When your founder was doing sales it was great, because they knew your customer's problems. But, they couldn't scale... until now.
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Start with signs of product market fit, take your hypothesis to only companies with the most publicly visible signs of that problem, then send 15,000 good emails to 5 different test audiences in just 8 weeks with only a $4k budget for data (outside of the course cost).
01
Founders who want to rapidly test if their market has a problem or take founder-led sales to the next level without a sales rep.
02
Chief Marketing Officer/VP of Sales who are struggling with building a predictable pipeline.
03
GTM Teams who have to depend on SDRs to harass your customers to get on the phone.
Rank your Entire Target Addressable Market
You'll leave with every domain in your TAM scored by what's important to you, so you can find the top 5% of the market that needs you the most now.
Build Playbooks by Pain, Not Persona
Find customer pain programmatically, write sentences about that pain, find leads with a predictable process, and automate great emails to customers without having to send them 1 by 1.
Save on Hiring SDRs and Needlessly Expensive Data
You don't need a $30,000 ZoomInfo subscription, a $20,000 6Sense annual agreement, or $500,000 Salesforce install. And you won't need to hire, train, and fire teams of Sales Development Representatives.
Never (Okay, Mostly Never) Land in Spam
Create multiple outbound inboxes that pass spam filters and that you can scale (with good messaging). Get the hell outta here with your "quick question" subject lines. The worse your targeting and your messaging, the more you'll be eating spam for email dinner.
Low Cost, High Quality, Data Just For You
With a $4,000 budget we will set you up with modern low-cost tools to score your TAM, find perfect fits, create data just for you, and scale what works. With a little budget and a little ingenuity, you got this!
You Can't Learn From Your SDRs
Your sales reps (SDRs) are incentivized to withhold education from your organization. And, if they crack it, they get promoted. If they don't they get demoted or fired. You get no compound learning from this structure.
You Made Your SDRs Loud, Not Insightful
You spent tens of thousands on ZoomInfo, Apollo, and Seamless so they could talk talk everyone, but gave them nothing good to say. So they beg for attention and never talk about your advantage.
Your SDRs Don't Know Your Market
Founders never teach their first SDR what they tried, what works, what fails, what they already know about talking to tens or hundreds of customers 1 by 1. And then they say, now you go sell...
Will Megson
Saad Khan
Jay Gutnick
Max Kolysh
Ben Robinson
Foti Panagiotakopoulos
Audrey Danser
Irena Pergjika, LPC, LMHC
Founder @ Blueprint
I cut my teeth (who says that?) in growth in 2016 when I helped Zinc.com grow from 1 to 100M in GMV in 2 years. Since then I've worked with companies like Mainstreet, Vouch, Ironclad, TestBox, MarketerHire, and more to test and iterate on outbound at scale by pain, not persona.
In my free time I do this... and long walks on the beach. And sushi. But you didn't come here for any of that.
Founder @ Growth Engine X
Eric has worked with 100s of Bootstrapped and VC backed companies to help them scale their outbound Go-To-Market motion.
He is an expert in email deliverability, data sourcing, web scraping, and cold email copywriting.
When he is not building GTM engines, he is training for an Ironman or flying his FPV drone.
Before we do anything strategic, we need to setup you email boxes and begin warming them. This allows us to:
1. Ensure high deliverability (we aim for 50-80% open rates)
2. Ample time to get them ready to send at volume (750 emails + per day).
3. Set you up for success by registering new domains and building inboxes for testing.
4. Save your main domain from ever landing in spam.
Full Email Setup Guide
A good mental model to help ensure you get a lot from this course is for us to outline failure modes, and what leads outbound systems to fail.
These are the patterns you should attempt to avoid.
If you fix NOTHING, fix this one problem.
You Don't REALLY Know Your Customers
Talk to your customers, interview them. Get to know how they describe your product. What they were doing before you, what their alternatives were, why they chose you, how they found you, If their language doesn't match your language, that's a problem. Use wynter.com or forgethefunnel.com to understand your customers.
The rest of these are in no particular order.
You Provide a Bad Offer:
A bad offer includes asking for time on the first email, making people read a huge PDF, sending generic advice that doesn't apply to them, making them pay for something of value. The best version of a cold email is one that's useful by itself, on first send, that gives them value ahead of time. If you're promising future value, if your email is not so good that someone would forward it WITHOUT buying your service, it's much more likely to fail.
You Don't Talk About Customer Benefits
No one cares about your speeds and feeds. Sure, I can tell people about how much data I have, how many emails I have sent, my open rates, how I scrape data... but at the end of the day my customers want to know, "how can I acquire a customer for a very low price at scale?" And that's why people buy.
You Can't Quantify Your Benefits
"You'll get more" sucks. "You'll get 5% more" is better. "You'll save $12,320 a month based on your traffic and AWS costs given X, Y, and Z. Customers like X saved $Y" is best. Don't say generic things unless you expect generic responses.
