Introduction

So I'm talking about B2B sales and our great tool Venta today. That's at least the official title that MindStone gave me. But I'd rather call it why B2B sales sucks and how to change it.

Getting Personal

But first, I want to get a little bit transparent with you guys. I want to get a little bit intimate. I want to tell you a little bit about myself.

So, as you know, I'm Lucas. I'm 32 years old. I'm from Bavaria.

I live here in Munich in a great city apartment. I'm not married. I don't have kids.

I have a girlfriend. For single people in the audience, don't get excited.

What else?

Introducing Venta

Yeah, I'm the founder of Venta. Venta is a tool for finding and contacting potential customers. So kind of like this cold outbound thing where you send people mails, that's what we do.

And my hobbies are hiking, skiing, reading, that kind of stuff.

And I'm telling you all about this because I would suggest that marketers and salespeople also know about this, right?

I'm a lot on Instagram. I have a LinkedIn profile where I post all the time. And I also tell stuff like that there.

So people kind of should know about this. And I would expect marketers to know it. Therefore, I would expect that I would get relevant ads.

Something like this. Hoopsie, the vegan leberkäse. I mean, kind of makes sense at least.

I'm Bavarian. I'm kind of like in the tech bubbles or could be vegan at least. My girlfriend is.

So kinda is relevant, or something like this. Like this is an app for hiking. I do like that, so I would love to be the beta tester. Totally relevant ad.

Or maybe like this, which is like plug and play. This is a startup accelerator. They want to get my company get ahead, and they have some cool staircases, I guess. So totally relevant ads here.

In preparation of this talk, I went to Instagram though and was looking at the ads I get. And I get stuff like that. This is like some child's toy, I guess, for somebody that has a daughter and maybe a balcony.

I would love to have a balcony, but I don't. And as I told you, I don't have a daughter.

Or this ad here. This is a lift to go from one floor to the other. I guess it's for elderly people or so. I have a one-floor apartment, guys, so I don't need that.

And this ad, I don't know what that is. To be totally honest, the first one looks like somebody's wearing a laundry bag. Second one kind of looks molded. I don't know what that is, right?

And this is even B2C, right?

Issues with Current B2B Targeting

It gets even worse when we're talking about B2B now. For example, this guy here is cold mailing me the other day saying, I'm a game designer. That's pretty rad, man. But I do sell a software and I don't need a game designer. And gets even worse because it gets stuff like that.

And nowadays, it's all about that targeting. And in B2C, we can target super specific, right?

I just checked that on meta ads, you can do filters that are really wild. Obviously, I can filter on the age and the gender and that meta stuff. But then I can also filter on my interests, like if I'm in a long distance relationship, if I have a new job, if I'm a console gamer. I can get super, super specific so that I can really target well.

But in B2B, it still sucks badly. So this is the reality most salespeople might know here, is the infamous LinkedIn Sales Navigator that has just like a few filters.

So you can filter on industry, maybe on country, on job roles. But that's basically it.

So I could get companies in Germany with, I don't know, a certain number of employees in a certain industry, but I don't know anything else about them. So if I'm looking for a specific company that I want to target, there's basically no chance in getting that out of the databases that exist today.

but that's what I want to do. I want to target very specifically and I don't want to just target like an industry, but I want to know who, who sells flat screen TVs. I want to know who has a social media account that they're using for marketing.

I want to know who's hiring a marketing manager or I don't know which employee benefits do they have because I want to sell them employee benefits and I don't want to talk to people that already have them. Right?

But all that information, I only get when I go on the home page, when I do my research, and that obviously takes a lot of time.

The Role of AI in B2B Targeting

And here's where AI comes into play, basically, because now you can use it for customer qualification. And that's just a simple case, right?

I have a list of companies and then I have these qualification questions like, who sells diapers on Amazon, right? Like, how would I find companies that do that? But I can ask AI if I give it a list of customers, of companies, and it can tell me which of those companies do that thing.

And this is exactly what we do at Venta. We give you a list of companies that you could sell to or you have a list, then we qualify them with our AI research, we find contact people for you, and then we contact them with a very personalized, well-targeted message.

Case Study: Targeting a Niche Market

So let's have a look into this, how this works, right?

Here's another great email I got the other day. I was targeting actually marketing agencies in Germany, like up until 25 employees. And somebody replied with this.

