Do you always have knee pain? Find out here how to get rid of them in 60 seconds.
No, not in this article. sorry Such promises are a common marketing tool to win customers over the web. Because if you now provide more information about your complaints, you can find the best product. For companies, this information is worth its weight in gold because it generates so-called Leadswho can become customers. That’s the plan. The reality is often different, because the quality of these leads is often far from sufficient to turn them into customers who are really willing to buy. An intermediate step is required for an optimal match: checking customer inquiries for relevance. Airlead takes care of that. Companies only get attractive leads that are very likely to become customers.
Ariane Lindemann in conversation with Marco Kolb and Abda Arouna from Airlead.
You no longer get customer inquiries by shaking hands and networking?
No. Most of it is done online these days. This market has exploded in recent years. It is now common for companies to acquire customers Leads to buy.
Do you have an example?
Let’s take Facebook. Your feed will be populated with ads from time to time, such as: Do you always have knee pain? Find out here how to get rid of them in 60 seconds. If you suffer from knee pain, you will almost certainly click further and leave your data in the further query. In the ideal case, a good product, such as an orthosis, will then be recommended to you. Or you can contact an orthotic distributor directly. This creates a lead that can become a customer.
It is still a long way to a customer who is ready to buy. Why?
The leads are often only a vague yield when the quality is poor. In order to find out who is really interesting and who is not, companies have to invest a lot of extra time. Of course, if half of the 50 potential inquiries that you have obtained have an incorrect email address or telephone number or you cannot reach them, then they are of course not relevant. Unfortunately, you often only find out when you have put in three, four or more hours of work.
Frustrating when you only get one good customer from 50 addresses. What’s wrong?
You can imagine it like an online dating site. Anyone who uploads their profile wants the perfect match. But if the technology behind it isn’t good enough to pinpoint who fits who, you’ll get suggestions that don’t match the profile at all. What is missing here is quality control before the leads are offered.
Airlead checks whether the potential customer who has provided their data is actually looking for what the company is offering.
Our vision is therefore to build a marketplace that connects all those who generate customer inquiries with their customers. We sit in the middle and take care of the issue of quality. In this way we minimize waste and get top leads as a result. We solve the whole thing technically, but also by phone. We employ staff who call these leads beforehand and check their relevance. During the conversation we ask where the shoe pinches. In this way we receive further information, which significantly increases the value of the contact, because the company then only has to call and advise.
There still seems to be a lot of room for improvement…
The big problem is that the market is very opaque. Each agency charges a different price, has a different quality, different payment models, and the call centers also vary greatly in terms of quality and price. Our vision is therefore not only to network the matches with each other, but also to make lead generation easier and, above all, more transparent for entrepreneurs.
More transparent means?
With us you pay per result. This means that when you get a lead, we also provide you with information about the quality of this type of request. For example, there are requests from people who still have to be strongly convinced. And then there are the others who would like to have the orthosis tomorrow, to stay with our knee example. Another needs a little more advice. Someone who needs advice is then cheaper with us than someone who wants to buy tomorrow. Companies only pay what the request is worth. This type of transparency does not actually exist on the market yet.
How good is the yield of leads with Airlead so far?
We usually throw out 30 to 40 percent of everything that comes in. These are people who, for whatever reason, entered the wrong place, no longer feel like it, or who have already found what they are looking for somewhere else. We relieve companies of this work. With what’s left, we have a success rate of around 80 percent.
Your process is still tied to manpower? Will there be AI?
Yes, in the future we want to reduce the manual and solve more technically via customer profiling.
Do you have enough capital to finance the whole thing?
We both started a marketing agency a few years ago. We’ve been in business for a long time now and we know that if something isn’t making money, you can leave it. So we boosted sales for our product, had signed contracts in our pockets after a few weeks and thought: Okay, this could be something. It’s worth giving up the agency for that. But when it came to how to finance it, we started looking for ways to raise capital. We ran into Nicolai from the CyberLab Accelerator at a trade fair and told us that they support startups.
What insights did you gain from this?
We wanted to know: what amounts of capital are interesting? Which capital do you use when? When do you submit concepts? How do you do that strategically? When do you give what percentage to whom? What is the disadvantage of VCs? What are the advantages and disadvantages of business angels? We were able to take a lot with us from the lab and were able to make many valuable contacts. For us it was totally worth it.
It is important to implement the knowledge…
This is a crucial point. You have to take action and make something out of it. For example, we spoke to a VC consultant who told us afterwards that we were the only ones who contacted him after the consultation. That made it even clearer to us that you have to take the initiative. He has now also opened the door for us to exciting VC lawyers. The CyberLab is a really cool way to talk to the right people and get ahead. But of course you have to be smart as a founder and seize the opportunities.