Yoni Tserruya
Simple business and marketing strategy
Lusha helps the go-to-market world become smarter by commoditising B2B data. They do this by providing a simple product that gives sales and marketing a solution to help grow their business.
For sales, they can reach out and gain their full potential with data for prospecting so they can do what is important – more selling. To do this, Lusha gives the salesperson a full breakdown of their prospect with correct contact details to easily engage and identify the best candidates.
For marketeers, Lusha solves a different problem to minimise the number of questions required on a web form by utilising publicly available information to increase your conversion rate. As a marketeer, you can have the shortest possible form on your website to ultimately get more leads.
The Summary
The aim of Lusha is to differentiate the customers that come to your website. It is important to gather the right information, as easily as possible but without having too generic a form on your website.
Yoni and his co-founder found their skills complicated each other perfectly after operating in the business space differently previously to starting Lusha. It meant they could each move the business forward doing what they were strong at. Those are the partnerships you should look for.
Yoni’s background is in engineering and he worked in several products with VoIP so had an understanding of data points.
The vision of Lusha as a business need and a character became a consumer experience to download it and start using it. Ultimately to cut out the salesperson’s demo.
At the beginning of his journey at Lusha, there weren’t any marketing efforts, it was based on a free offering which would then be purchased by self-service options.
For him it changed the whole way of selling as he believes the way to sell a product to your customer now is to show them the value, let them teach themselves about your product through application and this will lead to purchase.
We’re in a world where if a product is good you will buy it. He knew there was an element of need for salespeople that would be needed for questions, but this started out with just one salesperson.
The biggest source of growth for Lusha in the early stages was the freemium model as well as word-of-mouth.
He prides the company on reducing the friction passed onto consumers by offering the freemium model, flexible payment options and savings for longer-term contracts.
The core of Lusha is the product – just try it first.
Yoni found that the majority of the business at Lusha came from the bottom up. They tried outbound marketing but it just didn’t work for them, not to say it won’t work for everyone but for him, it wasn’t worth the effort.
All of the sales conversations today are to people who use Lusha not people who do not. When you speak out to people who don’t know you, you must communicate the value of the product first.
Part of the beginning strategy was a generic term of service, not customised contracts, they have always played the volume game. He adjusts his road-map for products after multiple requests for the change, not just one or two suggestions.
But in taking a more enterprise approach, he noticed they must become more flexible in their approach to payments and product releases, leading to his strategy of flexibility in remaining or becoming a Lusha customer.
He made the onboarding very simple so that the customer understands the product as soon as they can and have no need to speak to someone at the company itself.
The difference today is not only what you sell but how you sell it and you must do that simply.
Yoni started as an individual developer and every time the vision and opportunity got a bit more clear and he continuously wanted to do the next thing. He’s always wanted to have his own business but his journey happened very naturally – he just wanted to take on more responsibility each step along the way.
It started as a side project but after releasing it to the world he felt passionate about continuously building it.
They started as a single product solution but are now a multi-product company so their value proposition is different so they must position themselves differently.
But as a volume company, the two main marketing routes for them are paid advertisement, making sure the funnel converts correct and the second is awareness and content to build the brand further. Making sure people know who they are and why they are building what they are building.
Lusha does not try to promise something they can’t deliver. They are very clear and straightforward on what they can do and they do it well.
They did not want to be a company with a website saying big statements causing their customers to be lost of what the product is.
His staff are encouraged to invite customers to the product on a points system but he believes they can definitely do more with their staff. This has started with encouraging staff to post more on LinkedIn.
Most of their marketing activities are at the start of their journey, which I am excited to see get great results.
Yoni’s advice to developers is to start building, start small and don’t worry about deciding your path. You can build it whilst you are working. He believes in starting small and just seeing if it will expand over time.
If you have the passion it will happen. Persistence is key.