At Kakao, we specialize in the production of self-sealing stem bolts, primarily catering to the Icelandic and Greenlandic markets. It's like super specific, guys. And maybe some of you like Star Trek because self-sealing stem bolts is like an inside joke there that they use for this technical device that you see on the left that nobody knows what it's doing. but it's kind of like a joke. So he obviously was giving me this answer to kind of block away my cold mail, kind of making a joke.

But let's think about it, like who could we sell self-sealing stem bolts to in Iceland and Greenland. Like the super specific niche, but with Venta you could target it. And I was thinking about like who could need self-sealing stem bolts?

I mean, it doesn't exist, but it kind of sounds like it's sealing. So yeah, you could use it somewhat in a water or environment where it's important. And in Iceland and Greenland, obviously fisheries are a great thing, right?

It's very famous for their fish. So I was thinking about if we want to sell self-sealing stem bolts to somebody in Iceland or Greenland it would be fisheries. And since we would use those self-sealing stem bolts for the boats, they should at least have one ship, one boat. Otherwise, we don't want to target them.

For example, there are a lot of fisheries that are land-based, and they wouldn't need that, maybe. I don't know. And I might want to know other information, like how many ships do they have and how much fish do they actually catch in a year. And now we're looking to Venta and how we could target those people within our software.

Demo: How Venta Works

So let me switch to Venta, which is not on my screen, but I'll try to bring it over. Give me one sec. This should really mirror my screen instead of doing this, but there we go. All right, guys, one sec.

All right, this is Venta, and I set up a campaign for self-seeing STEM bowls. I do have to admit it's a little bit... All right, I hope you can read some of this stuff here.

So what you can do is that we have different campaign types, so you could target people via email, via LinkedIn, or a combination of LinkedIn and email for multi-channel outreach. You could also do letter campaigns if anybody's interested in that.

And then Venta automatically can find companies for you within your ICP and can find the most interesting contact people for you. And you can tell it how much companies and people it should find.

But now we're coming to the interesting part. So here's where you define the companies that you want to target. On the one side, you can access our database where we already have a few million companies all over the world that you want to target.

So set it to fishery and in Greenland and Iceland, of course. It's a very small niche. I think it only found 20 companies or so.

And on the right side is our AI qualification system where you can give it questions that you define yourself that it should check against. And only if they fulfill a certain criteria, it would target them. And I'm asking here, does the company operate a ship? And if the answer is yes, it should target them with this campaign. If no, then not.

Then I'm telling it like, who am I looking for in the company? Obviously like the managing director, maybe. So we'll look for people like that. And I also obviously want to write them a mail or contact them in a way. 1And I have this template functionality where I can also include more information into my email templates.

So I set up an email based on information of how much fish they produce and how many ships the company has. And starting with the subject, let your number of ships, so it should fill in the number of ships, not leak. And then setting up the email, hey, first name, I saw that you operate a majestic fleet of ships catching that much fish every year. And as I know, maintaining such a great fleet in the country that they are based, waters is challenging because of cold water leakage with our self-sealing stumbles. You don't have to worry about that. So what happens now is that Venta finds me companies, it finds me the information about them, and then adapts this email template to exactly the person that I'm writing to, filling in the missing pieces that it found through the web search.

Yeah, and I can basically put anything into that, personalizing the email in a very, very good way because I can get information that is specific to that company. So if you look into companies now, we'll see like a few fisheries from Iceland and hopefully Greenland. And it has filtered me out the four companies here that actually do have a ship and also for some found how many ships they have. And for them, it also found how much fish they are producing each year.

So I can look into this where it found that information. So here it found it on their homepage. So it will answer me the question and give me the source of that. Also give me the source where it found the ship. And unfortunately it didn't find any information about how much fish they produce.

And then it also finds, yeah, the person to contact. In this case, Rudolf Guttmundsson, who's the CEO there. It will find his email address, hopefully. That's here, using like some enrichment services. And in the end, it would also, yeah, set up an email for him.

Let your one ship not leak. Okay, here's only one ship, but at least. I saw that you operate the ship I can read that, Gudmundur Nisire 13, focusing on sustainable fishing in the North Atlantic. So it's filled in that information for me.

And now I have a very personalized email that I can just send to that person. Or I could also send that on LinkedIn. And yeah, that's already it.

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed Venta. And yeah, if you have any questions, hit me up.

That's me.

I'm found on LinkedIn, as I said previously.