A better way to get your first 10 customers
Or: how to survive B2B sales hell in 2024
You’ve built a B2B product, and now you need some customers.
So, you scrape 7,000 emails of people who will be perfect users.
You load them up in your fancy email-sending-tool and write a solid cold email.
Then you press send, sit back, and start daydreaming about what it’s going to be like to raise a $50M Series A five months from now when all these deals close.
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The next morning, you wake from your Eight Sleep, hit your cold plunge, and move to your standing desk where you excitedly open your fancy-email-sending-tool dashboard:
7,000 emails sent.
“Good, good” you say to yourself.
27% open rate.
“Hmm, seems a little low, but we can work with that”
0.2% response rate.
You faint.
You’re awoken to your Apple Watch calling you an ambulance, and you quickly dismiss the notification.
“A point two percent response rate?! But, my email - it was so good. So perfectly generically interesting to these 7,000 leads. Do they not care? Do they not have a soul? Is something broken?”
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Take a step back.
How many “generically-personalized” cold emails do you receive every day?
How many of those products have you actually bought in the last year?
For me, the answers are “lots” and “zero.”
So what makes you believe you’re going to be the one to break through this noise and scale and start landing sales?
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Here’s a different approach:
Look at your list of thousands of companies, and pick 10 or 20 of them (probably 20 max)
Set a goal that says, “I want to get initial meetings with all 20 of these companies in the next 30 days.”
Go.
Wait, what?
No, really.
That’s your whole plan.
If you constrain your entire sales world down to 10 or 15 or 20 companies, you’ll start getting creative, and creativity is what you need to get people’s attention as a company that no one has heard of before.
Your mindset shifts from “well, that won’t scale” or “that will take too much time” or “that’s too expensive” to “I’ll do what I have to do to get someone there to notice me.”
Asking your investors for intros? Not really possible when you have 30,000 leads - very possible if you have 3 or 4 specific asks.
Writing actually-thoughtful DMs? You can’t really scale this in most industries (even with AI), but very possible if you’re only writing a couple of incredible DMs per day.
Commenting on their content? Hard to do with thousands of decision makers - very easily done with only a dozen.
Running ads on LinkedIn, X or other platforms to get decision makers to notice you? Expensive with thousands of leads, cheap (and quite targeted) with only 15.
Realistically, I think you can pretty reliably get 2-6 meetings booked in the next 30 days with this approach.
One founder I work with just booked 7 meetings in the last 17 days by constraining his world to 20 companies, but your mileage may vary.
Here’s (more tactically) what I would do:
Pull a list of 20 good-fit companies for your product
Set a realistic 30 day goal: “Generate initial conversations with 6 of these companies”
Build a list in Apollo/Zoominfo/etc. of all titles and contacts who might be a good fit at each company
Ideally you’re listing 10+ contacts per company
Connect with all of these contacts on LinkedIn
Don’t send a connection message with the request (higher likelihood of them accepting the invite)
Map 1 or 2 creative tactics of how you’ll approach each company. How will you get their attention?
This can (and should) be different company-by-company
Example:
Zapier
Contacts: Nikki + 11 other contacts
Tactics to try: Get an intro to Nikki from XYZ investor, etc.
Rippling
Contacts: Mike + 7 other contacts
Tactics: Ask Mike if I can interview him for an upcoming blog about X, Y, Z.
Pagerduty
Contacts: Aakash + 12 other contacts
Method(s): Send a plate of cookies to the office with a handwritten note
…and so on for all 10-20 companies on your shortlist
And you should get really wild with the tactics.
Your mindset should move from “I need to hit all of these prospects” to “If these companies were prospecting me, what would grab my attention?”
A few ideas:
Warm intros: warm intros get dismissed because they’re hard to organize and founders worry they don’t scale. The CRO of a now-$5B company has asked me personally for a warm intro to someone in my network every 1-3 months since I invested. The best teams make their network scale.
Influencer marketing: I’ve booked many celebrities on Cameo to deliver messages over the years.
Send delicious things to their office: donuts, fruit, cakes, specialty coffees, wine - so many options that can work well.
Send a super personalized gift: One of the best AEs I’ve ever hired got hired because he sent me a cheap Casio watch in the mail with his resume and said “It’s TIME to give me a shot” - still makes me laugh.
Host a dinner: I’ve done this for years, and continue to do so despite my funemployment. Get 6-10 leaders in your space together for a dinner. Pay for it. Everyone trades notes and you’re viewed as the host.
Cold call: Most founders believe cold calling is dead. It probably is for some industries, but I also work with a startup who’s doing $10M ARR off the back of cold calling in 2024. Not dead for them.
Hyper-personalized demos: if you have a product that can be hyper-personalized for a buyer, this can be a great approach. Sometimes a Loom-style voiceover that’s custom for them can be helpful here as well.
Invitations for interview: I’ve landed so many customers by asking them if I could interview them for a piece of content I’m publishing about x, y, or z. Most people are far more likely to say yes to an interview than a demo request. Start these relationships by adding value before you extract.
Targeted ads on LinkedIn or other social platforms: You can target individual accounts and/or do role-based ad targeting on LinkedIn and several other platforms. This isn’t likely a primary tactic, but I’d double up on something like this with my 20 accounts if my buyers spend time on LinkedIn or X or Instagram or Facebook.
etc. So many more here, but I’ve vowed to never have someone fall asleep while I’m discussing B2B sales tactics, so I’ll pause here.
Sure, not all of these will work for you, or your industry, or your product, or your buyer.
But if you choose a couple of these and really try to nail them, the results are often much better than firing cold emails into the void and hoping for a sign of life.
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Questions? Feedback? Want to work together?
chris@chrisbakke.com