Sometimes, you run out of time. And ideas.

This is one of those days for me.

So instead of spending the usual couple hours writing an in-depth newsletter, I will copy/paste Part 1 of my prospecting playbook (in development).

Part 1 is about the theory of prospecting - covers the general systems you need in place to be effective. Part 2-4 are more tactical with examples of messaging.

LMK your thoughts.

Table of Contents

• Ebook: Founder-Led Prospecting: Complete Prospecti …

  • Inbound takes a long time

  • The fastest way to get early customers

  • A note on AI and automation in the early days of p …

  • How to use this ebook

  • A little about me

• Part 1: Prospecting Theory

  • Chapter 0: Prospecting as a GTM System (DON’T SKIP …

  • Chapter 1: Product Positioning

    • Why positioning matters

    • Components of Minimum Viable Positioning

  • Chapter 2: GTM Inputs

    • What are GTM inputs

    • Why GTM inputs matter

  • Chapter 3: Lead Sources

    • Hot, Warm, Cold

    • Lead Sources

  • Chapter 4: Prospecting Goals

  • Chapter 5: Prospecting Approaches

    • Inbound vs Outbound

    • 1:x Approaches

  • Chapter 7: Messaging

  • Chapter 8: Tactics

    • Clusters

    • Sequences

  • Pulling everything together

Ebook: Founder-Led Prospecting: Complete Prospecting System for Outreach

Everything you need to know in the early days to build a minimum viable process for prospecting and outreach

The harsh reality of being a SaaS founder is in the early days, you don’t exist.

You have an idea, you have a product. But nobody knows about you.

You don’t have a brand yet, you don’t have awareness yet.

So how do you land your first customers?

This is where prospecting comes in.

Inbound takes a long time

Too many founders go down the road of PLG and inbound when they get started.

Create landing pages. Get some SEO. Do waitlists.

The problem with this is that it just takes a freaking long time to get going.

SEO is a long term play. Content is a long term play.

You will learn more about your product and market in 3 calls with prospects than you will in 5 months of tweaking signup forms and website copy.

The fastest way to get early customers

Doing cold outreach might seem daunting. It might seem like a lot of work.

It might not really make sense at your price point. You’ll hear about how it doesn’t scale.

But none of that matters. Because you don’t need to scale right now.

You need your first 100 customers.

And the fastest way to get them is to make them aware about the problem you’re solving.

And the fastest way to do that? You guessed it - outbound prospecting.

Connecting daily on LinkedIn. Sending DMs. Sending cold emails.

When you do outbound well, you build pipeline.

You get to have meetings and conversations with folks who are willing to pay money to solve their problem.

They’re not friends or colleagues complimenting your ideas.

They’re real, potential customers.

And feedback from these folks is worth its weight in gold at your stage.

A note on AI and automation in the early days of prospecting

A lot of the founders I work with are looking for an AI magic bullet that will figure out their go-to-market (GTM) strategy for them.

From what I’ve seen, AI isn’t there (yet).

AI is great at scaling something specific. It needs to be micromanaged. It needs to be trained. It needs human input.

All of this, you’ll need to go and figure out. You need to talk to prospects and customers to understand the problems they’re willing to pay for. You need to translate that into positioning and messaging. You need to figure out targeting, triggers, etc.

AI can help you once you’ve figured it out. But it won’t help you get there. It needed a ton of context about you and your product that it doesn’t have.

I strongly recommend you avoid automating your outreach in the early stages. You will spend more time playing whack a mole with tech than you will be speaking with prospects.

How to use this ebook

This ebook should be a guide that helps you implement a prospecting system in your startup. It will cover all aspects of prospecting.

Here’s the best way to go through this ebook:

1. Do a complete read-through of the ebook so you know the different frameworks and sections.

2. Go into each component of “Part 2: How to set-up your prospecting” and “Part 3: prospecting tactics” and complete the reflection questions and action items. Some folks prefer to do a little bit every day to move things forward at a good pace.

3. Come back and revisit the chapters that are causing you the most trouble. Prospecting is about consistency and patience. Tweak everything until you get steady responses.

4. Document your approach so you know what’s working and what’s not working. This will be used to hire SDRs or train AI/automation once you’re getting consistent results.

