Growth Hacking for B2B - Part 2 - Indirect Sales

Growth Hacking for B2B - Part 2 - Indirect Sales

Following my last blog on “growth hacking” I received a few messages on LinkedIn requesting some tactics specifically for indirect sales.

First of all, it is important to state that channel management goes through a major shift, companies are starting to replace the traditional, compliance-based program with a new performance-based program designed to reward all types of partners, business models, and various customer technology consumption preferences. 

According to Forrester, 68% of all deals are not signed through the IT department and technology buyers are bringing in channels directly without asking IT or procurement. So vendors are starting to use an ecosystem that wraps partners around a customer’s need instead of a revenue model. 

So what can we do to create a systemic growth engine through indirect channels?

Here a few examples amongst many possible.

1-    Build your end-customers and partners buyer personas

If the marketing department or the direct sales organisation have not done it yet, the indirect channel department needs to build the buyer persona (end-customers) – this important information will be shared with our partners in order to adapt the go-to-market strategy.

Building such personas help partners to understand the pains, gains and key questions customers face daily.

Of course, the channel department needs to do the same exercise in relation to their partners. Who are the people they need to talk within the channel partners’ organisation – what are their needs, pains etc.

If the former activity will help your partners to sell, the later will help you define a successful partner strategy making sure you are doing the right activities with the right people.

2-    Define the role of partners in your customer journey

In clear, wherein the selling process and product lifecycle your partners bring added value to the customers. Do they have an impact on awareness, product consideration, decision making, delivery or deployment, daily operation, support, loyalty…

Once you have defined the customer journey, then identify where partners play an active role in the customers experience.

Remember that being customer-oriented also means you’re helping your partners reach their customers and enable them to identify opportunities and offer your growth expertise to reach customers.

3-    Execute part of the growth engine for your partners

Like for all of us, and it is also probably true for your partners, the main challenge is generating leads – so how can you help them?

Create a partner section:

• Create a section on your website that talks about them and where your partner’s presences add value – create a link to their website.
• Create videos where partners explain their expertise (not selling) and positioned themselves as subject matter expert.
• Share success stories – add pictures (no stock pictures) make the effort to take real pictures (with smartphones is so easy nowadays).

Encourage your partners to participate in your company blog

• Let them aware of your blog’s calendar and encourage and plan for them to respond to your articles with quality content.
• Create a join-marketing blog on important customer’s issues or needs.

Think outside the box

• Create YouTube videos
• Create Podcast and audio content
• Quora – answer questions regarding your market with your partners  

4-    Build a community around your partner solution which includes your product

Start small by writing blog articles (you and your partner) and see what kind of response they get from the readers. If some of them generated more buzz than others, expand on it and write eBook or white papers. (the key is for your partners to be engaged and create content themselves eventually)

Focus your partner online community on the interests of their target customers. 

You are here to produce buzz and interest and above all engaged customers.  An engaged customer reacts to your product or solution. They participate in its evolution by connecting with peers and conversing with brand representatives. They integrate your product and its values into their daily routine.

The forum is a way for customers to share experiences and best practices.

5- Interact with your Audience – Be real and be Live

With the ever-increasing use of chat-bots ready to answer your every question, there is no shortage of popups when you are browsing online. However,  you can utilize these tools along with real life people to improve your customer experience.

The key is to ensure that your partners’ colleagues embrace speaking directly to your customers as much as possible. Engagement with your customer base will allow you to understand more about their specific needs, request and of course their issues so you can incorporate them into your road map and evolve your product or service to take this into consideration and pivot where required.  

6 – Incorporate LinkedIn in your Hacking strategy

Posting relevant content, sharing information, connecting with people who you see as opportunities or partners who can lead you to new opportunities are paramount as a B2B hack.

Adding in content to your LinkedIn page that followers actively access and share is a key opportunity to build your profile and your perceived value within the network.  

Comment and be part of the groups. Comment on Influencers posts.

The signs that you are truly hacking demand generation are visible when your customers start seeing you as a trusted advisor. 

7 – Repurpose Great Content

Use LinkedIn groups or Post to re-use some great content you created.

A blog post could be re-purposed into a white-paper. An info-graphic can grow into an article. It’s much easier to re-purpose than to create from scratch. Recycle your content, and always remember to make it easy for your readers to consume.

Let’s wrap it up - for now

Nowadays, building a growth strategy is a must-do for any successful organization. It’s the foundation that helps start-ups build traction and become scale-ups. It’s also becoming the ‘bible’ that helps young companies to scale-ups stay dynamic and create systemic growth.

Large System Integrators or Value-added reseller should learn quickly from these successes and you as Channel Managers could be the catalyst for change within your partners eco-system.

Good luck

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Growth Hacking for B2B businesses - Part 1 - Practical Tactics

Growth Hacking for B2B 

If you are an adept of the “Challenger Sales”, you should appreciate "growth hacking" because the secret sauce of growth hacking is plain and easy: Be a rule breaker.

