Maharashtra Village Man Now Owns Forbes-listed B2B Lead Generation Firm, Clocks Millions in Revenue

The sales challenge is a never-ending one. 

Most companies and startups struggle for the longest time to develop a fully functioning pipeline that effectively identifies and generates quality leads fit for conversion. This often becomes the most vulnerable part of the business — because, without customers, what really is the rationale of building and offering anything?

In an exclusive interview with Startup Pedia, Harshal Patil says, “Most people are building solid products and services, but they’re also spending exorbitant amounts of money in trying to crack customer acquisition wrongly. I wanted to ease this friction with expert analytics instead of guesswork.”

Founded in 2017, BTB Venture is a Pune-based company that empowers businesses and enterprises to significantly improve their sales and marketing efforts by generating the right demand and targeted leads. This is based on market analytics and data insights that the company has developed expertise in.

FROM  VILLAGE TO FORBES

Harshal Patil comes from a small, rural village in Maharashtra. But that didn't stop him from aiming for quality education and an impact-driven career. 

He did his MBA in Marketing from the Symbiosis Institute of Management Studies in Pune. 

In 2011, he landed a job as Client Engagement at Wipro Limited. 

Eventually, he joined Niyuj, a United States-based tech company that he helped grow from just 50 to over 200 people. It went on to get acquired by Ness. It was here that Harshal Patil honed his customer acquisition and marketing skills, driving substantial results.

He says, “To be very honest, I never really saw myself becoming an entrepreneur and starting something of my own. But then…BTB Venture happened.”

While working with peer companies, Harshal saw an evident market gap. 

Many startup founders and companies were struggling to generate quality leads. They were making wrong moves in the hope of acquiring customers. Either their sales teams were grappling with rejections or they didn't have a team to begin with. 

Harshal adds, “Some founders are very tech-savvy but don't have the time to train people to look for leads. Others aren't very much in touch with tech and would simply want external help. But that external help often drains them of money without offering real results.”

Harshal Patil knew that he had the expertise it would take to resolve these gaps. He founded BTB Venture Group in 2017. He was joined by Krutika who took the reins as the co-founder.

The service company started by offering to simplify enterprises’ sales pipelines and generate quality leads for them. 

Initially, Harshal landed clients due to his existing credibility in the market. 

“Since the beginning, I've laid laser focus on building a value network. This came in very handy when I started BTB Venture. My first 5 clients came through my own contacts,” he explains. 

Eventually, positive word-of-mouth recommendations and referrals got BTB Venture more clients.

Even during the Covid-19 pandemic, the company flourished and achieved a 2X growth. This success was driven by the fact that many fieldwork-accustomed enterprises were struggling to book remote appointments. BTB came in to offer customized solutions.

With more than 1200 active customers from regions like the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, and India, the bootstrapped BTB Venture Group has gone on to win 18 different campaign awards.

Recently, the company was shortlisted by Forbes in its special 2024 list. More on that later.

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BTB VENTURE GROUP - THE SALES BOOSTER

From the very beginning, Harshal was very very firm on not positioning BTB Venture as something that replaces a company’s sales team.

“Collaboration is what we believe in and it’s always worked for everyone involved,” Harshal says.

The company focuses on account-based marketing (ABM). This is a highly specific strategy that focuses on targeting and nurturing certain high-value potential clients and prospects. Even though it is outbound, it is not bulk or generic in nature.

BTB Venture acts as an extended sales enablement firm that takes over at least 70% of the heavy lifting in the sales pipeline and makes it more qualified, predictable, and cost-efficient.

Instead of delving into inbound strategies of SEO and SEM, BTB Venture helps companies and corporations directly pick out customers, score leads, and manage content syndication backed by data-driven analytics.

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BTB Venture offers certain key benefits:

1. Zero-budget customer acquisition with all-inclusive appointment demand generation boosts business growth. Within weeks, the pipeline starts generating new business opportunities.

2. By handling everything that happens presales, BTB Venture makes a company’s sales team more solid from the inside, offering lead allocations and insights.

3. The use of hyper-targeted and intent-based lead-generation processes results in high-value partnerships.

While BTB Venture Group has 40% of its clientele in large corporations, 60% comes from medium-sized businesses across the United States of America, Europe, India, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific.

GROWTH & FUTURE

Now a top-rated B2B lead generation company, BTB Venture Group originally started with just 2 people. Today it has a team of 160 people working worldwide.

Harshal Patil has become a credible industry-leading name in the space of sales, marketing, and business growth. He has delivered over 60 keynote and panel discussions so far and has also been recognized as Asia’s Top Marketing Leader.

The most recent achievement of BTB Venture Group is being selected by Forbes India in its 2024 list of Top 200 Indian Companies With Global Potential by DGEMS.

With 1200+ customers, BTB Venture currently clocks a revenue in millions. 

In the near future, BTB Venture Group aims to develop its own methodology of growth quadrants that companies can adhere to, and thereby accelerate their growth. The revenue operations and lead generation firm envisions reducing the silos between sales and marketing and making both activities collaborate with increased seamlessness.

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