Claire & her co-founder Paula started Houston & Ko in 2019 to serve the market gap between hiring full-time executive assistants and specialist roles and huge platforms like Fiverr and Upwork. Both had extensive professional experience at world-class companies such as Adecco & Hilti, but lacked the experience & knowledge to build up B2B sales from scratch as entrepreneurs.
Challenge: Houston & Ko set out to build B2B sales without prior formal experience in their situation and without any external funding. That means it needed to be efficient, avoiding trial & error and also “doable” from a mindset perspective on embracing sales as a key success factor to scale their professional services platform.
Client Feedback: Here are a few key feedback points from Claire from her video testimonial:
Build up outbound sales from scratch
“You helped us also understand how to nurture that channel and get the most from that channel, but also did huge amounts in terms of how we structured and set up the outbound sales. Working with you, we managed to move away from the reliance on this sole channel (inbound) and mature the sales process that it now covers a better distribution of channels and we see our sales comes from a variety of those and it's much more mixed, which gives you more robustness in your pipeline.” (05:00-05:30)
10x deal size thanks to a sharp ICP and market understanding
“As we start to understand the nuances of the company culture and what works for them, we actually for the longer the relationship goes on, the better the service gets for them and the better our understanding of their organization comes. And so, yeah, I mean, from going to basically a ratio of one to one to sometimes, as I say, one to twelve. This has been a huge difference for us.
That's a 10x monthly recurring revenue…because it's just 10 times more people. Amazing. (Manuel)
Yeah, exactly. So that's been like a really fantastic kind of discovery to me. (11:30-12:10)
1-2 month sales cycles to large organisations with 2-week cycles for expansion
“Once we've done that sales, we do our master contracts with those large organizations and that's the one that maybe takes the most time, maybe it's around one and a half to two months. But then for every freelancer that we put in after that, they come together with this master contract and they're really, really able to offer those within about 12 days from request to hire.”
CTA: Scale sales quickly?
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