You can never truly offload prospecting

It's too critical to the current and future success of your business

Most Founders try to offload prospecting and pipeline building as quickly as possible deeming it as “low leverage,” “tedious,” and “something a young hungry person can do.” All are kinda true once you’ve done it yourself and proven it works. Pipeline building never stops whether you’re looking for your first customers or your first $25M+ quarter (how much you’ll need as a $100M run-rate biz). 

You can start thinking about offloading your prospecting and pipeline building when:

• Your messaging is working — A CTO (and Founder) of a publicly traded company once told me “Messaging is Strategy” and this is absolutely true. You as the Founder must create and know the messaging and positioning that resonates with prospects. You cannot outsource this or your team will deviate from your value proposition and vision of why you built the company. 

• The “profile” of company and account who fits your product — Yes, you can consider this an “ICP,” but even companies at $10M+ are still learning who their ideal customer is. Focus more on learning the problems, profiles, and desired outcomes of your ideal customers and document them so future hires can follow. 

• There are few surprise objections  — You know how to handle 95% of objections that come up to unblock the mindset or education requirements for a customer to understand the value of your solution in comparison to their alternatives (including no decision!)

• You know how people want to engage with your company and buy from you — What are the steps for someone to want to learn, understand and use your product? This includes when someone asks “so, how much does it cost?” 

• You know your GTM stack — You want to know how all of your systems work rather than hiring someone to think through how to solve things outside of the scope of their role. AEs and SDRs should not be responsible for building systems. 

Note: If you have the good fortune of having a huge top of funnel from inbound leads and/or product-led lead, you still need to know a similar set of the above requirements. The same type of qualification process needs to be learned to ensure you’re building a qualified pipeline this month, quarter, and year.  Having worked with some of the best PLG companies in the world, I’ve seen many teams attempt to offload sales to inexperienced folks with limited enablement which led to a swift “restructuring” down the line.

If you haven’t figured out the above yet, a “young hungry person” is likely set up for failure. They may work incredibly hard, show some early signals of wins, but as the Founder, you are responsible for creating their path to success. You should show a clear path for them to follow vs a “figure it out along the way” mindset. SDRs and AEs don’t know what you know about the market, your vision, and why people will ultimately buy your product. You’ll start to see how stark of a difference their knowledge of objection handling in your market is as you hear the basics being missed – this is normal and why enablement, training, and front-line management exists in sales. If you have none of that, so you must be incredibly cautious of who you hire and how you offload such an important part of your future revenue streams. 

From experience, we feel more strongly about hiring a qualified Account Executive as your first hire who can run full-funnel sales. With the above, if you feel good about your pipeline building process, you as the leader of your revenue efforts can decide which areas are your biggest bandwidth constraints. 

What about outsourcing to experts? 

An outsourced firm never works for early stage companies. They really only “work” for transactional products (non-technical fast sales-cycle SaaS) and/or when they are following a color by numbers framework that you expect them to follow and not deviate from the script. Even then, you are losing full control over the most important lifeblood of your business: the pipeline that allows you to hit your revenue goals. 

There are clever and great approaches outsourced firms take but you should own your pipeline. Rather than outsourcing outbound, learn best practices on how to build pipeline the modern ways through resources like Clay University, Koala University, and other best practices shared from companies like Apollo. 

Get started now, it will take you no longer than 2 hours to start owning pipeline building:

• Work on your outbound messaging – you need one value prop email with two reasonable follow ups. It will not be perfect. Just get started (1 hour)

• Think about subject lines that align with your value proposition  (10 minutes) — Why this matters: as you start outbounding, you can see which titles are willing to engage with your email regardless of response. For example, if VPs of Engineering are consistently opening your email 50% of the time and not responding, you know your “hook” works, now you must figure out what will initiate the response. 

• Set up an Apollo account (10 minutes)

• Build your first prospecting list (20 minutes)

• Set up your sequences with your messaging (10 minutes) — Bonus, strong recommendation: Add LinkedIn outbound to your sequences and/or use LaGrowthMachine (extra 15 minutes)

Review your results daily (block 10 mins)

• Review the metrics and performance of your campaigns daily 

  • Open Rates

  • Reply Rates

  • Profile reviews: 

    • Who is opening (titles, company size, etc)

    • Engagement per profiles (any surprises?) 

  • Which subject lines and emails perform better than others?

    • Anything that signals where you should double down? 

• Share the results with your team

  • Seek feedback, share reactions, learnings so the team feels enrolled and wants to help participate

  • Prospecting is a team sport! Get your team involved – it’s fun and an incredible way to grow your business as you start to learn what works. Enroll your leadership and get going. You can also leverage your investors in a more effective way too :)

Maybe you’re already doing this and still feel strongly you need to take this off your plate. If you feel like you’re doing the above well and won’t need to coach someone step by step through the process daily, then start thinking about who you’re going to hire that can do this exceptionally well and can see very similar results quickly. 

Note: Do not give up. It takes 6+ months to see signal of effective repeatable pipeline growth. Experiment every week. Don’t rotate too much on too many experiments at once. Pipeline building is like dieting – you won’t see results unless you’re consistent.