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A Better Way to Get Your First 10 B2B Customers

Published on
October 5th, 2024
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You’ve built a B2B product, and now you need some customers. So, you scrap 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.
The next day, 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?”
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?

Here’s a different approach:

  1. Look at your list of thousands of companies, and pick 10 or 20 of them (probably 20 max)
  2. Set a goal that says, “I want to get initial meetings with all 20 of these companies in the next 30 days.”
  3. 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 “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 3,000 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 aim to get 2-6 highly qualified 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:

  1. Pull a list of 20 good-fit companies for your product
  2. Set a 30 day goal: “Generate initial conversations with 6 of these companies”
  3. Build a list in Apollo/Zoom info/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)
And finally, map 1 or 2 creative tactics of how you'll approach each company. How will you get their attention?

Example:

Zapier
  1. Contacts: Nikki + 11 other contacts
  2. Tactics to try: Get an intro to Nikki from XYZ investor, etc.
Rippling
  1. Contacts: Mike + 7 other contacts
  2. Tactics: Ask Mike if I can interview him for an upcoming blog about X, Y, Z.
Pagerduty
  1. Contacts: Aakash + 12 other contacts
  2. Tactics: 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 change 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.
Content marketing: Get people to come to you. Post content that makes people laugh, gives great insights, shares something they haven’t seen before, or post something that’s helpful to their business. I wrote a whole post about going from $0 to $5M with content marketing in my last company.
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 get 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.
Sure, not all of these will work for you, or your industry, or your product, or your buyer.
But if you pick 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.
Chris Bakke is the former founder of Laskie (acquired by Twitter) and Interviewed (acquired by Indeed).
Comments (6)
Juhi Sen
That will be helpful to me. As m trying to be in something that i have never done in my life.
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Jonathan Richards
Great suggestions, Chris. Love the purposeful focus on 'things that don't scale'. And 'adding value before you extract'. I'd love to see a version of this article for B2C!
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