You Think About Scale First, Not Value First
Don't worry if it scales, we can help you do that. Imagine you had unlimited time to write and research ONE email. What would the perfect, research focused, email say? How specific can you get.
You Can't Find Any Public Evidence of the Problem
e.g. If you say, we help companies reduce their average handle time for calls—SO CAN EVERYONE ELSE! If you can say, "I noticed that you use X software and there is a 3 minute delay in connection time on that software, which means that if you're losing 459 hours a month on transfer time alone." That is powerful. Find clever ways to actually showcase the problem on the first email.
Your Customers Don't Use Email Much
Trying to go after doctors or engineers? Or construction workers? These audiences aren't really amazing on email. Or like if your customers runs their business fully offline, it’s hard to find good data to quantify problems.
You Don't Know Your Market or Your Competitors
If you can't explain what your competitors are doing, trends in your market, or why you're different, you're doomed. Here's a good matrix to try and outline your value.
You Are Afraid to Cold Call
Cold calling is the best way to battle test your hypothesis that you understand your customers, that you can speak their language, that you know their problems. We will give you cell numbers of your ideal customers if you will cold call them to test your message on them. Or pay wynter.com instead.
You Don't Know the Data
There's so much data out there, bespoke data sets, on your customers and their problems. Yelp reviews, G2 reviews, data on their website, Glassdoor, case studies, communities, public groups, etc. There's usually a 10x better data set, a perfect example of where potential customers discuss their problems. Search out for this, don't worry about structuring the data, just find perfect examples of the problem online.
You Don't Have Case Studies
Case studies are ways to structure research about your customer. To know what they care about, how they talk, and how your solution benefits them, in their words.
The Switching Costs / Inaction Costs are Too High
It's also quite possible you don't solve a top tier problem of theirs, that the economy has shifted around you, and that your solution isn't differentiated in the market. If you write manual emails that are research heavy, about problems, and no one replies--this may be the case.
When thinking about defining your Total Addressable Market (TAM), here is what you should be thinking about:
1. Define your market: Clearly define the specific industries, geographical locations, and company sizes that you want to target.
2. Research company details: Gather as much information as possible about the companies on your list, including their size, revenue, number of employees, and any recent news or developments. Spend time on their website, look through their LinkedIn profiles, read news sources, read reviews on G2. Your perfect list of filters isn't in Apollo, but it's usually somewhere on the internet... we'll help you structure it IF you can find it.
3. Identify common pain points: Research the common challenges and pain points that companies in your target market face, and consider how your product or service can solve these problems. You might use Reddit, G2, Glassdoor. Or use services like wynter.com or forgetthefunnel.com to survey your buyers. Or just pay buyers to learn more. You need to structure the common pain points of your buyers. Without this step, we'll be guessing not for 5 weeks, but 5 months. Do this work.
4. Evaluate budget and purchasing power: Consider the budget and purchasing power of your target companies to ensure that they have the resources to invest in your product or service.
5. Audit your list to determine company fit 1-1: After you have your TAM, audit it. Determine whether the companies on your list are a good fit for your product or service based on their business needs and goals by performing the same research you did above. You want to make sure your list is accurate as this will determine the success of the entire engagement.
6. Analyze competitors: Research the competitors that your target companies currently work with and consider how your product or service compares. Remember they are going to market with a similar service or offering and if you sound like them, you won't be able to differentiate yourself
7. Prioritize your prospective companies: Prioritize your list of prospects based on factors such as their potential value, likelihood of closing a deal, and fit. Generally speaking, smaller companies will close much faster, but pay a lot less. Medium size companies usually have better budgets, but more people are involved in the decision making process.
The purpose TAM list is not huge, between 20k to 200k companies. It's just a way to ELIMINATE a lot of companies you shouldn't go after. In future steps, we'll narrow down exactly how to target based on their current pain.
How to Define Your TAM
Define Your TAM
This is by far the hardest module, because it will force you to challenge your own understanding of your customer. It will ask you to structure what you know about your customer.
There are many ways to collect audience insights. You can:
Website Survey Questions
The goal of your website survey is to document your potential customer’s life before they’ve found a solution. Here are the questions to ask:
The multiple-choice first question—Which of these best describes you?—helps you understand the level of awareness most of your visitors are at when they arrive on your site: how aware of your product they are, of the problem you solve, and how ready they are to take action.
The second question—What tool(s) do you currently use for [problem], if anything?— provides insight on what visitors currently use to solve their problem. If they’re not using anything, it gives details as to what life is like before your product.
The third question—Is there anything you dislike or want to change about your current solution(s)?—reveals how their current solution contributes to their struggle. It highlights what’s not working.
