B2B (business-to-business) startups have to navigate a notoriously difficult sales cycle. But the Southeast is known for creating B2B startup and scaleup success stories. So this week, we are turning the mic over to current B2B founders so they can share pieces of advice that up-and-coming founders need to hear.
We asked, they answered: What advice would you give to B2B founders? Here are four founders’ thoughts:
Sarah Rodehorst, CEO and co-founder of Atlanta-based Onwards HR
Onwards HR is a workforce compliance platform that handles offboarding complexity to ensure consistent, compliant, and compassionate employee exits. You can read our previous reporting on Onwards HR on Hypepotamus here.
Rodehorst’s advice?
“If you want to build a B2B company, my advice is to start by working as a consultant. This will give you an inside look at the problems within your target industry. Once you have a better idea of the challenges, you’ll be well-positioned to find a problem big enough to warrant the procurement effort required for an enterprise company to complete the purchasing process. That’s how Janice and I started Onwards HR. We discovered a gap in HR technology – the challenge of offboarding compliance. Then, we made it our mission to make the process better for employers and employees alike.”
Alfredo Ramirez, co-founder and COO at Chattanooga-based Prosal
Prosal is an RFP platform that helps agencies unlock predictable revenue by finding, validating, and winning RFPs.
The best piece of advice Ramirez received?
“There is so much noise and distraction; whether from investors, customers, advisors, competitors, or news, there will always be something new to explore and an idea to test. It is easy to become an over-bloated platform that solves several problems well, and no one problem is better than anyone else. Keep your focus, stay lean, and build for your customer and only your customer, and you will inevitably become the best solution to that one problem that plagues your customers.”
Andrew Levy, founder at Athens, Georgia-based Adpipe
Adpipe, motion-first marketing software platform that personalizes, humanizes, and localizes existing customers’ brands. The team recently went through the Engage program and announced its $6 million Series A in January.
Levy’s advice to new founders in the B2B world?
“There are four questions every b2b leader wants to know: Who are you? What can you do for me? Who have you done it for? Why should I care? This equates to a brief story of your background, how you can specifically help the person you are speaking to, examples of how you have done that for others, and meaningful stats around your success and the importance of your solution. Master these answers and you will engage almost anyone.”
Tourial Jason Graub, CEO and co-founder of Atlanta-based Tourial
Tourial, a seed-stage company, is an interactive demo platform to create scalable product experiences across your entire go-to market org.
Graub’s Advice To New B2B Founders?
“Starting a software business today is fundamentally different than it was even a few years ago with the level of automation you can now add via different AI tools. It’s more important than ever for founders today to understand the real value they are delivering to their customers and taking a bet on how that will evolve as AI technologies improve in the coming years. The best UX or marketing strategy are no longer as defensible and I’d keep my go-to-market team as lean and efficient as possible until there’s clear signals of sustainable product market fit that won’t get disrupted as the entire tech ecosystem learns how to adopt these newer technologies.”