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Ask HN: How to market a tool built for B2B?

10 points by wondersoft ↗ HN
It’s a simple tool targeted towards B2B. I am reaching out to directors and VPs of marketing but I see lackluster response.

How can I get these people’s attention and sell them the tool?

I would love to get ideas for selling to marketing folks.

9 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 37.1 ms ] thread
Lionga
Have a something that they actually care about. They probably get lots of messages and your tool is not important to them/does not solve a relevant problem if they do not reply.
sabbaticaldev
You are asking a question that has no answer. People that knows how to sell, knows how to sell. Learn how to sell and you might find customers. If you build a product without even knowing where to find your audience you might have wasted your time.
tanaylakhani
It kind of ties into a discussion I had recently on Reddit - that there is just too much supply of tools. It slows down the rate of adoption of new tools.

A couple of things you may want to do: 1. Try to sell in person so that you can observe the reaction. 2. Find a champion in the company who may get the most value, talk to him/her before pitching to their director/VP. 3. You may need to validate if they are aware of the problem you are solving, what are they currently doing, and how you do it better. Once you identify this, create an email sequence to target each of them with different subject lines.

saaaaaam
Kind of impossible to give any advice without knowing what the tool does.

I’m assuming it’s something marketing related if you are targeting marketing people though.

Do you come from a marketing background? As in - is the tool something that you knew there was a need for, or have you built a product based on consulting/market research/etc.

altdataseller
I am not helping a random person with such an open ended question without at least knowing what this tool is. So share the tool.

Otherwise good luck finding what you need.

journey2s
What does "lackluster response" mean? How many people have you reached out to? It should be a minimum of a 100 or so. The great thing about an outreach is you learn a thing or two along the way.
CatDivers
Two things that work well for my b2b are direct outreach on LinkedIn and online webinars with member networks/groups that they're part of.
majd-mak
It depends. Tell us more about:

1) What does the tool do? 2) What your ICP is (ideal customer profile) 3) How you're reaching them 4) What you're pitching