How to prospect at different growth stages

I work with a lot of founders at different stages. Some who are still trying to find customer no. 1. Some who are already at $2M+ARR and wanting to move from PLG to sales assisted/led motion to tackle up-market.

Each of these companies will be prospecting in a different way based on where they are in their stage. And knowing how to best prospect for your stage will help you get pipeline faster, and grow faster.

Let’s go through a few approaches here, then ask yourself if you’re using the best approach for your stage.

Table of Contents

• 0-10 customers

  • Asking for referrals

  • Cold outreach (LinkedIn)

• 10-100 customers

  • Cold Outreach (Lookalikes)

  • Inbound and social interactions drive outbound

• 100+ customers

  • Interacted leads (recycling campaigns)

  • Cold outreach (adjacent)

  • Demand-gen outreach

• Using the right approach for your stage

0-10 customers

At this stage, you’re just looking for people who are willing to pay. You’re brand new, no reputation yet. The founder brand is your best play here, and you get to use it through your network.

Asking for referrals

This will be your no 1. source for finding your first 10 customers. A lot of founders already know this, but they’re likely not approaching their network in the right way.

When you first launch, you can ask your network for help. Most founders I’ve met go to their network to try to book a meeting to get feedback on the SaaS their building. That’s not going to help you a whole lot. What you need are warm intros to people who have the problem you solve.

So the play here is to outline what you’re up to, and ask for help. Most people are willing to help founders get their business off the ground.

A quick email like this could land you your first 10 customers:

Subject: asking for help

Hey Jane - I’m reaching out to ask you for help.

I’ve recently launched a new business and looking to get my first 10 clients. I launched a coaching biz helping founders who are struggling with figuring out their sales process. Often they have pipeline, some growth, but struggling with closing deals consistently. They’re not sure where their process is breaking down, but they know it’s not great because they keep getting ghosted after their demo.

Do you know anyone you could introduce me to who would be struggling with this?

P.S. [some personal anecdote]

Talk soon,

Dan

You can likely run this play twice within your first 2 years. With maybe 1 follow-up if they didn’t respond.

This worked incredibly well for one of my clients. They were struggling landing their first few customers. So in mid January, we ran this play to about 300 contacts. Response rate was >25%. There was about 15-16 meetings booked, 10 proposals sent out, 3 deals closed for $26k ARR, with a few more expected to close.

It’s a quick way to get paying customers.

Cold outreach (LinkedIn)

The second approach will be cold outreach. Once you’ve tapped the intros from your network, you’ll need to reach out cold to prospects.

There’s no real way around this. It’s still the quickest and most direct way to get your early customers (outside of warm intros).

What you’ll need to do is focus on your founder brand. Likely on LinkedIn for most folks (maybe X if you’re selling a dev tool).

I wouldn’t worry about email at this stage, because you don’t know what works yet for cold prospecting. Folks don’t know your product yet either. So LinkedIn is great, you can optimize your profile to really showcase your expertise. When you’re connecting to 2nd degree connections, they’ll see mutual contacts you have. Use your reputation to help you here.

Send connection requests to targeted folks. Then when they accept, find something interesting about their profile and ask an ice breaker question. If they respond, continue asking a few questions, switching to pain-based probing. If they have the pain, suggest a meeting.

It takes a while to get good at this, but this is still the best way in the early days.

10-100 customers

At this stage, you’re looking to replicate use cases. There’s typically two things you’ll work on:

Cold Outreach (Lookalikes)

You’ll still be using the LinkedIn tactics mentioned above. What you’ll likely be doing differently is using customer stories to decide your lists.

At this point, you’ll have a good understanding of the main use cases and pains, because you have at least 10 customers.

Based on those, you’ll be reversing your way into an ICP of similar customers who have the same characteristics that show pain.

And you’ll filter down your list in LinkedIn Sales Navigator even further by focusing on lookalike accounts. So if you helped 3 dropshipping companies solve logistic issues with your software, your next logical step is go build a large list of dropshipping companies that you suspect have similar issues.

When you reach out to them, you can mention the pain that your 3 customers had, and how they solved it using your SaaS. This significantly increases the relevance.

At this point you’re likely adding email as an outreach channel as well.

Refrain from using automation and scale until you have good response rates. You will kill your domain reputation if you try to scale and automate email outreach too quickly.

I have a client of mine who runs an outreach shop, one of the better ones. He does millions of emails in volume. His first step for every client is to get responses manually. He does manual targeting and manual email outreach to figure out what gets responses. Once he starts getting responses, he looks at what parts of the messaging can be automated through Clay tables and Smartlead sending.

He doesn’t start with automation and scale, ever.

Inbound and social interactions drive outbound

At this stage, you might be getting some inbound. Maybe through SEO, or some of your outreach. You likely have a few demos. If you’re running a free trial approach, then you might have some stuff there.

Use inbound as a signal that the company has a problem, not that the lead has a problem.

This is where most inbound fails. If you’re only reaching out to the single lead that signed up for a trial, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunities.

