Generate early interest

How do I come up with a list of potential customers to go after?

Objective: Find the best customer group to target for NewCo; gather contact information for your first batch of potential customers

Strategy:

• Testing and searching for the right size and strength of a network

• Build your own custom, high-quality, and targeted list

• Query based on different key dimensions for prospective customers - here are a few examples: Geography, Size of Company, Title & Seniority Level, Years of Total Experience, Tenure vs Recent Role Change, Industry, Keywords

Tactics:

• Refine initial customer segment until it hits certain acceptable thresholds (i.e. size, titles, geo, connections)

• Build a custom list using various tools: scrape public info, use existing databases, produce owned data, leveraging personal network

• Tip: Aim for low thousands or high hundreds of contacts (anecdotal sweet spot) because it gives you enough volume to run experiments over several weeks towards a targeted segment of customers (i.e. 150 contacts a week for 6 weeks = 900 total contacts)

• Tip: When standard database tools and LinkedIn do not have the right contacts, try and be creative to look at associations or other private groups to find a list to cross-reference

Outcomes:

1. Come up with scan of “first universe” of contacts (i.e. high hundreds)

2. From there, curate your own custom list of 100 contacts manually (i.e. it might be 10% of initial universe)

3. Use whichever tools are at your disposal to then scrape or generate contact email addresses or other means to contact these prospective customers

4. Export a spreadsheet (i.e. CSV file) of your contacts with all of the relevant information

Considerations

• Picking a solid customer segment from the get go is super critical to your success. You may choose to research multiple customer segments and sample several ones before you land on your initial hypothesis. It can be helpful to map out all “potential” customer segments when you’re just starting out, and then use a decision making framework to help you prioritize which ones you might start out with.

• When you are curating your contact list, ensure you are trying your best to find high-quality leads and contact info such as email addresses. Bad quality lists lead to high bounce rates on emails which can drastically impair your spam score. Once your domain is screwed or an email service identifies your email address as spam, it’s extremely difficult to recover.

• In industries where there are not a lot of potential contacts (i.e. the universe is super small), you may choose to prioritize high levels of personalization instead of a high throughput game. This makes sense because you just don’t have a super large lead list to get data from, so every contact is precious - use high effort here on prospecting notes.

How do I determine what messages and channels work best? 

Strategy:

• A|B test positioning statements (i.e. 1 liners on both email and LI)

Tactics:

• Writing Broad vs Specific messages.

• Results tracker on open rate, response rate, time of day, etc.

Outcomes:

1. Write 4 messages that test different value props

2. Run at least 3 rounds of A|B tests over 6 weeks with enough contacts in each test

3. Determine a conclusive top message/channel fit through having gone through several iterations and attempts

Effective Messaging

Imagine you are building a LegalTech venture. We are trying to help litigation lawyers spend less time doing research by surfacing the best documents and previous cases using AI.

Here is an example of what a prospecting email might look like (and the same principles would apply to any other outbound channel like LinkedIn with slightly different wording to optimize for the channel):

Taking an omni-channel approach where you are not bound to just a single channel is often important to take note of. Instead of just focusing on email alone for example, you could do both email and try them on phone or Twitter.

A|B testing is one of the biggest principles that are critical to the success of early outbound efforts. We do not know how the market will react to any message, so, we need to test them in the real world. Below is an example of how you might isolate 1 value prop statement and use either a Broad or Specific approach to get your message across:

Tip: In the early days, it’s usually better to start with a Broad approach, and then as we learn more information from our discovery calls, shift towards more Specific once we nail the language on how our customers talk about a problem, solution, or space.

Considerations

• The best messages include a very simple 1 liner that can clearly illustrate the problem statement or the value prop of the solution. Often times this means that you can speak this 1 liner out loud and it rolls off the tongue nicely, rather than becoming a tongue twister.

• It’s easy to get lazy on channel testing. We might default to just doing LinkedIn only or email only. We need to do a lot of different actions and experiments at the start across as many channels as possible so that we are making big leaps towards finding the best fit. Don’t be afraid to try non-conventional channels too (i.e. X.com, Discord, Snail Mail, etc.)

• Be patient. It often takes a professional weeks if not months to get to the right channel/message fit. And even then, that is contingent on whether there is a real need for the problem you are trying to solve. Continue to be disciplined with experimentation and at minimum, try to run 3-5 iterations before giving up or re-evaluating your strategy completely.

• Responding quickly when you get a response from a prospect is everything. You should aim to get back to them within 5-10min because you know they have just looked at their inbox and are likely doing some work. If you let it sit, you have a higher likelihood they will not respond and lose interest.

• Good starting point when beginning is to send emails on Weekdays from 8am-4pm. Then, tighten the schedule as you learn more about what times of day people are reading/responding to your messages.

• Choose LinkedIn InMail when there is an extremely small universe of contacts because it ensures almost 100% deliverability to their inbox. Choose general email when you have a high volume of contacts you want to test messaging against and gather statistically significant results.