The Challenge
The challenge of being a one-man show
Before using an AI sales assistant, Wantedly Singapore’s sales outreach efforts were handled by just one person: Xiandi Loh, the startup’s Head of Business Development.
The process was tedious, repetitive, and incredibly manual.
“Basically, I was just going to LinkedIn, searching for people who are hiring, connecting with them then and there, and trying to get a meeting with them or trying to get them to use the platform on a free trial,” Loh reveals.
His strategy was to touch base with at least 20 companies every week, cold messaging key decision makers from those firms through another mainstream recruiting portal. Out of these 20 leads, Loh lands about five accounts to work with in return.
“The maximum amount of leads that I can reach out to in a month would be maybe 100,” he says.
It was a manageable number for a small team in a small startup. But once they had to scale up, “it was impossible to handle.”
It didn’t help that they had to compete with bigger, more established players in the market such as Indeed, JobStreet, JobsCentral, and Glassdoor.
“Down the funnel, the problem arises because we’re pretty new. People tend to trust job boards with a bigger name. It’s mainly the trust that people don’t have with Wantedly in the Singapore market yet,” Loh shares.
To garner more volume, he needed to learn how to generate mailing lists and how to engage his list of leads in a more efficient, productive way.