The fourth question—What matters most as you look for a new solution?—is especially important: it uncovers what message to prioritize on your website. It enables you to say: “Hey, we know you struggle with X! Guess what: we have your solution!”
The fifth question—Is there anything holding you back from [booking a demo/signing up] right now?—helps you understand the anxieties, unanswered questions, and other blockers that prevent your website visitors from taking action.
Now, you might be concerned about how a website survey could impact your conversion rates. Or maybe you’re worried about distracting visitors who may otherwise be qualified leads. Don’t worry: we have best practices and specific advice on how to run a survey that takes these concerns into account.
Just like with our customer research resources, you can grab a copy of these website survey questions and our survey best practices in the workbook.
When we say “Jobs-to-be-Done” (JTBD), what we mean is:
To understand the Job your customer “hires” your solution for—the one that led them to “fire” their past solution, search for new ones, and ultimately choose yours—you need clarity on:
Taken together, these three elements (struggle, motivation, desired outcome) summarize your customer’s experience into a customer job statement
The four steps we’ll take are:
Customers’ struggles will appear in response to these kinds of questions:
Customers’ motivations will appear in response to these kinds of questions:
Customers’ desired outcome themes will appear in response to this question:
Your choice might already seem obvious, but just in case, there are a few helpful factors to consider when making your choice:
Urgency to solve their struggle: From the customer’s perspective, which Job were people in the biggest hurry to solve? Which one required a solution yesterday? It’s much easier to sell a painkiller than a vitamin.
Willingness to pay for value: These customers understand the value your product provides, are prepared to pay for that value, and are most likely to have the budget to do so.
Less hand holding/sales burden: For product-led solutions, these are the customers that need less support to purchase or onboard into your product. They’re able to get the value it provides without constant emails or support tickets to your team. For sales-led, there is a clear champion solving the problem, there are fewer layers of leadership to convince, they have fewer questions, or they require less training.
High retention potential: Do customers with this Job have a long-term recurring need to use the product, or is it a one-off? Those with a recurring need will stick around longer and are more likely to build an ongoing habit around using the product, meaning they're less likely to churn.
Expansion and upsell potential: How likely is it that once this customer has solved their Job with your product, other struggles will arise that they can also solve by using additional features or upgrading to the next pricing tier?
Congregate in ways you can target: Do customers with one Job tend to gather in ways that make it easier for you to find and connect with them more than another? Demographic data may be useful to layer in here. Customers with shared job titles, stages of growth, or industry can be easier to craft messaging and target marketing for.
Other criteria, or the wildcards: There may be criteria unique to your company that could push your Job choice in one direction or another. It could be related to your company’s vision—you have a higher passion for solving one particular Job over others. You may, because of your background or experience, have an unfair advantage with one over another. You could decide to prioritize one Job based on where your product and team are today. One Job might be solvable using a self-serve, product-led approach with a lower touch (and cost) to acquire customers. Another may require a sales-led approach, needing a higher touch and leading to bigger contracts. One might leverage product foremost, the other a sales team, and your company might already be stronger in one of these areas.
Mapping the customer’s experience starts by breaking it down into three main phases:
Struggle
Evaluation
Growth
Within each phase, there are three questions you’ll answer using your customer data:
What is the customer feeling as they struggle, evaluate, and grow?
Questions you ask in your research (covered in Chapters 3 and 4) will give you insight into what your customers with this Job were thinking, what they were doing, and how they were feeling during their Struggle phase. Those questions include:
Let’s look at survey responses from SparkToro’s customers that give us insight into their Struggle phase:
Survey question: When did you realize you needed something like SparkToro? What was going on in your world that caused you to start looking for something new?
Answers from customers, revealing what they were thinking:
From those answers, we can tell what customers were likely doing:
And what they were likely feeling:
The trick is to read between the lines of customers’ answers. For example, from the statement “My client started asking questions I couldn’t answer,” we know this customer is managing clients, that they’re trying to make clients happy, and that they might feel stressed or frustrated.
Repeat this “unpacking” process for all of the questions asked that give insight into what customers with this Job were thinking, doing, and feeling during their Struggle phase.
Audience research helps you understand:
Specifically, you need to understand:
Identify Your Best Customers
Not all customers are created equal. You want to learn from your best: your “pry it from my hands” customers who:
These are the customers you want to learn from, since these are the customers you want more of.
Now that you know how to ask, here’s what we ask:
Questions from your research that give you insight into the Evaluation phase include:
From these answers, we can tell what customers were likely doing:
And, feeling:
When pulling apart feelings—and then their corresponding thinking and doing stickies—the Struggle phase will often break down into at least two milestones:
When pulling apart feelings—and then their corresponding thinking and doing stickies—depending on your customer’s needs, the Growth phase will often be broken down into milestones like:
Now that we have our TAM, we need to start exploring where we can find public indications of the problem we solve. DO NOT worry about how to scale this at this point, this step is really just about researching where there are public indicators of pain.