Let’s do this!

A little about me

Before we dive into the prospecting system and how to build it for your startup, let’s set a bit of context.

I’ve been working in SaaS startups for a dozen years. Reported directly to founders. Held leadership roles in GTM functions in both Sales and Marketing. Was often the first hire outside the founders or engineers. Been part of many accelerators and incubators. Coached founders on building their first sales process.

Some of the companies I worked at were between $0-20k MRR when I joined. We were building sales and marketing from the ground up.

I grew sales processes, hired and built teams, and saw the journey from $0-10M ARR in different stages at different companies. Even spent time with a company post-IPO.

I’ve directly managed 4 teams of SDRs in my career, and implemented inbound and outbound prospecting systems at 6 different SaaS companies of varying stages. I’ve taught first-time sellers right out of university with no experience. I’ve helped a few CTOs do cold calling blitzes and land meetings. I’ve personally reached out to thousands of prospects, and gotten a lot of nos.

I’ve seen the good, the bad, the ugly.

What I realized is that there are tons of technical founders out there who are great at launching ideas. They come up with great products, they have the ability to code, and put something out there in the wild.

Very few know how to sell in the early days. And this is where a ton of amazing startups fail.

How many technical founders out there focus on building their revenue model? How many give it the same thought and attention as their product? How many actually go out and sell?

Are you a founder struggling with sales? 

• You’re an early-stage startup that has some level of a sales process (not self-serve).

• You have a bit of revenue in place, but most if it came from small inbound deals. 

• You might be trying to go up-market and sell to larger customers.

• You know your product can solve a real problem for your potential customers, but you’re struggling to get it in front of the right prospects.

• You’ve read countless articles and online resources, but you still feel lost and disorganized. You don’t have a framework or a reference for how to prospect well, and don’t know where to start.

• You’re scared by the sales process, and you don’t know if you’re getting the best outcome.

Is this you?

Imagine…

…knowing exactly which prospect to reach out to

…being in control of your lead flow and not waiting around for inbound leads

…having scripts, messaging, and tactics that get you responses

…and not being afraid of being rejected.

This is why I founded SalesMVP Lab. Technical founders needed a way to relate to sales. To simplify the concepts. To create a system. To make it repeatable.

If you’re a founder with an idea, and need to speak with real prospects that will help you land your first few customers, this is for you. If you need to get to $40k+ MRR in founder-led sales before you can raise money or hire sales reps, this is for you. If you’re at the point where you need to hire sales reps, but haven’t productized a sales process yet to teach them, this is for you.

You need a sales process to scale. Early on, it doesn’t need to be complicated. Really an MVP will work, or Minimum Viable Sales Process™. You’ll get plenty of chances to learn and change it over time. But you need something.

Let’s say your deals are worth about $5k annual. And you’re winning 20% of your demos. In order to get to $500k ARR, where raising and hiring makes more sense, you’ll need to close 100 deals yourself. This means you’ll need to run 500 sales cycles. Which means you’ll likely need 5000 or more leads to get there. That’s a lot of leads, and inbound takes a long time.

So you need a system that’s repeatable, and a way to document what you learn.

In this book, you’ll learn everything you need to know about setting up a prospecting system that works for your startup. We’ll go through prospecting theory so you understand the mechanics of it. We’ll go through how to set-up the go-to-market (GTM) components of your prospecting system. Then we’ll go into how to execute on specific tactics like emails, calls, and LinkedIn. We’ll wrap up with a couple examples of fully fleshed out prospecting systems that consistently generate pipeline and revenue.

Part 1: Prospecting Theory

Before we get into tactics, let’s go over the mechanics of prospecting and outreach.

It’s important that you understand the foundational approaches so you know what to test out for your startup.

I often see founders just start sending random messages to folks they think could be prospects based on their own assumptions. Which usually ends in giving up after a few attempts.

This is because prospecting is really hard to nail down and get right. A lot of different components, from positioning to targeting to messaging to timing all need to line up for you to get a response.

Plenty of folks on LinkedIn share their tactics. Email templates. Approaches. Gimmicks.

The problem is that they don’t share the entire system. They share one thing that worked. Maybe only once.

