Welcome to Little Wins!
Team Letter | September 25, 2023
September 25, 2023
Happy Monday, Alpaca!
We have a FUN thing happening in the company this week – the launch of our new newsletter, 🎉 Little Wins! 🎉 Now, we’re a company that launches a lot of stuff! This one is special. And that’s because of one thing: it creates true demand generation for our company.
So, what is demand generation, and why is it so important to us, anyway? I don’t want to assume that we all just know this idea, so I thought breaking down WHY things like newsletter signups are helpful, and how it helps us build a strong company.
First, a little history lesson:
The way we used to sell things before the internet was a lot different. If a company had something to sell, they’d do one of a few things: they’d buy advertising space on a billboard or television commercial, they’d go to trade shows and give away key chains to get their name out there, and then they’d get out the phone book and call people up and say “hey, I have a thing that I think you’d like to buy. Can I come show you it?” The thing these strategies all have in common is that they are OUTBOUND sales strategies. “Outbound” means the company is making the first move, calling someone up and seeing if they want to buy our thing. This is why the world used to be filled with door-to-door salespeople. That’s how you bought a vacuum! Someone reached out to you or showed up on your doorstep and asked “are you interested in buying this?” and if you needed a vacuum, then you bought one.
Well, then the internet came along. And because of search engines and eventually e-commerce, people didn’t have to wait for a salesman to show up at their door to sell them a vacuum, they could actually search for and find the services and products that they wanted to buy. Well, this changed everything. Because it gave rise to INBOUND marketing. Inbound marketing is when people show up on YOUR doorstep and say “hello, you don’t know me but I’d like to buy the thing you have for sale.” This is fantastic because when people raise their hand and say “I’m interested in you” there’s a lot better chance that they’re going to buy something.
And this proves to be true! The typical “win rate” for an inbound sales effort is 30-60%. The typical win rate for an outbound sales effort is more like 5-10%. That sounds good, right? Right!
Sooooooo…how do you get the right people to raise their hand and say “I think I might want to buy Alpaca!” aka, inbound leads?
You deliver them value before they buy anything.
The internet is a vast place to find free pieces of value. You find value every time you get a question answered on Google, every time you watch a cooking tutorial on TikTok, every time you connect to a person on LinkedIn. The internet is FULL of free value - that’s why it’s so transformational. But because of that, there are a lot more companies competing for people to pay them money.
So the best way for a company like ours to bring in those inbound leads is to deliver them free value on the internet, in exchange for their email address, which gives us the opportunity to continue to talk to them via email and sales efforts.
And that “free value to get email addresses”? That is called DEMAND GENERATION. We are literally generating demand for our company by giving future customers value right now, in exchange for their email address.
What you work toward with those email addresses is then the whole game. You don’t just gather the email address and then one day call them up and say “want to buy Alpaca now?!” Nope, instead you do what you would do for any relationship you want to grow: you NURTURE it. If someone signs up for your newsletter, you link them to our Resources page where they can find even more value. When they download a resource, you point them to our blog. When they read a blog post, you direct them to our surveys. And over time, they say “ooh, I wonder if Alpaca has a survey for holiday parties?” and they come directly to our website and find what? They find VALUE.
With Hubspot, we’re able to track all those lil things they do – every time they download a resource or read a blog post or take a survey. So when they’ve done enough of those things, guess what happens? Yep, you got it – they get a call from SALES. But instead of that call being totally cold and the customer saying “ I don’t know you! Why would I spend thousands of dollars per year with you?” they’re warmed up! So they’re saying “I know these guys – they have great stuff! I’d love to see if we can bring their care packages to our team!!”
So!! Why is this all important right now as we head in to Q4? Well, in Q3 Alpaca has done an impressive job of creating a demand gen funnel that did NOT exist before Q3. Now, at the end of the quarter, we have built a few key demand generation products that we deliver to future customers. They are:
Getting to Know You Survey
Resources (such as our celebration notes and celebration planner!)
Little Wins!
Little Wins is a particularly exciting one, because when people sign up for a newsletter, they’re signing up to hear from our company every single week. THAT is exciting.
So what’s next? We’re going to continue to build resources and content that is VALUABLE for school leaders, to bring them in through that demand generation funnel, nurture them, and then sell to them with higher win rates.
Thank you for coming to this lesson on inbound marketing and why it matters at Alpaca. 😀
If you want more, I highly recommend the book Inbound Marketing by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, the founders of Hubspot. I promise you will learn a lot from this one!
Let’s go launch some value for school leaders this week!!! Happy Little Wins Week everyone!
KB