A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:24:44 · Pablo Srugo, Daniel Saks
[00:24:44] S2: if you want it will it email and call for you yeah [00:24:47] S0: so we don't have voice calling because it's not there's regulatory hurdles around that we can do automated outbound in terms of like LinkedIn email and then we have a dialer that allows people to dial what I'd say is the secret sauce and this is what we've learned over the years the secret sauce isn't necessarily like the AISDR functionality of just being able to do everything in one tool the secret sauce is really how do you leverage your unique data plus third party data to have a much more targeted list and to have the data that understands how to help you craft the message that's going to be the right person the right value prop at the right company at the right time and that's really what differentiates people who are successful with outbound from people who aren't
00:25:30 · Pablo Srugo
[00:25:30] S2: we have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show are you one of those people you want to be a part of the group you want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers so hit the follow button we'll probably weave the story in as we go maybe on tangents but like I do want to make sure we get enough time on quarter market on outbound specifically because I think there's just so much value we can probably extract there so imagine you're an investor right in a company so you have like you have a stake right and they're like listen we want to start an outbound function like we've got some amount of product market fit because that's always that's always an issue I mean if the thing you're selling nobody wants nothing nothing's going to solve that for you right but it's like listen we got this product customers are happy retention's decent we've got an amount of inbound you know we're working on that but outbound is beautiful because if you figure it out you can just control it right like you really can dial that up the numbers around it start to get pretty predictable if you can figure something out where do you start right like what are some of the obvious questions that you would ask like we're having we're gonna have a 30 minute conversation and I'm a founder that you've invested in and wants to do outbound right like we'll go from there obviously I have enough to pull that but just from a starting perspective like where would you start
00:26:36 · Daniel Saks
[00:26:36] S0: yeah so step one for any company is know your TAM so you have to understand and build a comprehensive TAM map that would articulate okay for my business here are the segments that I can go after here are the exact companies here are the people at those companies and to have that living TAM map is actually a very costly or difficult exercise in fact when I was at AppDirect I remember maybe at our series C we hired Grant Thornton a firm and we paid a few hundred thousand to build this TAM map that showed okay here are the industries you can go after telco software manufacturing here's the estimated market size today with tools like Landbase you can have Claude build that TAM map for you and as you mentioned there is a key which is like how do you prompt it to do the right things and a lot of our efforts are helping our customers understand the perfect prompt but if you already have a lot of context in your Claude code you could literally go to Claude code and say use Landbase to build me a comprehensive TAM map and it's going to look through your call recordings it's going to look through your CRM it's going to look through your win-loss records it's going to look through your website it's going to look through your competitors and it's going to say okay here are the top segments that you should go after here's the tiered prioritization of them and then it can do a lot of research and qualification so a lot of times traditionally in prospecting if you just ask Apollo like hey find me manufacturing companies in Ohio they're not going to actually be the manufacturing companies you want there's going to be a lot of fluff in there it's going to be really confusing so what we can do is actually go in automatically and do research to understand like is this the exact person or story that you would need so for example with Landbase like while we service manufacturing companies like Honeywell or ABB or Schneider Electric we weren't going into the traditional selling arms we were typically looking at what are the IoT initiatives that they're underpinning and you can't do that type of work on ZoomInfo or Grata or Crunchbase you'd have to do a lot of manual research and that's why in the past reps were left to do this on their own it would be very time consuming and manual but with Landbase and Claude this can be done centrally by the head of RevOps by the
00:28:46 · Daniel Saks
CRO by the CEO if it's a smaller company and having that visibility to your TAM map gives you all the power in the world to understand how you forecast how you think through your pipeline how big your TAM is and if you have to build adjacent TAMs how well you're penetrating your initial TAM and just as I mentioned the key to product market fit is identifying these tight beachheads in which you can dominate so with AppDirect it was initially large telcos around the world and then it moved into adjacent fields what's super important is understanding like are you penetrating that so like Peter Thiel through Mithril was one of our investors at AppDirect he always talked about the idea of dominating a small niche market that can really grow and then finding adjacent markets or adjacent products to be able to expand that's what I really refer to as this magnetic momentum so having a TAM map allows you to do it's a total addressable market it's allowing you to understand okay for my initial segment how well am I penetrating that how much more you know should I hit at it you can even find out through Landbase like where your competitors penetrated versus you and this is all really helpful for an executive team for a board to understand how to navigate so for example at Landbase one of our recent pull areas has been what we call fractional SDRs so these are top callers that maybe left you know a big company as a BBR and went out on their own and they find their own customers but for these fractional SDRs they need to spend time list building and that's very time consuming very difficult so there are these like power sellers or fractional SDRs Fletcher Cox Jesse Rupa Tony Brophy these are like you know people who have huge LinkedIn followings and are seeing a lot of success in calling what we found is we enabled one of them to use their CLI then all of a sudden they're like I'm going to talk to more of my friends now we have like this whole influencer network that's using it and promoting it and then it's impacting their downstream channel so it's an example where the fractional SDR market's very niche it's not big enough for me to say that I'm going to be a you know 10 billion dollar company from but the pull in that market is strong so I can say how well penetrated are we on these fractional SDRs and what's the next adjacent market that we can move to where we can
00:30:57 · Daniel Saks
capture a higher contract value or have a bigger TAM and then how do we penetrate that market going back to like how I started the conversation when you said like what does product market fit feel like I don't believe the product market is fit is something that you don't have and then you have and you always have it and it's just like easy I believe that you're always fighting to find product market fit in adjacent categories and the way you can feel it is the pull so the example of you know us with fractional SDRs is important and how do I navigate that it's using Landbase but I have my TAM map I understand that fractional SDR is actually a pretty small segment of my TAM but I'm dominating that and because of that dominance I can then go into the next market that might still be a smaller niche market but I can dominate that too instead of being too wide
00:31:45 · Pablo Srugo
[00:31:45] S2: one of the things on TAM is like with this this breadth and niche like one of the challenges I see is I've got I mean there's companies I was talking company it sounds like customer success AI for customer success or like everybody has customer success like my world is everybody so you can segment however you want the upside is you're not going to run out I mean you can you can go crazy on volume and just go I've got other companies that are like I sell to a market that's still a big market but it's like maybe there's thousands of leads if you really think about it and like you will run out does that mean outbound just doesn't work or it's like you have to do it a different way how do you think about the relationship between you know how many accounts there could be and how you therefore should treat outbound