A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:32:24 · Daniel Saks
[00:32:24] S0: yeah so I think like the best outbound companies are ones that have massive TAMs and massive value props so they have their own pull I'd call like Rippling, Ramp, Frigade they're probably the powerhouses for sophistication in outbound prospecting and they have the credibility to go out there and they have the hook that's going to be very strong I think for most companies that's not the reality they either have a small TAM which means you have to be much more careful on how you activate that TAM or if they go after too wide of a TAM they're going to fall into issues where the pull is not strong enough and therefore they have a lot of people marking in the spam and therefore the campaigns get burned and they don't see a lot of success so what we believe is you need to go with precision and even if you have a small TAM oftentimes that small TAM could actually be large companies with many people and you have to figure out okay who within this company do I go after so traditionally there was like ABM motions account-based marketing so what we've found is you can use land-based to intelligently approach account-based marketing and even though your TAM might just be a thousand fortune 1000s within those 1000s there may be millions of people that you have to figure out who am I going to navigate to and the titles are not obvious or indicative of who owns what the outcome is so that's where you want to bring intelligence to the forefront to say okay who should we go after in which priority have they talked about this on LinkedIn is their job description open for the pain point that I have that we can solve and that level of precision can make you as a seller or founder-based seller or SCR team or AE far more efficient because you're going after the right people at the right time with the right value problem
00:34:03 · Pablo Srugo, Daniel Saks
[00:34:03] S2: so that's kind of step one is kind of build that TAM and understand what it is and what kind of game you're playing what would be step two [00:34:09] S0: yeah so key thing with that TAM is to score it and prioritize it and understand who are the top accounts in which you want to put a lot of effort to traditionally called account-based marketing and what we even do is we say okay for our top tier A accounts I'm the one that's going to do the outreach because they're so strategic and important and we're going to put effort to go in person and meet them because the contract value can be big the next tier would be people that my team can go after and they're in the sweet spot and then there's lower tiers in which hey it'd be nice if they reach out to us but we're not going to we're going to do that on autopilot using the AISDR functionality of you're prospecting out on LinkedIn or email but maybe not giving calls or not spending in person time so the key is prioritizing your reps time because to drive pipeline you know the limitation is always going to be your time and capacity you want to make sure that you're focusing on the right things
00:34:09 · Daniel Saks, Pablo Srugo
[00:34:09] S0: yeah so key thing with that TAM is to score it and prioritize it and understand who are the top accounts in which you want to put a lot of effort to traditionally called account-based marketing and what we even do is we say okay for our top tier A accounts I'm the one that's going to do the outreach because they're so strategic and important and we're going to put effort to go in person and meet them because the contract value can be big the next tier would be people that my team can go after and they're in the sweet spot and then there's lower tiers in which hey it'd be nice if they reach out to us but we're not going to we're going to do that on autopilot using the AISDR functionality of you're prospecting out on LinkedIn or email but maybe not giving calls or not spending in person time so the key is prioritizing your reps time because to drive pipeline you know the limitation is always going to be your time and capacity you want to make sure that you're focusing on the right things [00:35:00] S2: let's talk about one and two yeah so like the ones that you've decided because I that's very common like almost every founder I work with how some accounts they're like whatever enterprise means to them it's like these are the ones that would just change the game for us so I'm going after them but what does excellence look like in that world like for you you're like these are my 10 accounts whatever that is maybe it's 50 but I mean actually I'm curious how many accounts is that and what are you doing with each account
00:35:23 · Daniel Saks
[00:35:23] S0: yeah so I think the key for excellence here is making sure that it's genuine so you're reaching out to the right person right time with the right message but you've put a lot of thought into the value crop so in those accounts we actually use AI to create case studies where we can go in and we have different elements so we can pre-run a TAM map for these CEOs in our case right and we'll say here's what we've seen as your TAM here's the hard to reach TAM here's how we can help you get there here's the business case that's customized of how you get there we create these little like landing pages in some cases that are customized pilots in a way to showcase hey here's the data that we can get for you that you can't get elsewhere and we would do that only for the top accounts because there is a cost to you know running that we also have checks and balances where humans would have over time like looked at that reinforced it edited it and then it gets to a point where it's pretty precise without human intervention and that's the level of focus that I have so for example like over my career and people sometimes say like cold email you know does it work does it not I mean I had Michael Dell cold email me Aaron Levie cold email me some of the best opportunities I've had have been going outbound and emailing people so the key though is it needs to be right person right time genuine interest the other thing which correlates to this feeling of magnetic momentum or product market fit is it's much more powerful if you can have someone come to you so I gave the example of we launched Bell and because of that we talked about it and then AT&T and Comcast came I think one of the things that I've seen is the big secret sauce in a lot of companies growth is you work really hard on one company you evangelize that case study but then you go and you share that case study with others so one of the outbound motions that works very well is to showcase hey we understand who you are and who you're targeting we've serviced similar companies to you and had this level of success and articulating that very succinctly
00:37:15 · Pablo Srugo
[00:37:15] S2: how are you doing that like walk me through like the specifics on that because the idea makes a lot of sense but just you know are you getting a warm intro to someone are you like running into them at a conference are you just like straight up cold outbound being like hey we work with XYZ like you know like does anybody even read that I mean what's the approach to get that message even just listen to on the other side
00:37:33 · Daniel Saks, Pablo Srugo
[00:37:33] S0: yeah so it's surprising that if you have cloud code and cloud code or codex is like indexing a lot of your stuff your calls your slack your CRM it's gonna know a ton about what's working what's not and who you should go after and we also put all of our customer case studies in skill files in our Claude so what I'd recommend is like a step one for a company and this could be really any company of any size but it's how do you give agents context to your win-loss to your customers your call records the agents can very effectively reason over your data to be able to say okay this is what each person needs but you do need to put in place checks and balances to make sure that the output is strong and it doesn't come across as a slopp so we work with our partners depending on their level of technical maturity to think through skill files and templates and ways to identify how to best activate their outbound motions but it's possible today to have really good understanding of like who your best customers are and why and therefore other customers that look like them that should have similar value and you know cloud code or codex can just do that for you they can apply with land basis data plus your data they can understand okay here are similar companies the ones that you're going after today here are similar people use this case study data and go after them [00:38:53] S2: and you're going after them like just here's a cold email here's a case study over cold email for example for your 10 accounts yeah