And founders see this, copy/paste it (just like thousands of other SDRs are doing), without thinking about how it fits into their positioning and GTM strategy, then try to automate it through smartlead/instantly/lemlist or AI. And it doesn’t work. Then they get blocked by prospects. And it creates a whole downward spiral.

And when thousands of other founders and SDRs do the same thing, it creates a whole problem in the market. Where prospecting becomes selfish. Becomes about promoting your product and features.

And it’s bad.

So we’ll take a bit of a detour here. Instead of getting straight into tactics that you’ll copy and blast through AI and automation, let’s focus on understanding prospecting theory first so you know what approaches you need to take for your specific market.

Chapter 0: Prospecting as a GTM System (DON’T SKIP)

Let’s first zoom out and look at prospecting as a whole, and the different components/systems that work together.

Prospecting and outreach isn’t a single thing. When we think of prospecting and outreach, we’re usually thinking about connecting on LI or sending an email. Those are tactics and activities.

But there’s a lot that needs to come together before you even make it to the tactics.

Here’s a breakdown of the different components and systems that work together for prospecting (in this specific order)

1. Positioning: This is the process that identifies how you’re different from the alternatives, and who cares the most about the value of your differentiators.

2. GTM Inputs: These come down to ICP/Targeting, relevance, and timing.

3. Lead Sources: These are all the different ways a lead might show up, through inbound and outbound channels.

4. Prospecting Goals: These aren’t metrics or results. This part is about what do you want to accomplish through your prospecting, like gathering info, raising awareness, or booking a meeting.

5. Prospecting Approaches: This is where you’ll decide the best approaches to use for your market, like 1:1 prospecting, ABM, 1:many, etc.

6. Messaging: This is where you break down the key components of your positioning into bite-sized messaging that can be delivered through different channels.

7. Tactics: This is where you decide specifically what kind of prospecting activity you’ll do (like email, LinkedIn DMs, or cold calling), how frequently you’ll do it, in what order, etc.

8. Results: This is where you’ll book meetings, close deals, or get told to fuck off :). All of which will be used to tweak the rest of the systems and approaches.

So very quickly, when you zoom out and look at prospecting as a whole, you can see why a lot of folks bang their heads against a wall when it comes to tactics not working.

It’s rarely the tactic that’s at fault. It’s usually the 6 other systems that come before the tactic that has flaws.

So let’s take time to break down each of these systems before we go into how to set them up.

Chapter 1: Product Positioning

In this chapter, you’ll learn about positioning. What it means, why it’s important, and the basic components of positioning. In further chapters, you’ll go through an exercise on how to do your positioning. 

If you’ve already gone through the FOUNDER Operating System, you can likely skip this. But for those who are new to SalesMVP Lab and our frameworks, let’s review the theory behind how to do positioning and why it matters.

From a prospecting perspective, you need to cut through the noise. And the quickest way to do that isn’t to be better. It’s to be different.

And this is what positioning will help you with.

Why positioning matters

Positioning is mission critical to the success of an early stage startup. If you get it wrong, you’re invisible. Positioning is the work that’s involved in defining the problems you solve, the capabilities you have, the uniqueness of your features, the outcome they drive, and the people who really really care about it.

You’ll need to have your basic positioning defined before diving further into the other parts of building your prospecting system. EVERYTHING YOU DO in your sales process, prospecting, outreach, and marketing pulls from your positioning. If your positioning is flawed, all of your systems will fall apart. So keep reading on.

One of the unique parts of running sales as a technical founder is you don’t have the support you usually get once there’s a sales and marketing team in place. You probably don’t have a product marketer yet, working on your positioning, messaging, and sales narrative.

You need to create this from the ground up, yourself.

There are selling systems out there designed for sales professionals, but they generally miss this critical component of early-stage founder selling. They typically work with sales leaders who have teams, and assume Marketing is already coming up with positioning. This is a major downside of a lot of sales trainers, coaches, and legacy methodologies.

The flip side is you have amazing resources, consultants, and coaches out there that can genuinely help with positioning and messaging. The problem there is that the resources are focused on the process to come up with positioning and go as far as crafting the sales pitch, but don’t really connect the dots with the rest of the prospecting system.  You still need to figure out how your positioning helps with prospecting approaches, tactics, messaging, etc.

