Prospecting can feel overwhelming, as a founder. Because you don’t know where to start. Or how to tackle it. There’s an ocean of things you could be doing. And yet, you’re constrained by the resources at hand.

But overwhelming also because you need to figure it out. Fast.

Your company’s life depends on it.

Top-of-funnel activity is the lifeblood to your revenue. The oxygen to your startup’s lungs. The gas to your sales engine. Without it, you can just stick a fork into the idea of having a company.

And yet, prospecting doesn’t garner the attention it deserves. It doesn’t get enough love. Founders are quick to ignore it. Sweep it under the rug. Delegate it out to junior employees. And part of me gets it. The work is far from glamorous. Like eating glass. A lot of times, we’re sending messages out into the void without getting any replies. There’s no dopamine to keep us going.

Many founders undervalue the time and resources it takes to get to message-market fit. They end up flailing at it without much discipline or structure. Months of precious runway go by while the pressure keeps mounting.

Know what I mean?

Over the past decade, hundreds of founders and startup operators have come to me for coaching on their sales and go-to-market challenges. And I’ve done my best to help. In the series unfolding in the coming weeks, you will not get only the required frameworks to get you thinking properly about prospecting as a founder. But you’ll get the tools necessary to generate consistent pipeline for your company. So sit tight. Tune in. And, as always, be loud with your questions. Here’s your first installment.

Alright, I won’t keep you waiting. Let’s jump into the strategy of getting in front of potential customers.

There are exactly two ways to get in front of customers: inbound and outbound. Inbound is defined by potential customers coming to you. Outbound is the opposite. You go out to your prospects.

Each has its advantages and pitfalls. Inbound feels great because leads are coming at you. It’s like being the pretty girl at the bar. You get approached. And the attention feels intoxicating. Because leads are coming in hot, with high intent, you could drop the ball, and often they’re the ones following up with you to make sure a demo or introductory call is scheduled. These leads also tend to be further along their purchasing journey. They’ve experienced enough pain that they’ve taken the time to research potential solutions. In doing so, they landed on your website and have started getting acquainted with your product. You’re far from an unknown quantity. Some background has been obtained. They’re leaning in, and want to find out more.

The issue with inbound is that it’s hard to control who comes at you. And with that, you’ve got to learn how to qualify hard; keeping the riff raff out of your pristine pipeline. Tire kickers might be coming to your car lot. But you need to find a way to figure out if they’re real buyers.

Outbound, on the other hand, gives you complete control over who you’re targeting. Which is powerful. The trick is garnering a prospect’s attention. As your outreach is an interruption in their day. They might not know you even exist. And perhaps haven’t even considered they’re suffering from the pain you’re promising to eradicate.

Having said all that, outbound is easier to scale early on. And your time to value – in this case generating meaningful customer conversations – is shorter. Some startups are able to unlock inbound early on in their journey. They might strike a nerve in the market and get prospects to tune in and reach out. Or they might be able to get their ads to resonate with their audience. But in the greater majority of cases, inbound is harder to crack in short order. With runway constraints and pressure mounting to get traction, it’s the more risky path for founders.

Outbound allows you to – among other things – get fast feedback, unearth early objections, test messaging, and validate your ICP. Because you’re going into the market. And you’re not waiting around for it to come to you. To get your initial batch of customers, outbound is generally – although not always – your better bet. That’s where we’ll narrow our focus going forward.

Now, let’s look at market size. Number of target contacts, specifically. In outbound, the number of contacts you have will help dictate what strategies and tactics you’ll employ.

And there’s a rule of thumb you’re going to want to use: if you have at least three to four thousand contacts in any given vertical you’re targeting, automation should be considered.

“Now, why is that, Paul?” you might ask.

Well, the beauty of automation is that you can use it to scale your efforts. Hard. Whether it’s automating your emails, LinkedIn exchanges, or even power dialing, your ability to automate outbound gives you greater muscle and incredible efficiency. But getting to message-market fit with automation can take you quite a while, and quite a lot of contacts.

For automated email, as an example, it might take you fifteen or twenty one-hundred lead campaigns to come up with three campaigns that are working very well. That’s a total of 1,500 to 2,000 leads used to land on those few campaigns you get to scale up. Which then only leaves you 2,000 to 2,500 leads to work with. At 400 leads per fully-scaled up winning campaign, you’ve got 5 of those scaled up campaigns before you’ve chewed through your 2,000 remaining leads.

So all in all, having more than 3,000-4,000 leads to target gives you room to scale. But being anywhere below that plateau won’t make automation even worth doing.

So, if we’re not going to automate, what are our other options? Shall we just reach out to people in a more manual way?

That’s exactly where we’ll start in next week’s episode. We’ll explore the differences between more manual approaches and automation. And how to think about using each method. See you then.