5 Ways to Sell with Zero Marketing Budget

Written by Ed Johnson

5 January 2024

Making your first sales, generating your first revenue, signing your first contracts, securing your first paying clients, registering your first paid subscription. Whatever you refer to it as, we all know that revenue generation (which leads to profitability) is now seen as a rather vital first step to startup success. It’s, I’m certain, easier done with a marketing budget and part of the reason why so many startups look to raise investment. Marketing and development are probably the two biggest cost drivers to people seeking a funding round. Development, sure, I get – in some cases. Marketing – not so much. At PushFar, we secured our first contracts with zero marketing spend. Here’s how we did it.

1. Stop Selling, Start Listening
Weird first piece of advice, perhaps. Stop selling to generate sales. Hold on. Hear me out. We generated our first sales by simply asking our target audiences for their advice and guidance on what we were building. In the early days of PushFar, whilst my co-founder was busy developing the platform, I spent my days reaching out to our target audience (those people running mentoring programmes). That consisted of professionals in the learning and development, HR, diversity and inclusion and education space. I sent a few dozen connection requests each day, sent unsolicited messages and they actually responded! The key here was that my messages had nothing to do with selling anything. They barely had anything to do with our platform. I simply wanted to know about their experience in mentoring and the programmes they were running. Here’s exactly what I sent-



I can confirm, Sophie, a senior HR leader did reply, we had a call and towards the end she asked to see the platform and wanted to learn more. At no point in our conversation did I “sell” or “push” anything. I shared an overview of our vision and wanted to hear about Sophie and her pain points with mentoring. It helped us to develop the right product and find a market-fit far more quickly.

2. Get Out There, Passionately
Ugh, not another entrepreneur telling you to “find your passion”. No, don’t worry, that is not at all what this is about or what I’m saying. This second way in which we cornered the market and sold our first contracts without any marketing budget was to start talking about what we were doing – with passion! I knew that I couldn’t build a mentoring platform if I didn’t care about mentoring. Fortunately, I did – and still very much do – care a lot about mentoring. In fact, it’s one of the keys to my own success. But you can’t just write an article or share a post on LinkedIn once a month, you have to be truly passionate. Get in front of the camera, talk about your topic, share advice, guidance, tips and tricks, become a “thought leader” and connect with others in the same space. Consistently, for years, if you have to. Slowly but surely people will start to see you as the leader in your space and begin to approach you, rather than you selling to them.

3. Double-Down on Content – No, Really!
Some people overlook content creation for the obvious reason that it is not a “quick fix” solution. It can take several months, often years, to have the desired effect but when it works, it can work really well. In the year that we spent, pre-launch, developing PushFar, I began to write articles every week on mentoring, coaching, learning and, ultimately, any topic our target audiences of learning and HR professionals might be searching for. It took time, we saw very few results (at first) but after a year we had a bank of 50+ articles and were coming up on the top of Google for things like “famous mentors” and “find a mentor”. Now, still, we are at the top on Google for “mentoring software” and have a powerful inbound channel with a reliable domain and subject-matter authority on Google. It cost us absolutely nothing! Was it quick? No. Was it worth it? Yes, 100%. It has undoubtedly generated a very significant number of leads and sales at zero cost and gave us a whole heap of things to share on social media.

4. Think Outside your Target Audience
This one surprised me in many ways but I thought it was worth a short. It ties in nicely with the second point about getting out and about passionately. I started to attend events that were not related to our target market or audience, per se, but guess what, people know people! I spoke at events full of recruiters (they definitely know people in HR), events for students, events for entrepreneurs and events for PR agencies. I blagged my way in to talk about mentoring and learning because, ultimately, they can and do benefit everyone, in every sector. It cost nothing, it raised our brand awareness and helped introduce us to prospects who became clients. Again, zero budget but sales secured from it.

5. Be Seen as Helpful
This last piece of advice isn’t just about securing your first sales without a sales or marketing budget, but more a piece of advice to live by in business – be helpful! Yes. Simple, I know, but highly effective. Become a connector. Think about how you can help others to achieve their goals and get further in their own career. It will, and definitely does, come back to help you. In the early days of PushFar, I was just so desperate to connect with anybody who would talk to me that I would go into every meeting thinking about how I could help the people I met, rather than doing anything that related to our own business. As time went on and PushFar became more popular and effective, I couldn’t do this to the same proactive extent but in the early days, I had a lot of time on my hands and spent it trying to help others. It definitely came back to benefit us! Suddenly, the people I had introduced 6-months earlier, were working together and were able to open doors to me, introduce prospects and ultimately sales. Be helpful. People will remember and reward. It costs nothing either!

So, there you have it. Five things that any start-up, entrepreneur, freelancer or founder can do right now to begin to build a sales pipeline at no cost and secure your first sales with zero marketing budget. I’m sure there are other things we did too but these, immediately, come to mind.