What we’re going to do in the next two sections is go through the core elements of crafting your positioning theory.

Components of Minimum Viable Positioning

It’s important we spend a bit of time going through how to position your product in the market. You’re early, and likely competing against much bigger players. We need to make sure we emphasize your uniqueness to win those early deals.

Your prospects need to understand your unique point of view on the market. You need to be different from the alternatives. You need to provide more value. Why else would they make the switch, or go with a lesser known product?

Your prospecting system is designed to help your prospects understand how you’re different, why your way of solving the problem is the best way, and why they should care.

Let’s go through a simple process for getting to “good enough” positioning and start testing it through your prospecting system:

• Alternatives: If a prospect doesn’t use your tool, what would they use? Often founders will only think about direct competitors. Sometimes they’ll say they don’t have any competitors. But reality is, the prospect is doing something. Are they trying the problems manually? With spreadsheets? Using another tool that isn’t designed to solve the problem? A direct competitor? What are they using? This will help create relevance in your targeting and messaging.

• Unique Features: How are you different than the alternative? Not better, but different. This is important. Better is subjective. A lot of founders who launched a “better” CRM compete against Salesforce. But Salesforce is better for many companies because of the integration and ecosystem of professionals who know how to use the tool. Better is subjective, so focus on what’s different. This will help craft the solution part of your messaging.

• Why it matters: Dig deep into the problems your unique features solve. The outcomes it generates. What value does it bring? This will help highlight the problems you solve in your messaging.

• Who cares: Finish with who really, REALLY, cares about this differentiated value. What types of companies? What functions or roles? Use firmographics and qualitative aspects here. Identify traits. This will really help isolate your ICP and targets for prospecting.

We’ll dig deeper into how to do this, with examples, in future chapters. But for now, this is the basis of the prospecting system. It all starts with the positioning.

Chapter 2: GTM Inputs

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the critical components of prospecting, and how to get it right.

What are GTM inputs

There are 3 critical components to prospecting:

1. Targeting

2. Relevance

3. Timing

This is the intersection of effective prospecting. You need to target the right people, with the right problem, at the right time.

Outreach always works if you can figure out this trifecta.

Why GTM inputs matter

Here’s the reality of your market:

• 3% are buying right now

• 12% might be getting ready to buy

• 20% are open to buying sometime in the future

• 20% have a problem but aren’t aware yet

• The rest will never buy

For you to get a yes, you need to be in the first 15%. Anything else is a long-term marketing play.

So to get prospecting to work - to book actual meetings that turn into pipeline - you need to get this right.

Which all comes down to targeting, relevance, and timing.

This is why prospecting is so damn hard. You have an 85% chance of getting it wrong.

So take the time to go through positioning, and translate that into GTM inputs. This up-front work will save you lots of headaches downstream.

We’ll go through an exercise in future chapters on how to translate your positioning into GTM inputs.

Chapter 3: Lead Sources

In this chapter, you’ll learn about different types of leads you can target as a founder. In future chapters, we’ll go through more details on how to execute on different types of leads.

Lead sources are important because you need a consistent way of finding prospects. If you’re lucky, you’ll get inbound leads. But that usually takes a while. So the highest likelihood of you finding prospects will come from a large variety of cold sources.

Hot, Warm, Cold

Let’s first define a few different types of leads before getting into sources:

• Hot: Hot leads are those who want to buy your software now. They’re usually coming from inbound sources like demo requests, or maybe a direct intro from a partner or investor. You don’t get a lot of those in the early days, but when you do, drop everything and work them. Get on a call ASAP. It’s your highest likelihood of winning a deal. And do it fast, as they’re shopping and you’re not the only vendor they’re talking to.

• Warm: Warm leads are aware of you, but haven’t explicitly said they’re buying now. They might have signed up for a trial, seen you speak at an event, maybe heard about you from a customer/partner/investor, etc. They are problem and solution aware.

• Cold: b

Lead Sources

Now let’s go through different lead sources for the different types of leads:

Hot

• Inbound demo requests: These are the hottest leads. They want to talk to you from a sales perspective.

