3 ms·

The myth of low-hanging fruit

13 points by duck 10y ago

spking 10y ago
This has been my experience in doing cold outbound sales myself for one of our SaaS apps. It's a grind. I spent 30 days straight doing no development, no product work, no distractions. Just outbound sales. It's very easy to trivialize all of the steps involved in prospecting until you actually have to do it. 1) Build a prospect list. A good one will likely cost money, either in the form of a service like BuiltWith or hiring a research and data entry contractor. 2) Identify the correct contact(s) at each company. Usually at least 50% or more of the data is stale. This means loads of time tediously browsing LinkedIn profiles, cross checking company About/Team pages, and data.com. 3) Using tools like EmailHunter or digging through countless directories to find actual email addresses. 4) Running email addresses through a service like neverbounce to weed out the crap email addresses that could get your sending email address spamlisted from a high hard bounce rate. 5) Writing a good email sequence and populating it into yesware or replyapp, then importing your clean contacts in. 6. Monitoring the email sequence and jumping on leads as they come in, trying feverishly to schedule day and time for demos, and testing different copy variations to see what converts best. 7. Actually doing demos, wrangling gotomeeting and answering tons of questions. 8. Doing follow-up emails and calls to try and close the sale. 9. Rinse and repeat. I was able to get 5 clients in those 30 days of effort, and so far the churn has been 0% after 2 months. I did have to do a lot of hand holding during onboarding that would never scale, but I was willing to do that to learn where the sticking points were. Bottom line: We tend to get comfortable in our development and design roles and can be flippant about how truly difficult activities likes sales and marketing usually are. Try it yourself for a while and see if you still have that attitude!
- jomamaxx 10y ago
  It's crazy that devs would ever think sales is easy. Sales is usually a lot harder than development. It's why they get paid so much. Unless you're selling something easy, and have deep contacts etc.. It's a rough, rough business, selling.

13 points by duck 10y ago

This has been my experience in doing cold outbound sales myself for one of our SaaS apps. It's a grind. I spent 30 days straight doing no development, no product work, no distractions. Just outbound sales. It's very easy to trivialize all of the steps involved in prospecting until you actually have to do it. 1) Build a prospect list. A good one will likely cost money, either in the form of a service like BuiltWith or hiring a research and data entry contractor. 2) Identify the correct contact(s) at each company. Usually at least 50% or more of the data is stale. This means loads of time tediously browsing LinkedIn profiles, cross checking company About/Team pages, and data.com. 3) Using tools like EmailHunter or digging through countless directories to find actual email addresses. 4) Running email addresses through a service like neverbounce to weed out the crap email addresses that could get your sending email address spamlisted from a high hard bounce rate. 5) Writing a good email sequence and populating it into yesware or replyapp, then importing your clean contacts in. 6. Monitoring the email sequence and jumping on leads as they come in, trying feverishly to schedule day and time for demos, and testing different copy variations to see what converts best. 7. Actually doing demos, wrangling gotomeeting and answering tons of questions. 8. Doing follow-up emails and calls to try and close the sale. 9. Rinse and repeat. I was able to get 5 clients in those 30 days of effort, and so far the churn has been 0% after 2 months. I did have to do a lot of hand holding during onboarding that would never scale, but I was willing to do that to learn where the sticking points were. Bottom line: We tend to get comfortable in our development and design roles and can be flippant about how truly difficult activities likes sales and marketing usually are. Try it yourself for a while and see if you still have that attitude!

jomamaxx 10y ago
It's crazy that devs would ever think sales is easy. Sales is usually a lot harder than development. It's why they get paid so much. Unless you're selling something easy, and have deep contacts etc.. It's a rough, rough business, selling.