Crafting an outreach plan
Need to talk to customers, but don't know where to start?
Problem: First-time early-stage founders often struggle with finding new people to talk to.
Result: They talk to way less customers than they want to
Consequence: They lose momentum and kill their startup
Cause: They lack structure in systematically reaching out to potential customers
Solution: An outreach plan, as built in this article:
Four steps
Define who you want to talk to
Identify the outreach channels
Set input goals per outreach channel
Create overview table
1. Define who you want to talk to
B2B/B2G
What is the role of this person?
In what organisation does this person work?
What is this person trying to achieve?
B2C
What Job to be Done identifies this consumer?
What is your consumer currently buying instead?
What characteristics of this person help you to find them?
⚠️ Every thing you write down here should help you to answer the next question: Where are these people? If your description doesn’t help with that question, it’s not the right description.
2. Identify outreach channels
There are three ways to go: digital hangouts, physical hangouts, or cold outreach.
Tips for Digital Hangouts
Be stealthy. Most groups don't like spam.
Some communities are mostly US, such as Reddit. Think about potential bias of the only hangout.
Open, personal questions work well: "I'm considering to buy X. What is your experience around product X/problem Y"
Try to get to 1-1 contacts with people that respond
Tips for Physical Hangouts
Great for quick getting a lot of responses (e.g. train stations)
Ask for permission depending on the building. Or don't. Getting kicked out is fun.
Camp outside if you are kicked out.
Ask for follow-up talks -> E-mail/phone number -> Commitment
Cold-outreach tools (LinkedIn/Email)
Folk (scrape details and build a CRM directly)
Hunter.io (email finder)
Bardeen.ai (scrape list of profiles from LinkedIn)
Phantombuster (find their emails)
Crystal Knows (get personality insights)
Dripify (automate everything, don’t start here)
3. Set input goals, not output goals
For each channel, you want to set goals. However, don’t set goals on the output. You don’t have full control over that, and that will be demotivating. You want to set input goals.
If I’m going to email, I’m doing that to get 10 conversations. However, not every email I send will lead to a conversation.
I applied some optimistic conversions, and it appears that for 10 calls, I need 100 emails sent. If you set goals, set them on input. Easier to control for, easier to hold yourself accountable to.
4. Finalising your outreach plan
All you need to do now is to compile it into a table. I’ve got a B2B SaaS startup in mind that helps to get feedback from small organisations. This would be my plan:
All that is left is execution.
Bonus Tips
Block time in your agenda to actually do this. This outreach easily slips into the cracks of a busy week.
Most people don’t like outreach. That is okay. Acknowledge it sucks. Not everything about a startup is supposed to be fun.
The conversation and its outcomes are fun. That’s your carrot. Think about that.