Thread by @dunkhippo33

Today's thread is on outbound sales for founders. At a high level, what is the strategy? How do you create a repeatable process out of it?

Specifically, the focus of this thread will be on the method @motoceo talks about in his book Predictable Revenue.

Read on >>

1) If you are building a B2B company (or heck even a B2C co), I would HIGHLY recommend reading or even just skimming the book Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross.

This book: amazon.com/Predictable-Re…

2) This is a commonly used way to get customers at scale for B2b companies.

But even for B2C cos, it can be a good way to do customer development at scale.

3) At a high level, when you think about building a repeatable outbound sales process, it basically looks like these 5 steps:

A) Research potential customers
B) Find their contact info
C) Reach out to them to set up a call
D) Talk w/ them
E) Close them

4) Simple, right? And many entrepreneurs in starting their company go through all 5 steps.

First, let's go and do some internet research. Find their contact info. Cold-email them. Schedule a mtg. Chat. Etc...

5) I did that with my startup.

But I found that it was REALLY SLOW. It would take me a LONG time to complete a loop with any of my prospects. Heck researching prospects -- enough of them -- took a LONG time.

6) So I was spinning my wheels. In a given wk, I found that I might only be able to talk with a couple of customers. And yet, I was just so busy trying to complete this 5 step loop.

What was going on??

7) As CEO / founder, you def need to run through this full loop yourself in the beginning to get learnings & hammer out the loop. BUT, once you have it worked out, then you need to scale it.

That's when I read Aaron Ross' book. And that changed my entire outlook on this process.

8) The key insight in the book is you want to separate these steps into modules. And have different ppl FOCUSED on different modules.

You will never get scale if you have 1 person doing all the steps.

9) A crude analogy is like the development of interchangeable parts in the 19th century. It is much better to have ppl focused on different parts of the widget and have a team as a whole assemble it together.

The same applies in sales.

10) So loosely speaking, I needed to have team members who were focused on the different stages.

CEOs / founders should be focused on the last 2 stages -- Talking & Closing

11) And in an ideal world, what that looks like is that as CEO of your startup, you should be able to pretty much just do calls all day everyday. Heck, it might be really repetitive and boring.

That means that you have a team of ppl who are getting mtgs scheduled on your cal.

12) And prior to that step, you have a team of ppl researching prospects, figuring out their contact info, reaching out, and scheduling warm leads to meet with you.

13) Ok, but as a startup, I couldn't afford a team! How would I do this with no budget?

Upwork. Interns. Outsourcing. Etc.

It's important to think about what skills are needed for each stage.

14) For the first 2 stages:

A) Research potential customers
B) Find their contact info

You actually don't even need perfect language skills for either of these stages. This is an easy one to outsource with specific instructions of what to look for.

15) For scheduling:

C) Reach out to them to set up a call

You need someone who has good communication skills and is organized. Decent language skills are needed, but note, this person is not doing the actual selling. You, as the CEO, are.

16) And so what you'll notice with this process is that if, you as the CEO, are not able to get enough warm calls in, then you'll need to increase the number of people / hours of work on the 2 research stages.

17) If you have too many calls, then perhaps, it's time for you to start training up a new hire to do the calls in parallel to you.

18) With this process, you can see where the bottlenecks are and can ramp up more hours / ppl accordingly.

Ok, so we get the underlying strategy, but how do you refine it?

19) The best way to create a process is to build out documentation.

What is the email script for scheduling? What is the rubric for research?

E.g. look for cos in X industry w/ more than Y employees located in Z city/country. And find ppl at the dir level & higher in mktg.

20) And avoid emails like hello@ or info@ etc.

The list goes on and on. And as you run this process, over time, you refine parts of it to make it better.

Maybe you edit the script. Maybe you edit the rubric. Etc.

21) Lastly it's impt to measure success.

This is a LONG thread in itself, but at a high level, your cost is the total salaries of everyone involved in this sales process. Include your mkt rate!

How much you make is your revenue.

Do you have a profitable machine?

22) If it's not profitable, then go back to the drawing board / cust development on what you are selling. Or find a new cust acq channel.

If it is (or near) profitable, refine the sales process.

23) Later, you will need to measure cohorts to figure out if you are getting better. But that's a longer post.

For now, the first q to answer is if you can get this basic process to be near profitable on your ppl costs vs sales.

If so, you may have something promising.