I am a project / production manager at a startup company. We are using 3D to create product photos for furniture manufacturers and retailers. We are using that money to fund our main product, a software that will make possible to create photo quality images easily (without any software knowledge and experience). I’ve been managing part of our production for some time and most of our projects. In the past few weeks my boss (the CEO) asked me if I would be interested in a new department.
They finished part of the software development and we could sell that first iteration to businesses (it works well, but it still requires some 3D software knowledge and experience). We haven’t sold anything like this before and currently we work with a different type of client base so this would be a new area for us.
He asked me if I would be interested, and if yes they would give me money and the opportunity to manage the whole department if I sell a few of our new product (subscriptions) and start up the department.
I should do this by the end of Q1 next year, that is when they plan to start doing it if no one else wants or does it.
All in all it sounded like a good opportunity but I’m not exactly sure how to connect with potential clients. Expensive and long market research is not an option at the moment, I have a general idea about the clients we need to contact and we’ll need to figure out the specifics along the way and/or do a market research later.
My issue is that now that I know in general who should I contact, how do I contact people and small businesses? (At the moment I am not confident I could take on big businesses and get a lead.)
Currently this is also a market test so not a big campaign - for the next 6-12 months we are not relying or planning to rely on the profit from this software. I would need to sell a few subscriptions first and test the waters along the way and scale up later. I was thinking cold email, but emails of the companies I need to contact is not easy to come by and probably pretty slow. I did sales but that was B2C cold calling and now this is B2B and dont know how different that is. So the questions is how would you approach selling a new B2B product when there is no sales process at all (and also limited resources)?
Thank you!