• Intros: These can be hot if they’ve expressed interest in buying. Usually come from friendlies like partners and VCs

• That’s it, there’s not much in hot leads :)

Warm:

• Trials: Often people confuse trial signups as a hot lead. It rarely is. Most people who start trials aren’t actively evaluating. They’re just poking around. So trials end up in warm leads. You should still follow-up with them.

• Intent leads: Those are folks who signal they might be looking. They might be visiting your pricing page, or using your chatbot to ask questions about how the product works. They might be visiting your G2 reviews, reading case studies, or hitting up a bottom-funnel SEO page like alternatives to [competitor]. They haven’t told you explicitly they want to talk to you, but they’ve shown patterns of folks who might be buying.

• Some content leads: Some content leads, if designed in a way that signals pain, can be a warm lead. Webinar leads are good for this if you design them as “How to [fix problem] to drive [results]. Most content isn’t designed this way, so most content doesn’t really drive leads.

• Friendlies: In the early stages of launching your startup, reach out to people in your network. Investor intros, people you know or done business with in the past. You only get a limited time to use this as a founder. So milk it for as long as you can.

Cold:

• Content leads: Email signups, ebook downloads, articles, etc. They all fall into this category. You’ve captured someone’s profile or email address. But they are not problem-solution aware yet. Which makes them slightly better than reaching out to a cold prospect on a lead list.

• Lookalike accounts: If you do have some customers, then profile them to find similar accounts. Use traits and characteristics of the companies and people that bought from you to create a target list for outreach.

• ABM accounts: These would be your top XX accounts you want to land because they match your ICP definition from your positioning the best.

• Social Media Engagement: If you use social media to post thought leadership content, and someone likes/comments/reposts, those could be signals for cold outreach.

• Trigger Events: There’s a list of triggers that could happen at an account, like new executive, hiring, M&A, downtime, etc., that can signal it’s time to do outreach.

• Cold accounts: If you don’t have any of the above lead sources, then you have to reach out completely cold. This is the “moonshot” approach, but often necessary in the early days. Build a lead list based on your positioning and ICP, and start reaching out. You can’t wait around for the other stuff to happen.

This is a pretty comprehensive list of lead sources. I’m sure there are more, but the bulk of it is captured here.

One thing we’ll cover later in some examples - once you start prospecting, you don’t stop. Your inbound will drive outbound, your outbound will drive inbound. You’ll be recycling all of your leads until the end of time.

Chapter 4: Prospecting Goals

In this chapter, you’ll learn about the different reasons to prospect and outreach.

This isn’t about results, yet. It’s not about activity goals. It’s not about meeting goals. This is about understanding the reason you are reaching out.

Jeb Blount wrote a great book called Fanatical Prospecting. If you want a pep talk before hitting the phones, read the book.

But in it, he really broke down the different reasons why you prospect. Most of us think it’s just to book meetings, but there are plenty of other reasons why you might reach out, depending on your approach.

• Raising Awareness: You are signaling to different folks in a company that you exist. The goal here is to get as many people aware of the problem you solve as possible. It has no ask.

• Gathering Info: Here you want to better understand something about a prospect, account, or market. You’re probing for information, which you can use in future prospecting to executive decision makers, or to tweak your approach.

• Booking a Meeting: The most popular reason to prospect - book a call with someone to probe further on their pain and show your software.

• Close a Deal: Not often thought of, but powerful - prospecting other folks in an account while you’re actively running a sales cycle. This helps you “multi-thread” a deal and make sure everyone is on the same page.

• Generate a Referral: This can be done with existing customers, past prospects, friendlies. But you can reach out to folks to ask for referrals.

So there are many reasons to prospect, not just to book meetings. Ultimately you want to build pipeline. But a lot of the tactics and playbooks you’re seeing on LinkedIn and online are based on Sales Development Reps (SDRs), which are measured and compensated on booking meetings. Account Executives (AEs) tend to be much better at prospecting because they’re not tied to a meeting KPI. So they use all 5 reasons for outreach to build their pipeline. They usually don’t get as much volume of meetings as SDRs would, but their meetings are much higher quality and convert into deals. Which is really what you’re after.