Here's a video on ways to sniff for public problems.
There are two approaches to problem sniffing, starting with companies and researching them and then trying to find cohorts of problems using Google or scrapers.
Examples of ways to sniff for problems:
Search Engines:
1. Google: site:g2.com inurl:reviews "doesn't work"
2. Google: (inurl:careers OR inurl:jobs) "implement SAP"
3. Google: site:linkedin.com/in "Zapier experience"
4. Bing: site:linkedin.com/posts "*w" "cold email"
5. Google: site:salesforce.com filetype:pdf intitle:impact report
Other Ideas:
Look at their about page, pricing, help articles, etc.
Then use tools to learn more about what's below the hood:
1. BuiltWith.com
2. SimilarWeb.com
3. Dataforseo.com
4. Pagespeed.web.dev
5. Glassdoor.com
6. PredictLeads.com (news articles, customers, connections, etc).
7. Craft.co
8. Crunchbase.com
9. Owler.io
10. Apollo.io
11. PeopleDataLabs.com
12. Government databases
14. Other Google hacks (another one)
Don't worry about getting stuff at scale, just find great examples and we will help with the scraping.
You can look in job descriptions too (like "our first sales" to indicate they are hiring early stage sales people). The add or removal of tech with BuiltWith. Changes in headcount with Harmonic.ai or LinkedIn, traffic changes, recent events like Dreamforce, recent raising rounds, key hires, their about page, customer reviews, ask past employees, email customer support, what's going on with their retail locations, data from Yelp or Google Maps, changes in the relationships of your customers.
There's data everywhere!
How to Find Problems in Public Data
https://gamma.app/docs/Cold-Email-The-7-of-why-they-reply-kfyekjxk5bu4arr?mode=doc
Hi {{first}}
Great messages hit on every one of Dr. Robert Cialdini’s 7 principles of influence
Cialdini's 7 Principles
The 7 👀 email framework
Subject: Intrigue
Bait, but not Switch.
Bad: Your dog's in the hospital
Good: Woofie's health
Investigation (can be Unity or Commitment / Consistency)
The targeting is the message.
90% of your time should be spent here. Ideally this can speak to consistency, what makes folks most likely to do something they have already done.
What do you know about them?
Insight (or Gift - Reciprocity)
What is your unique insight on the problem. This is your USP. Ideally this showcases, quantifies, and brings into question the path they are about to take / are taking and HOW dangerous that path it.
Intro (Authority)
Your buyers have been pitched the same intro from every other {{x}} company, why are you different. "Unlike traditional X companies who do X, we do Y."
What's a message they have never heard before.
Including (Social Proof)
We are trusted by companies that you trust (ideally)
PredictLeads: "partner", "vendor", "purchaser", "integration", "investor", "holding", "parent", "rebranding", "published_in", "other"
A MUCH better version of this the smallest atomic community they are a part of and invest in…
Insane Value / Interested
This can also be an offer to give more, for free.
P.S. Irresistible Offer (Scarcity)
Over the past decade, there have been major changes in B2B sales, making a course like this necessary for you to win against SDR-heavy organizations that will soon no longer rule the world.
You'll learn now only how to address these trends, but how you can thrive in a world where More SDRs ≠ Growth.
Get to know email deliverability:
3-5 hours per week
8 Weeks of The Mondays
1:00pm - 2:00pm Pacific
Each week we teach a 30 minute course on the topic and have 30 minutes for Q&A, over 8 weeks.
Friday AM Office Hours
1 Hour Friday 9am to 10am Pacific
Fridays are office hours for you to come in and ask questions
Weekly projects
2 hours per week
Each week you'll have homework that will take you about 2 hours a week to complete. It may take some much longer, depending on how well you know your customer. If building a repeatable lead gen process isn't your primary goal, DO NOT SIGN UP!
Email Setup Costs: $523
It's about $523 per year to send the 15,000k emails in this course, and then you'll have the infrastructure to keep sending. You must be prepared to pay these fees yourself.
Data Costs: $1,000 - $3,000
Data costs depend on your needs. But, for the most part, we have ways for you to get the best in class data for 1/100th market rates. Expect to spend, in total $4,000 in the next quarter on data.
We don't mark up the data or make any commissions on your purchases.
Bad Joke Fees: ∞Patience
Jordan makes a lot of bad jokes, it won't cost you any cash outside of the course fee to listen to them... but it will be very painful. So you may need to budget for an extra beer, vape juice, or some more yoga sessions. Plan accordingly.
Active hands-on learning
This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects. You'll all be learning a better way than hiring thousands of SDRs to cold call your whole market.
Interactive and project-based
You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams. We'll work with you to score your entire market.
Learn with a cohort of peers
Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you. You'll create and share tactics with other top founders and GTM leaders to learn from us AND from them.