like Canva or logo building SaaS platforms. Is some case you can use Fiverr to hire a freelancer and create your brand book with low budget.
(example of page selling used drones)
Then make several posts with photos (ideally, use attractive video — purchase it somewhere like Shutterstock or find on a portal with free license videos) and texts describing your product and newly created venture.
Make the upper post with an offer or call-to-action, leave your contact details in a post and choose “boost the post” to start showing the ads to potential buyers. This is not the sales itself, but it is an attraction of people to your page. So you increase page views (this is good for fast moving goods, that people buy without additional research and explanations)
3–5 posts will be enough to fill the group and start your campaign.
Simultaneously find the “promote” button in the left side of facebook group, and choose “Get more customer contacts — request contact details from potential customers” at the bottom of the list.
It will help you to set the right campaign, where you will receive phone numbers of interested buyers at the end of the process. You may choose which information people should leave if they like your products.
.. and find your leads afterwards at “Manage promotions” section, which will appear right below the button “Promote”.
Of course, the success depends on your copywriting skills and attractiveness of the offer.
Example of use: Event management business.
The event management company was generating traffic to the website through facebook. The conversion was bad and I was asked to modify the facebook campaign to attract more people to talk about potential purchase of exhibition stand.
I set the facebook “lead generation” (above mentioned) type of campaign and offered people to leave their contact details in exchange of a file: a file contains full list of participants of the event.
Given that the event participation was expensive, and the client’s niche was narrow, the companies were willing to know who among their competitors purchased the event participation. So the strategy got success: the potential event buyers where leaving the contact details at a cost 2–3 usd per lead, thus allowing to start a sales conversation for the sales team.