As a founder, act more like an AE prospecting than an SDR. Forget the gimmicks and tactics. Those meetings rarely hold. Focus on generating real pipeline with real buyers.

Chapter 5: Prospecting Approaches

In this chapter, we’ll go over different kinds of prospecting approaches, and how they work. In further chapters, we’ll go through examples.

There are two components to look at for prospecting approaches:

1. Inbound vs Outbound approach

2. 1:1 vs 1:few vs 1:many approach

So this means there are 6 approaches you could take

Inbound vs Outbound

A lot of times, people talk about inbound vs outbound leads. In my experience running many sales and marketing teams, that’s just a recipe for internal fighting on definitions. And lack of results.

Leads are leads. Inbound and Outbound are ways you approach the leads.

Depending on the lead source, you’ll use an inbound approach. Or an outbound approach. Once you understand this, the leads start making a lot more sense.

Inbound Approach

When a lead comes to you and explicitly says they want to talk to sales, you need to deploy an inbound approach.

Inbound approaches are about speed and qualification.

A lead has a problem > they reach out > you qualify > turn into an opportunity

The faster you do this, the higher likelihood they’ll convert.

Outbound Approach

An outbound approach is when you reach out to a lead proactively without them explicitly asking to talk to sales. The vast majority of lead sources fall into this, even content leads.

The outbound approach is all about finding relevant pain

You’ve qualified a lead/target > you reach out > you probe for pain > turn into an opportunity

Outbound is more about timing, relevance, and targeting. It’s a calculated approach. Quality and consistency matters most here, not speed.

1:x Approaches

There are 3 ways you can handle inbound and outbound approaches:

• 1:1 - This is where you reach out to an individual and hyper-customize your outreach. You point out stuff specific about them, their company, their content. You tailor your messaging, approach, channels, etc., to the individual. Most commonly used on ABM accounts or enterprise sales motions.

• 1:few - This is where you’ve identified something common in a small group of people. The most common formula here is Persona x Industry. Example could be reaching out to sales leaders at mid-sized commercial cleaning companies. If you’re confident that the problems are similar in this group, then you tailor your outreach to the group. Most common in mid-market and SMB sales motions.

• 1:many - This is where you are sending a generic message to a large group of folks. Ideally you have a way to segment a bit or add some level of personalized variables (easier now with scrapers and AI), but you might now. Example could be reaching out to all digital marketers in SaaS. Most common in PLG or SMB motions, large total addressable market, used mostly for the awareness goal (not meetings/gather info).

So there you have it, 6 total approaches to use for prospecting depending on the lead and the sales motion you are running. The larger your total addressable market (number of companies that have a potential to buy), the more you can get away with 1:few or 1:many. If your TAM is less than 1000 accounts, then you will rely a lot on 1:1 with maybe some 1:few. This is why I mentioned earlier don’t try to automate or use AI until you know what approach you need to take. You can easily burn through an entire market, kill your reputation, before landing anything.

Chapter 7: Messaging

In this chapter, you’ll learn the basic frameworks for creating messaging for your different approaches.

There are lots of best practices when it comes to messaging. We’ll cover some in later chapters. But for now, we’ll go over the basic principles of what makes good prospecting messaging.

John Barrows popularized the “Why you, why you now” method. It still works today. Lavender.ai also came out with the OPSA framework (observation, problem, solution, ask) which I really like. Winning by Design has the RRR framework (Relevance, Reward, Request) which works great for an awareness goal. They modified it to RRRR (Research, Reference, Reward, Request) eventually, to further break down what Relevance means.

All of these are viable ways to create messaging.

Why?

Because they’re all about the prospect. The biggest reason prospecting doesn’t work for a lot of folks is because it’s self serving. It’s about you as a founder of a cool startup, wanting to book a meeting.

The various messaging approaches work because the prospect is at the center of it, and you’re making that very clear.

This all gets pulled from your positioning. Personally I like the OPSA framework because it’s easy to get started with. It takes practice and tweaking to get it right.

• Observation: This is where you highlight something you’ve noticed about the prospect or company. This ties into your triggers, content downloads, lead sources, and ICP from your positioning.

