Comment by gervwyk
7 days ago
Thanks so much for this!
I’m just now really trying to put myself out there and get into sales to further develop our business. We’ve been lucky with some early network sales, but for the next chapter of our business (https://resonancy.io) I need to build the sales engine and I feel very much out of my depth.
Just telling myself its a practice and trying to chip away at it one week at a time.. At this point identifying potential customers and getting meetings is a real challenge. Been trying Apollo and doing cold outreach but is a slow grind. Also trying my best in linkedin..
IMO - and again, remember this is experience from 20+ years ago although I still do a lot of this now - using these kinds of automated shotgun approaches is a mistake, especially early on and especially if you are selling something. We use an automated engine for our podcast agency (https://edgewise.media) but that is a different pitch when it's "come on my podcast and talk about yourself" versus "I want you to spend money for my widget".
What we did was more labor intensive and a function of these kinds of tools not existing (initial dot-com days). We would read the tech press, etc. and identify companies that might have a use for our tech. Then we would email the top person (guessing their email address usually - and most companies use a small number of variations for addresses) with a custom written, but short, tailored pitch to why they could use us and see if they wanted to talk. No pitch deck or attachments. Literally 2-3 sentences. Something that if even someone is going to quickly delete, something in those 2-3 sentences might catch their eye and make them reply instead of delete. We landed customers like Google (who we ended up later suing - that is a different tale), Doubleclick (who ended up being bought be Google), PayPal, Xbox, and a bunch of others through this method.
Happy to chat more. Startups are hard and all of us should help one another out to make the road a little less hard if possible. Keep at it - I know you'll get there. Hard work will get you there, shortcuts (usually) won't.