Predictable prospecting

What Hacker News says

1. eltJul 2022
   It really depends on your customer. In my case, I did cold emailing. I was able to narrow down my customer by their job title/role and knew exactly who to email.

   I don't really buy into gimmicks or tricks to differentiate my emails. You can read a lot of "tricks" out there, but they come across as inauthentic to me and that isn't how I wanted to establish a business relationship.

   The thing I did was send very targeted emails (to people I honestly believed would benefit from my service) and every email was personalized (and I don't mean using a template and swapping out variables). I sent each and every email from scratch, one at a time.

   I did read a few books on sales outreach and prospecting ("Predictable Revenue" and "Predictable Prospecting"). They were helpful and I did pick up a few ideas from them, but I mainly took the knowledge and paved my own prospecting/outreach strategy from it.

   With that being said, I haven't done any outreach in over three years. All of my customers come to me, mainly referred to my service by existing customers. Or customers that leave a company and advocate for my service at their new company.

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2. mindcrimeMar 2021
   https://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steve-Blank/dp/09...

   https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...

   https://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Prospecting-Radically-Inc...

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3. mindcrimeMay 2017
   How would you go about getting contact information, introductions, meetings and eventually sales?

   The first, most obvious, and probably cheapest, way to get contact info is to use LinkedIn. Find people that work for those companies. If you have shared connections, ask your connection for an introduction. If not, send them an InMail (note: I think you'll have to have a paid LI account for this, at least if you need to send more than a handful of messages). Beyond that, you can also try to find those people on Twitter, etc., so you can send messages their way.

   You can also buy contact information from Hoovers and similar services.

   And while it's low percentage, you can still do the old thing of cold-calling the main office number for the firm and ask for them by name. Get ready to read up on how to deal with "gate keepers" and the like. And expect a low rate of actually getting through, especially as you target people higher up the organizational hierarchy.

   Once you get to that point, contact people and just be straightforward with them. Say "Hey, I'm looking at (building a product | delivering a service | whatever) that I think would pertain to a firm like yours. If you'd be so kind, I'd love to have a short meeting or phone call with you to get your feedback on my idea(s) and see if there might be a way we could help you". Or something roughly like that. Don't necessarily use that exact language (I'm not really a sales-person!) but that general approach seems to work reasonably well. The percentages will still be pretty low, but it's likely that some people will be willing to talk to you.

   A couple of books that contain some additional details on all this, that you might find useful, would be The Four Steps To The Epiphany by Steve Blank, Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross, and/or Predictable Prospecting by Marylou Tyler.

   In terms of understanding what to do once you get conversations started, I recommend the series of books by Jeff Thull that includes Mastering The Complex Sale, Exceptional Selling and The Prime Solution. There's also some really good stuff in The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes and The Challenger Sale by by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson.

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