The Making Of Explor.AI

Today is a sidetrack to my previous posts, I will be writing about marketing. Why? Because for a young company offering a service, the first clients not only bring the first revenues, they define your personna (the description of your ideal client).

So today I will talk about the channels to use in 2020-2021 to reach your customers in the business to business field and what are some nice mistakes you should, preferably, avoid!

Don't assume anything, measure everything!

For a guy working with datasets for so long, I have to say I am not particularly proud of one of my early mistakes...

Once explor.ai's website was up and running, I decided to try out Google Adwords and Bing Ads. The message sounded good ("AI As A Service!") and I let it go at around 20$ a day.

24 hours after putting the ads, I got my first message from a client with a project.

YEAH!

I call the client, we chat a bit, I write some quote (my first quote!), and three days later I was working on our first project.

Seemed like the ad had done its job, right?

Well, days later, weeks later, a month later and a few hundred dollars down the road without any client messaging me... I started to doubt.

I had ASSUMED, because of the timing, that this client had seen my add. I called them to check, to find out it was actually not the case.

Oooohh, the shame, I had taken a completely random event and turned it in a business decision.

Well, I was not going to make that same mistake twice. I can assure you, we now measure everything!

What ultimately worked for us

At explor.ai, we help existing teams deliver AI projects. We help full fledge AI + Data Science teams, or assist experienced software developers adding funky functionalities to their SAAS. We step in to jumpstart or get them back on track, we rarely propose project.

In marketing terms, the act of reaching these clients is called business to business. This field has its own set of strategies, mainly because the people that make the decisions are typically not those our team work with. How do you reach the decision makers, right at the moment they need help with their AI project?

Mass mailing? Hell no!
Mass emails? Not in that industry...
All-in-one marketing agencies that guarantee XX client meeting per month?

We tried a lot of different approaches, trying to find a way to generate leads without efforts (automagically!). Turns out, if you don't put effort into it, it's not worth it. Fortunately, I met Karelle Lepine, from Middle!

After analysing our situation, her approach was totally different : she suggested to train explor.ai's data scientists. Armed with marketing best practices and the knowledge of highly efficient (though complex!) marketing automation tools, we devised our strategy, which we still use today.

So... what do we do? We start with searching a specific industry that we want to work with. The first step is to use specific tools to extract companies from Google search, LinkedIn or Google Maps.

The second step is to find for each of these companies, who we should get in contact with and let them know we exist. We don't push offers to these people, its not the right time, we typically just ask for a LinkedIn connection.

The third and final step? We listen. You see, explor.ai does not sell product, and we hardly ever propose projects: we step in to help companies when they have or start an AI project or, if their team get stuck with lower than desired AI performances.

So, if they are suddenly hiring or are posting technical questions on reddit, stackoverflow or elsewhere, then we reach out to them, offering our services.

Simple, yet very complex! ;)

Distributing the effort

Since all of us at explor.ai are tech savvy and good with data flows, we distribute this effort among teammates. Each of us have some prefered industries and sources we monitor, so we each search the vast internet, using various tools, to keep us informed.

Blogging and posting is also an important part of marketing these days, so having your experts write a lot of content is another way to gain visibility.

My last bit of advice : Ask for referrals! All the time!!! All your team members can participate on that. We are very good at satisfying clients at explor.ai, and clients that do the extra effort of referring us brings us a lot of value!

Next up : Summer 2020!