As a quick background, at the end of last year Treasure launched Treasure API which is a first of a kind API enabling any company to embed an investment offering on their platform. 

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We were in a good position as we had received some market pull for this product via a large partnership with one of the largest payment processors in the US (Priority Payment, Nasdaq: PRTH) but we wanted to further capitalize on this via developing full sales motion for this product.

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I review here a few learnings from doing some testing last year and having driven our Go To Market (GTM) motion for the first quarter this year.

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It all starts with a good list

We originally used some large list of potential buyers for our API product, created some nice email sequences and waited, and waited and waited… Sure, it was our subject line! We improved it, our open rate improved a bit and then we waited and waited and waited…. Sure it was the copy! We found some more optimized and tailored way to describe our product and call for action, then waited, waited and waited… 

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What we had failed to realize is that our potential buyer list, while containing close to a thousand of companies, seemed like a guarantee to work. But it was way too general and not directly tailored to a well defined ICP. So we were basically pushing on a string and sending thousands of emails in a complete vacuum.

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Takeaway: Be hyper precise on our ICP, a smaller list with very well vetted potential companies is 10x better than a catch all long list.

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Emails don’t work (anymore)

After we had created some better tailored and smaller list of prospects, with optimized subject lines and well crafted copy we thought we were about to be inundated by response to our email outbound… We were not. While our open rate was good our number of meetings booked rate ended up being less than 1%. Messages were being open and read without much action.

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Takeaway: Email inboxes are now being saturated by junk emails and the default assumption from anybody receiving an email (even with some nice personalization) is to assume it is just another spam and it goes straight to the delete button.

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Find the right channel

Having learned our lessons from the email sequence we went even more surgical via doing some outbound via Linkedin and this is where we were able to get a great response rate and meeting booked. As depicted by the chart below the number of first meetings booked increased 4x in Q1 by leveraging our outbound on Linkedin.

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Takeaway: Find where your potential audience lives. In the Fintech world there is a very vibrant community on Linkedin.

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Conclusion

This might sound obvious for some Sales experts but when doing some outbound for a specialized and technical product such as a Fintech API it helps to have a very well defined ICP and be hyper precise on the companies which fit that range. On top of this, email inboxes are now completely saturated and so using some new channels to reach out to potential buyers might help.

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