“Growth hacking” produces great results when there is genuine and strong cooperation between the sales, marketing and development departments.  

I’m not going to delve into the details of growth hacking strategy, per se. Instead, I’m going to give you 6 customer acquisition tactics. (if you want to know more on strategies there is a list of “must-read” at the end) – yes Jeremy… reading! and not just watching YouTube videos.  

Great Content!

Great start-ups are good at storytelling and they know that acquiring customers start by interesting individuals working for these companies who might research the market, your company or your solution.

Tactics 1: Blog hack

With the right content marketing strategy and quality blogs, you are guaranteed to generate higher traffic to your website, increase B2B leads and most importantly, sales. 

These individuals you are targeting must find valuable information that will help to improve your brand recognition and earn the trust of your target buyers.

The greater the content you can provide for your target market, the better your chances of influencing a sale.

One way to do this is to attract external experts writing in your blog – they are many tactics to employ such as asking relevant questions on specialised forums, but my favourite is to ask an “expert” to be interviewed and featured in the company’s blog.

Try to interview a consultant from Gartner of Forester and see the result for yourself!

Tactics 2: Content Upgrade

Once you start to attract a good number of people on your blog start analysing the data to identify the pages on your website that deliver the most organic search traffic, ideally top-of-the-funnel content like top blog articles. You can do this within your analytics platform. 

Filter down on each page using the built-in filter and then select to view the queries for that URL. Now that you know what people are searching for to get to your content, you know what they actually want.

This is important because you can now create a content upgrade, with the purpose of capturing contact information in return for access that relates directly to one of these keywords.

According to my marketing department, we scaled this specific test across around 10 different pages on the website and saw an average increase in conversion rate of over 200%.

Tactics 3: Capturing buyers doing due diligence

Now the intent is to capture the organic traffic that comes to your website with high commercial intent, i.e., the visitor is actively looking to buy, is probably the most valuable traffic you can generate.

In truth, this kind of traffic is often much smaller in numbers than that coming from more informational queries (e.g., “how to do…”).

Outside of capturing people searching specifically for your brand name (if you are lucky enough to have already a recognised brand name), there are a few types of tactics that will often work well to target specific target segments.

Industry-Specific Pages

I am assuming you did your homework and have already defined the target market segments you are going after and the buyer personas within these markets you want to attract.

What you need to do is to match the keywords relating to your product against the market segments you are targeting. Then you analyse them with Google Keyword Planner and prioritise the keywords and start building web pages with content to target each one.

SalesForce is the “king” of industry-specific pages like: “CRM for Financial industry”, “CRM for Healthcare”, “CRM for Retail” etc… They have entirely tailored the content with the relevant keywords, used industry images and include industry-specific testimonials.

The solution is exactly the same – the message and content are utterly specific.

Feature-Specific Pages

These pages are designed to help prospects during their buying journey – once they are interested, they often look for more specific information on features you are providing. 

• List out the main features
• For each feature – explain the problem it solves or the benefits it brings (very important)
• Use the relevant keywords that people are searching for
• For each principal feature – build a page packed with the relevant keywords
• Not only this will help buyers to get more technical information but also help us to be better ranked in search engines for keywords specific to the features of your product.

 Tactic 4: Co-branding with Partners

If you have a channel or technical partners, then create a co-branded piece of content promoting both brands and it will dramatically increase the overall reach of the content as well as leads generated.-          

•     Make a list of partners targeting similar audiences and complimentary to you
•     Work on content together
•     Create a landing page on each website
•     Share out leads

Tactic 5: Answer Quora Questions

Generate qualified referral traffic through to your website by answering relevant questions on Quora.com. This is a long-term play – but can pay big -time.

Use a SEO tool and do a search on Quora for relevant questions.

Answer the questions that make sense to your business and remember not to sell too much – promote yourself as subject matter expert. You can use links to your website but be careful Quora moderator can remove your answer in no time. Preferably use links to testimonials.

Tactic 6: Republish Content to Medium

Boost your traffic by tapping into Medium’s referral engine and give your existing content a second life.

Medium is pretty amazing. You can duplicate your content on Medium and add canonical tag (your SEO will appreciate that) so that you do not have to worry about content duplication.

Truthfully, there is very little to lose in doing this. Medium's referral engine can get a lot of readers on your content, so I'd recommend taking some of your content that you think will be most suited to Medium and importing it.

There you are… 6 practical tips for growth hacking.



Of course, growth hacking is much more than this and includes many more activities. Honestly, growth hacking is so vast that I am learning new tricks every day.

Nonetheless, I hope I gave you a flavour of what can be done with growth hacking for B2B businesses.

Good hunt.

Some must-read:

-          The Growth Handbook, Andrew Chen & Intercom-team

-          100 Days of Growth, Sujan Patel

-          Lean Analytics, Alistair Croll

-          Lean Marketing for Startups, Sean Ellis

-          Don’t make me think, door Steve Krug

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