How to Find Early Advocates for Your B2B Startup

Early adopters are great for opinions, but they’re lousy for growth. The best early adopters are early advocates or champions for your startup (“earlyvangelists” in the words of Steve Blank).

Advocates want to be first using a product and they like to brag about their discoveries. They’re in a position to benefit from fresh innovation and have the visibility and influence to bring your solution to attention.

Working with the right early advocates can substantially reduce the effort needed to sign your first customers, get case studies and convince other companies to follow.

How to Find Early Advocates for your B2B Startup

At this point, if you’ve been doing your research properly you should have 50, 100 or more early adopters on a list and this list should look a bit like this:

Example of a list of early adopters

Since you’re looking for early adopters with the potential to become evangelists, you’ll separate the prospects that are setting the trends from the ones that follow them.

There are two aspects to this:

1. Personal influence — how many people can this early adopter influence?
2. Company (or employer) influence — how many companies can be influenced by a case study from their employer?

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For each early adopter on your list, you’ll look at:

• The number of followers they have on Twitter;
• The number of followers of their followers on Twitter;
• The number of contacts they have on LinkedIn;
• The rank, role and network size of their contacts on LinkedIn;
• Their activity level in groups on LinkedIn;
• The number of articles or publications they have;
• The number of talks they gave (# of SlideShare presentations);
• The number of blog posts they’ve written;
• The popularity of their blog (comments, shares, etc.);
• Their visibility on search engines (# of links on Google);
• The number of times other people have quoted them (e.g., Google search “James McCarron”);
• Their Klout score;
• The word-of-mouth in the industry; etc.

Although Klout scores are not a perfect measure of social influence, they capture a lot of these metrics for a fast assessment.

Find Early Advocates for your Business – Get the Early Adopter Evaluation Grid (Free)

You’ll assign a grade from 1 to 5 to your early adopters, ranking them by their personal influence level. The more reach, visibility and references your prospects have, the higher their grade should be.

You’ll also highlight the most influential companies on the list. The actual grading is not as important as the priorities you assign to your prospects.

Example of a prioritized list of early adopters

Armed with your prioritized list of early advocates, you’ll be able to focus on recruiting from the right companies for problem interviews and get the right influencers to work with you.