A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:41:39 · Pablo Srugo, Daniel Saks
[00:41:39] S2: and what's the answer to it in the sense that if you've got like how many accounts are you personally going after [00:41:44] S0: I would have 100 in my top heat map and I would limit it not just to accounts but to the people within the accounts so I'm going after the exec sponsors but then I have my team that would go after the people on the ground so my outreach would be more to a CEO or potentially a CRO and then my team would map in different levels [00:42:02] S2: how far would you take it like just to follow up on that you're going after a CEO you hit him up three times like would you just hit him up X times over each quarter so we've seen
00:42:11 · Daniel Saks
[00:42:11] S0: all the data on this you could do different it's called a sequence so we enable omnichannel sequences meaning hit them up first you know with email then a call then LinkedIn connect with them on LinkedIn but don't send the message until later we've done testing on all of it and what we found is generally three sequences is going to get you 90% of it if you go to five maybe you get an extra 10% but you risk people flagging you for spam so I'd say like the sweet spot is probably three maybe four if you have the right message and then I'd say that what people underestimate is that they could send emails and not get email responses but people do see it and then you become a familiar name when you call you can reference that email and one of my first jobs back in the day this is when I was in college was a wealth manager at Royal Bank of Canada I worked for a wealth manager doing old school prospecting and he literally gave me a physical phone book and said go find rich people in a zip code and start calling out at the time you know what I learned is that if you were to just say hi I'm Daniel Saks calling on behalf of Ami Shore from RBC you know do you want to talk it would be like a weaker signal but what we actually did is send physical mail first and we'd say hey I'm calling from RBC did you see the message we sent to you with like a portfolio review offer and then they say oh well I don't maybe I saw it maybe I didn't but that facilitates a better hook for a conversation so I think the key thing is you can warm people up to the calls by using multi-channel touches and the key thing here is always to just build trust and credibility so what I'm doing with my whole team is encouraging them to build brands within LinkedIn and I find that my sales team members that have bigger LinkedIn following are the ones that get better credibility because people look them up right away and want to work with them my team has tons of outbound calls going all the time and I get snippets of them and I you know look at them for QA but just this morning there was like one of our target accounts was reached out by by one of my SDRs and the guy said well let me just make sure you're legit I'm going to look you up and he goes like looks up land bait looks up the guy's name Max Wu and Max has 10,000 followers on LinkedIn and he's like oh yeah you're legit you're a thoug
00:44:16 · Daniel Saks, Pablo Srugo
ht leader I see this I see you're funded by you know series A company that builds trust so the more you can do to build trust is what's going to drive the efficacy of the cold outreach the example that I give there is like Michael Dell cold email me his email was Michael at Dell.com and I like double shot saying is this really him but fuck yeah I'm going to respond but if it's a unknown SDR from a really weak company there's not a chance that I'm ever going to read that message so you have to think of ways to build credibility and often that time that's just leveraging and building an online profile so you know the CEO you as a CEO or even you as your sales team can be credible thought leaders that people want to spend the time to talk to [00:44:56] S2: I think you know the lesson there for me at least is like you have to find a way because it's true anything that you get that you feel like is cold outbound you just my default is ignore just ignore it how do you turn something so that it's for whatever reason just slightly above cold outbound right obviously if you have just like you know you're Michael Dell it's like okay cool like this person's reaching out to me directly like I'm it's a no brainer right but like anything you can do like you said you know warm it up through email whatever have a like online visibility so that people are like maybe I've seen that name before I feel like I know this person or like just anything like that already puts you in a different ballgame and you're going to see new response rates
00:45:31 · Daniel Saks
[00:45:31] S0: yeah no exactly yeah people often say oh cold outbound doesn't work I don't pick up the phone but you'd be surprised at how many people really do and if it's the right person the right message at the right time it's credible and look honestly I've hired people based on them cold emailing me I've worked with a lot of vendors based on cold emailing me so I think it's a very effective channel there's just too much lack of trust and there's too much proliferation of AI slop and overload and spam so if you're being untargeted I think the benefit actually so what's happened in the last year which could be seen as a headwind for our company but I actually have seen it as effective is there was a point where there was so much AI slop and so much spam that we're all overloaded and there was a shot that like hey this is never going to work just because it's just our inboxes are flooded and no one's going to ever tune into this but I think what's happened in the last year is the spam filters have gotten way better at filtering out bad messages and putting in good and what we've seen from managing a lot of email deliverability and LinkedIn messaging is that it's not just if the message is generated via AI or not that's not how they distinguish it it's actually you know the relevance and the you know credibility of the domain one of the things that we did to add a ton of credibility is that you can get your domain authorized to get a blue checkmark in your inbox so you need a lot to do that it took us like a year to get but now whenever I send an email it's going to be a verified blue checkmark and that's done a lot to increase conversion rates and then other techniques that we have is definitely having better LLM indexing as you said so if someone's going to be searching how do I find or target this person they'll say hey use Landbase
00:47:08 · Pablo Srugo
[00:47:08] S2: simple question just on sequencing you talked about three kind of steps you get to 90% of value how quickly does that reset like I do three and then in the month no reply okay cool I put you in a pile at some point I'm going to hit you up again is that in six months in a year like what's the default there?
00:47:21 · Daniel Saks
[00:47:21] S0: it depends on how often you run through your list so for example one of my team members was doing outreach to the GTM owners at private equity to support their portfolio and maybe it took a couple weeks to burn through the list and what our AI would recommend is probably okay let's go back to the ones that are engaging that have you know we can see that they're opening emails or they're following up but the rest can go dormant for call it a quarter and then we can go back after them and if you have this live TAM map then you can see who you've penetrated so within each of these sub segments that you have I would want to look at okay if I want to dominate fractional SDRs how many are there? How many have I touched? How many have responded? How many of them are with competitors? And in the world of like a small enterprise TAM that knowledge is power so knowing okay I have a hundred enterprise companies that I can go after in manufacturing we've talked to 70% or we've reached out to 70% you know call it 50% have either said no or said yes you know of the ones that said no they told us why maybe it's like we're working with a competitor and it's a three year contract and then you can mark like okay in three years you know or call it two years so you have time to prep go back and if you're working within Claude Code and you have all this indexed Cloud will do this for you based on the way you can set up Landbase so I think if there were like call it maturities of sales development you know the old school way would have been go call from the phone book like I described manually dial you know the next would be you're using a zoom info to do the research you're maybe doing manual web research and then you're manually sending an email or LinkedIn or a call I think then the next would maturity would be call it go into clay pull in data sources have your TAM push that out I think the next frontier is just being native in Claude Code or Codex where you give it all the context and it's gonna run this for you live and it's gonna activate your TAM for you and the power of that is incredible and you would have previously needed a way way bigger team to be able to activate that whole TAM