It’s very rare in B2B SaaS that a decision is made by a single person. A trial only shows one person within the company who’s investigating a way to solve their problem.

It doesn’t tell you anything about the problem they have, and who else within that company cares about that problem.

So if that person decides not to use the trial, and you’re not reaching out to other relevant stakeholders within the account, then you’re missing out.

So use inbound as a signal to start outbound.

The same is true with social media interactions. If you’re posting on social, commenting, etc, use that as a way to start some outbound. If folks like your content and they’re an ICP, connect and reach out. If folks view your profile and they’re an ICP, connect and reach out.

100+ customers

At this stage, you’re probably approaching or have gotten above $1M ARR. What’s different here is that you have a lot of leads to work with, regardless if you’ve done inbound and/or outbound.

Interacted leads (recycling campaigns)

Here’s a dirty secret - folks you’ve already talked to at some point are way likelier to respond to you than a cold lead. Like 20-30% response rate vs the typical 2-3% response from cold leads.

Yet most founders don’t go back through their email or linkedin inbox to find who they’ve talked to. Who they’ve had meetings with. Because it’s tedious to do this.

But that’s where the best pipeline exists. Going back to those folks you’ve interacted with and striking up a new conversation.

I’ve ran this play for my coaching business and increased my MRR by 40.98% in the last 4 weeks. And I have about 6 more deals in my pipeline that I’m expecting to close in April. Just because I reached back out to folks I had conversations with last year.

This is called a recycling campaign, where you recycle through leads who are already aware of you.

Sources for recycling:

• Past conversations

• Closed-lost opportunities

• Old unconverted trials

• Old chats

• Customers who churned 6 or 18 months ago

There’s probably more you can think of. But essentially you’re going out to people who are already aware of you, your product, and the problems you solve.

This is tactic is especially effective for PLG companies who are going up-market and figuring out their sales motion. You already have a lot of leads coming in, and a lot of them are likely your ICP. You could just led the inbound pool grow the contact database, then constantly run outbound recycling campaigns against it, and you’ll grow at a pretty good rate.

Cold outreach (adjacent)

So you’re doing lookalike outreach successfully at this point. Keep doing this until you saturate the market. Once you’ve saturated the market, you start jumping to adjacent markets. And use 1-degree of separation as adjacent.

Example if you’re selling software to help sports teams with their social media, then maybe something that’s adjacent could be the venues where these games are played. Maybe it could be team sponsors. Maybe you’ve saturated the NHL, now you’re going for the NFL and MLB.

What you’re doing here is maximizing your lookalike campaigns first, then going to the next closest thing where you could leverage the customer proofpoints effectively. If you’re selling to the NHL, then try to go sell to L’Oreal, you can’t really use any of your social proof to help you here. But if you sell to the NHL, then go to CCM (makes hockey skates), that would be relevant social proof, in an adjacent market.

This will help you systematically grow your total market.

Demand-gen outreach

At this point, you likely have multiple channels that are producing leads. Some are more direct, driving trial signups or demos.

You likely have some level of cold outreach to targeted ICP accounts that’s working. Either using your inbound to drive outbound, or maybe running lookalike campaigns. Maybe you’re doing adjacent growth.

You likely run other campaigns. Thought leadership on LinkedIn, webinars, events, ads, social media posts, SEO, etc. You might have an email list, with some folks actively opening and clicking.

Those are warm-ish signals to use to drive your outreach. They’re likely not product aware, but they might be problem aware. Reaching out to those folks with a pain-based approach can work well.

You can also use these as signals to drive outbound to the rest of the account. We did this a lot at LevelJump Software (sales onboarding software, exited to Salesforce in 2021).

We would run webinars that signaled someone had pain. The formula was:

How to [JTBD] to [Results]

So an example could have been “How to design your onboarding program to ramp reps faster.”

If someone signed up for this, we could assume they were struggling with ramp time for their reps, and were looking for better ways to structure their onboarding programs.

It didn’t matter if someone attended or not. If they signed up, we could assume that this problem existed at the company level.

So we started prospecting to relevant folks within the account. And we were really successful at this.

Using the right approach for your stage

There are more approaches we could go through, like trigger-based prospecting, and account-based prospecting. But I think I covered the most relevant approaches for most types of startups who are at the earlier stages.

What’s important is not to jump ahead too far.

What I often hear are folks who are just getting started with sales. Still working on customer no. 1. And they’re asking me how to scale email outreach to a large list.

That’s not at all what you need to worry about at this point. It’s going to be more of a distraction than anything else.

Same with folks who are moving from a PLG motion to sales-assisted or sales-led, they’re asking me how to do cold outreach. Only do cold outreach if you’ve maximized your recycling campaigns first. Cold is the hardest to crack, go talk to people who already know who you are.

Hope this helps you better understand where to focus your outreach efforts.

DM me your #1 sales bottleneck. If I can’t help, I’ll point you to someone who can.

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.