• Problem: This is where you highlight a potential problem they might have based on your observations.

• Solution: Here you can either use a quick story/use case from a similar customer, a brief description of your unique differentiators, etc. And add a quick line about the cost of inaction (basically what can happen if they don’t solve the problem).

• Ask: A close-ended question that signals interest. Example: “Worth exploring?” This isn’t an ask for a meeting. You can’t book a meeting with someone who’s not open to changing.

You can see how these frameworks for messaging are all centered around the prospect, and pull from your positioning exercise. They all work, with enough time and practice. So pick one that you like. Avoid writing from scratch/feel when it comes to sales prospecting. You likely won’t get consistent results.

Also avoid copy/pasting templates. Use frameworks instead. Anything you’ve found and copy/pasted has already been done by thousands of reps, and email providers know this. Results in spam. So write your email templates from scratch, using a good framework.

Chapter 8: Tactics

In this chapter, we’ll briefly touch on different tactics and activities to use during outreach. In later chapters, we’ll go through specific examples.

There are lots of different ways to reach out to prospects to signal that you are prospecting them. We’ll focus on these 4 for now:

• Touches: Emails, LinkedIn connects, LI DMs, Calls, Voicemails

• Nudges: LI Profile views, LI follows, LI content likes/comments

• Clusters: A quick series of touches and nudges

• Sequences: A combination of touches, nudges, and clusters, over a longer period of time

Touches and nudges are fairly self explanatory, but let’s dive a bit deeper into clusters and sequences.

Clusters

Clusters are useful for tying a handful of activities together. There’s really two types of clusters - double tap/triples, and short bursts of activity.

A double tap or triple would be when you view someone’s LI profile, call them, leave a voicemail, and send an email all in a row. What you’re doing here is blowing up someone’s alerts on their phone, and doing 3-4 touches all at once. It really helps generate a response when done well.

A burst of activity would be something like a double tap/triple, followed by a bump email the next day, followed by another double tap/triple the next day that includes a visual. What you’re doing here is clustering a short sprint of activities in a few days. Can also be a great way to generate responses when done well.

Sending DMs on LI can also be done in a cluster. Instead of sending one long DM, you break it down into 3-4 smaller DMs all sent in a row.

Sequences

I can imagine you’ve probably guessed this by now, but sequencing is a combination of touches, nudges, and clusters, over a period of time.

The most popular structure for a sequence is Touches x Days. Example 21 touches over 14 days for an inbound demo request sequence. Or 30 touches over 30 days for an outbound sequence. Those are just examples, not necessarily the best way to structure inbound or outbound sequences.

A quick note - sequences are somewhat out of style right now. Salesloft and Outreach have given the ability for sales reps to abuse spammy prospecting tactics, which has led to sequencing being a lot less effective than it used to be. Smartlead/Instantly/Lemlist + AI are only making it worse. 

The best way to prospect these days is to always be present. If you’ve identified an account that has the problem you solve, then there should be a continuous effort to get a meeting booked with the account. Use lots of nudges, triggers to time clusters/touches, and recurring tasks in your CRM. Think less in Touches x Days, but more what are the different prospecting goals and approaches that will help you raise awareness, gather info, and eventually get a meeting booked with an account, over a long period of time. Remember timing is critical, so you want to be top of mind when the pain is most felt.

Pulling everything together

So as you can see, there’s a lot that goes into prospecting. Long before the specific email you write in Smartlead (or whatever else you’re using). Long before figuring out multi-domain, multi-mailbox. Long before determining the tech. Or what AI to use to scale this.

You need to get your positioning to isolate your ideal client profile. Then use this to create targets, relevance, and timing. Which will give you your different lead sources and triggers. Which will then tell you what your prospecting goals should be. Which will determine your approach. Which will lead you to your messaging framework. Which will translate into touches, nudges, clusters, and sequences. Which will translate into you reaching out to 20 prospects a day. Which will lead to a few responses a day, and a handful of meetings a week.

This is how it works and all comes together. If you skip the steps, then you are approaching prospecting blindly. And will likely lead to you scaling automated activity prematurely, and causing spam for your prospects. Which is the opposite of what you want to happen.

[END OF PART 1]

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