
The myth of low-hanging fruit - duck
https://m.signalvnoise.com/the-myth-of-low-hanging-fruit-443459fe205a#.m1gdv9lsa
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spking
This has been my experience in doing cold outbound sales myself for one of our
SaaS apps.

It's a grind. I spent 30 days straight doing no development, no product work,
no distractions. Just outbound sales. It's very easy to trivialize all of the
steps involved in prospecting until you actually have to do it.

1) Build a prospect list. A good one will likely cost money, either in the
form of a service like BuiltWith or hiring a research and data entry
contractor.

2) Identify the correct contact(s) at each company. Usually at least 50% or
more of the data is stale. This means loads of time tediously browsing
LinkedIn profiles, cross checking company About/Team pages, and data.com.

3) Using tools like EmailHunter or digging through countless directories to
find actual email addresses.

4) Running email addresses through a service like neverbounce to weed out the
crap email addresses that could get your sending email address spamlisted from
a high hard bounce rate.

5) Writing a good email sequence and populating it into yesware or replyapp,
then importing your clean contacts in.

6\. Monitoring the email sequence and jumping on leads as they come in, trying
feverishly to schedule day and time for demos, and testing different copy
variations to see what converts best.

7\. Actually doing demos, wrangling gotomeeting and answering tons of
questions.

8\. Doing follow-up emails and calls to try and close the sale.

9\. Rinse and repeat.

I was able to get 5 clients in those 30 days of effort, and so far the churn
has been 0% after 2 months. I did have to do a lot of hand holding during
onboarding that would never scale, but I was willing to do that to learn where
the sticking points were.

Bottom line: We tend to get comfortable in our development and design roles
and can be flippant about how truly difficult activities likes sales and
marketing usually are. Try it yourself for a while and see if you still have
that attitude!

~~~
jomamaxx
It's crazy that devs would ever think sales is easy.

Sales is usually a lot harder than development.

It's why they get paid so much.

Unless you're selling something easy, and have deep contacts etc..

It's a rough, rough business, selling.

