Basics of prospecting and outreach

Prospecting and outreach is a hot topic with founders I’ve worked with lately.

Everyone seems to have a pipeline issue.

We all dream of building a product, putting a signup sheet on our website, and then never having to lift a finger for sales and marketing.

But reality is, you don’t exist yet. Nobody knows about you. They don’t know how to search for you, how to find you.

Which makes it tough to launch a startup.

Which is why, in the early days, no matter what your price point might be - prospecting and outreach is usually the fastest way to get customers. Not always, but most of the time.

But it’s a slog to do it. Takes a long time. Need to stay at it every day.

I wish there was an easy way to do this, but there really isn’t. And AI isn’t “there yet” to really figure it out for you.

So in this newsletter, I’ll go through the basic principles of prospecting. It’s still going to be hard, and you’ll need to test out a number of different tactics and messaging.

But this should at least help you narrow down your focus, a bit.

Table of Contents

• The Basics of Prospecting

• Creating Relevancy

• Getting the Right Timing

The Basics of Prospecting

There’s really two things that matter for prospecting:

1. Relevancy - are the problems you’re solving relevant to the prospect

2. Timing - are they experiencing these problems now

This is where a lot of folks get stuck with prospecting. They send a bunch of emails or LI DMs, mostly about their product/solution.

Then, after a few weeks, they give up.

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t meet the criteria for a response.

For a prospect to agree to a meeting with you, they need to have a problem that you solve, and it needs to be in focus/priority right now (or very soon).

If you don’t solve their problem, at the right time, you’re never going to get a response.

So how do you address this in your outreach?

Creating Relevancy

There are a few components to relevancy:

• Right problem

• Right solution

• Right audience

To really nail down this problem + solution + target match, you need to have a good sense of your positioning.

April Dunford has a great book called Obviously Awesome that I recommend you reading if you’re going to do any type of prospecting. Goes through how to reverse-engineer your positioning.

I also break down her process into basic principles in my Ebook and Course/Community.

• What would your customers use if they didn’t use you? This determines the context in which you compete.

• What unique features do you have against each competitive set? This helps you stand out.

• What value does your uniqueness bring? This helps you isolate what problems are worth solving and what outcomes you can help with.

• Who really cares about this value? This helps you narrow down a specific targeting list.

Once you do this exercise, you get key components for relevancy:

• From the positioning, you can mention very specific use cases and problems that folks you work with typically experience.

• From your unique features and value, you can mention how you’re solving those problems, which makes you stand out and creates intrigue.

• From the “who cares” exercise, you can extract an exact list of companies and personas using different traits that would match the problem you solve.

This is how you create relevancy in your outreach. It’s a process that you’ll need to do many times before you get it right.

Getting the Right Timing

There are a few ways you can nail timing with your outreach.

• If the problems you solve are tied to a specific signal or trigger, then you can monitor this using different tools like Google Alerts and lists in LI SalesNav. There are signal specific tools that exist too for B2B sales, some are expensive, some are reasonable. Example of a trigger would be if someone is hiring more than 20 sales reps a year, they’ll need a really good onboarding program. So monitoring sales headcount growth + open job posting could be a signal that you use for timing your outreach.

• If the problem you solve doesn’t really have a signal attached to it, then you just need persistence. Operational tools typically fall into this category. The problem will present itself once things become very inefficient internally, but there’s no real external trigger that will signal this. In this case, you run short prospecting blitzes once a quarter on your target set of companies, then find a way to stay in front of them (like newsletter, ads, content, social media, etc). When the timing pops up, they’ll remember you.

The best thing to do is to keep track of a handful of important signals, then run through your account list a few times a year. Try to commit to reaching out to 10-20 prospects per day.

This is why prospecting is really hard. There are no gimmicks or tactics that will get you around this. Top performing outbound SDRs who are prospecting 10 hours a day, 5 days a week, are only generating 6-12 meetings a month.

It’s not because they aren’t sending emails, DMs, or making calls. It’s because the conditions above need to be true for them to land a meeting. And often, the conditions aren’t really met, so it results in no response.

Solve a problem that’s in their current top 5 as a company? You’ll land a meeting.

Don’t solve a problem, or solving something that’s not currently in their top 5? You won’t land a meeting.

NOTE: I’m not getting into specific tactics here because they vary so much from company, targets, personas, and markets. Email, phone, social all work if it makes sense for the prospect. There’s also a lot of technicality with prospecting now with email deliverability, call spam rates, LinkedIn jail, etc. It’s gotten pretty complicated from a technical standpoint. That’s a topic for a different day.

So here you have it. These are the basic principles behind prospecting.

Let me know what you think of the newsletter! Always want to cover topics that you care about.

For more practical early-stage sales tips, connect with me on LinkedIn.

If you’re looking for more hands-on help implementing your first sales process, reach out for coaching packages.

P.S. Starting the waitlist for the next group coaching cohort starting in September. LMK if you’re interested.