How to do early stage outbound

How to do early stage outbound

Customer development vs. sales

Once you’ve done an initial round of customer development and gained conviction around your idea and product efforts, it’s time to start selling and making sure you have a pipeline of design partners with willingness to pay who will also give you product feedback.

When it comes to early sales efforts, I actually prefer cold outreach over introductions from investors or friends because it yields more genuine feedback from people who express interest in learning more about your product. This feedback is crucial for developing a product that addresses a specific pain point for a particular buyer. It's important to seek validation from unaffiliated connections.

ICP Analysis

We’ve already covered how to build out your initial ICP last week. As part of this exercise, hopefully you’ve gained some perspective on who are the types of decision makers and buyers of your product. You should get as specific as possible about their titles, what they care about and the specific problems they have that you’re solving.

My preference is to get as niche as possible early on and identify ways you are helping a specific person with a problem that really matters to them.

Fish where the fish are

To reach these potential customers, understand where your ideal customer profile congregates. For example, if you’re targeting product managers or VPs of Product, determine if they are active on LinkedIn, Twitter, or other communities like Slack. For that product manager example, you should seek out places like Lenny’s Slack to see what they’re talking about.

Observe their interactions and the issues they discuss to craft personalized outreach. Aim to select 100 to 200 people or accounts, deeply understand them, and then create a personal message. A personal message from the CEO that references something specific they've mentioned, like a podcast or a tweet, is more likely to elicit a response.

What should you say?

The content of your message should address a pain point relevant to your solution. For instance, if you notice someone struggling with managing their team remotely, mention how your product can summarize notes from Zoom conversations and integrate with project management tools like Asana or Linear. Demonstrating social proof, such as mentioning peers who are already using your product, can also be effective in prompting a response.

However, avoid framing your outreach as a request for feedback unless you're in the customer development stage without a product. If you have an MVP or existing customers, focus on selling rather than soliciting feedback. Be clear about your objectives and tailor your approach accordingly.

How should you get in touch with your ICP?

Unless you’re targeting SMBs and/or brick and mortal retail businesses, the best approach is typically a mix of email and LinkedIn messaging. Sometimes using channels like Twitter/X could work. In this early effort, you should be prioritizing a smaller amount of consistent outreach every day and week. This should allow you to deeply personalize the message and follow-up in regular intervals.

Your goal should be get to get 5-10 conversations each week if possible to help you iterate quickly and make sure you’re going in the right direction as much as it should be to generate revenue.

If you have any questions on the above, including tools recommendations, please let me know. Feel free to find some time here if you’re at this stage and interested in digging in more.

Three interesting articles

1. A deeper dive into enrichment tools

This one is a bit meta, but I posted on LinkedIn about data enrichment tools and there was a great discussion in the comments about new tools. Check it out to get some ideas to help with your prospecting efforts, especially for industries outside of tech.

2. Learning to sell

Another great X post from Gokul about learning to sell as a founder. Some excellent advice that everyone can take something from in my opinion.

3. Net new customer growth matters above all else

Another great post from Jason Lemkin and one that isn’t surprising at the early stage, but bears repeating: the metric that matters the most to you should be net new customer growth.

First GTM Hire Jobs

• Paces, a Brooklyn-based environmental tech startup, is hiring their first Head of Sales. They have a few AEs already ramped, so it looks like a very interesting leadership opportunity.

• Dirac, a manufacturing tech company, is hiring their first sales/GTM hire in LA.

• Signadot, an early-stage devtools company that went through YC, is hiring their first sales hire.

Quick note: I’m thinking of making this job board longer and bit more permanent. If that would be interesting and valuable to you, let me know!

Closing thoughts

As always thank you for reading. If there’s anything that you’d like to see here that you’re not seeing, just reply to this email and let me know!