Exactly 14 days ago on 7th June, I sent out a newsletter to announce the closure of this newsletter.
At that time, we had made the decision to niche down to focus on the cybersecurity market specifically.
Having ran a couple of POCs and speaking to industry leaders in the space, we decided to shut down our current business.
There’s a few key reasons.
Reason #1 - It Didn’t Suit Our Strengths
When we first started out, we were doing sales and marketing workflows and systems (back before AI was the craze).
Along the way, we felt that companies were setting up systems to solve their sales and marketing problems, when the issues were in their strategic approach.
That was what sparked our transition into the world of lead generation, sales prospecting, and GTM.
We spent a ton of money and time learning from industry experts, and we started to get the hang of it.
However, even after doing it for 1+ year, we didn’t get much traction and client results weren’t amazing either.
As Justin and I reflected on the reason why our progress has been so slow, we concluded that it was due to the lack of proof.
We simply weren’t able to get client results.
Underlying that is because that’s not our strengths.
Justin’s Strengths
Justin is incredible at AI and automation workflows. In fact, clients were always impressed with his ability to retrieve any data you can find on the internet.
His technical skills are incredibly sound, and he’s great at turning ideas into reality.
Marcus’ Strengths
On the other hand, I’m good at understanding complex ideas and simplifying it into an easily understandable concept.
I’m able to sit down with a client, ask a series of questions to understand their challenges, and map out their entire process along with the key challenges we need to solve.
In other words, we’re both operationally competent, but not as marketing-driven.
When we focused on helping companies generate more leads, there were 3 principles we followed which I coined “OTP” — reaching out to the right person, at the right time, with the right offer.
We were great at the first 2 steps (finding the right person at the right time) because Justin creates custom AI agents for each of our clients to find these contacts and enrich them with signals.
However, when it comes to crafting the right offer and writing the messages to be sent out, we weren’t as good at it (and didn’t enjoy it either).
Reason #2 - APAC Market is Different from US Market
This was another huge struggle we had.
Most of the advice and programs we signed up for catered to the US market, but the APAC market is hugely different.
People aren’t as open to trying out new things
The market is way smaller
Messaging is different
When we ran a trial in the US market, we got comparative better results than in UK, Australia, or Singapore.
Taking Singapore as an example, people are more risk-averse and don’t actively respond to cold emails.
If you’re prospecting in APAC and you’ve faced these same challenges, feel free to reach out. Happy to connect and share insights based on what’s worked for us.
Reason #3 - Shifting Landscape of B2B Sales
For the clients where we got the best results, they always came from warm prospects — people who already know of them.
As we sat down to analyse the landscape, coupled with our experience thus far, there were 2 meta-trends:
Buyer-led instead of sales-led — buyers often do their research before reaching out to vendors
Trust-building in the age of AI — AI is making buyers increasingly skeptical, increasing the need for sellers to build trust
Especially in the APAC region where sales remains more relationship-driven, trust is the most important thing for B2B sellers.
So… What’s Next for SalesDuo?
We’ve decided to play into our strengths, and will be leveraging AI to help B2B companies accelerate their sales pipeline by enabling buyer-centric, trust-focused engagement.
Use Case #1 — Finding “In-Market” Prospects
One of our first use cases will be what we’ve already delivered for many clients — helping them find their ideal prospects who display signals that they might be “in-market” for a solution.
For example, Justin built a custom AI agent that tracks Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority (BCA) website for new projects because our client provides relevant solutions for that target audience.
Or another custom AI agent where we searched for retail companies which had more than 5 outlets in Malaysia with a specific tech stack — tracking exactly where and when they had a new store opening OR whenever they were hiring for a new store manager
Basing off our OTP methodology, we’re basically delivering “the right person at the right time” to sales teams.
Instead of relying on lead databases that offer static and outdated information, or trying to track these signals themselves by integrating multiple tools and enrichment platforms, we handle everything and they’ll receive the list of qualified prospects with an overview of why it’s the right time to reach out.
Use Case #2 — Trust-Building Materials
This is another use case that we realised was important to get results for our clients as well.
As mentioned above, the best results we got were from warm prospects — which highlighted the importance of brand-building.
With buyers often researching on their own before reaching out to sellers, there’s a need for sellers to build trust with their buyers by providing relevant (and valuable) content.
This can be adopted when:
Prospecting into new accounts
Nurturing existing sales opportunities
Creating upsell / cross-sell opportunities for existing clients
To bring it to the next level, it can be combined with the above use case.
For example, when you receive a relevant signal — for example, a new Sales Director hire — instead of asking for their time to pitch them your solution, you can share a “How to Succeed in Your First 90 Days As A Sales Director” playbook.
These are the 2 main use cases that we’ve identified based on our experiences so far, but I’m sure more will pop up along the way.
It’s a scary step for us as we’re restarting everything, but we feel the need to lean into our strengths.
We’ve seen the shifting landscape of B2B sales, and we know AI is here to stay, so we want to leverage AI to help companies adapt to the new landscape.
We don’t know what will happen, but we’ll do everything we can to make it work.
In the meantime, we’ll be keeping this newsletter and updating our progress as frequently as we can.
If you want the latest updates, we’ll be more active on LinkedIn:
Marcus — www.linkedin.com/in/marcuscheu
Justin — www.linkedin.com/in/justincheu
PS — we’re running POCs now. If any of the use cases resonate or you want to explore how you can accelerate your sales pipeline with buyer-centric, trust-focused engagement, book a demo with us.