You only need to focus on sales

Doing SEO and building an audience first is taking a detour. You are completely right that directly talking to potential customers is the way to go.

However, I would not rule out other avenues of customer acquisition such as SEO. Through SEO I am now found by a different ICP than who I am actually focused on talking to. If I'd "only talk" to my envisioned target customers I'd probably never figure out that a very different target customer group is out there.

Agree with you, Steve! Communicating with potential customers is very important and especially trepidatious in the early stages.

In my experience, scripts don't work here. A salesperson for a startup should be as loyal, empathetic, optimistic, and communicate in a way that allows you to get to know your client better.
A startup without sales, I agree, is doomed.

This is excellent advice, we'll use it in our company as well.

Nice post Steve! We have been focussing on getting early users for our product and get feedback as we are in early alpha satge

What about innovation around growth rather just selling ?

getting the product right is the key. if it sells, nothing else matters. of course, to scale, SEO and design and other things are important but key is to get the product right ehich sells. Awesome post @steveprocter

100% correct. Thank you.

This is great Steve - I love the specific example emails, and the different types of outreach. Thanks!

This is great advice! Thanks... like so many others, I needed to hear this! Only thing that matters is the money your customers give you!

Great post Steve - you’re on it. No sales = no money. Pick up the phone (yup, I cold call folks for what I’m working on), and start. I literally googled realtors in my area, and went down the list to call them. Super unsexy, and not very comfortable, but effective. Good luck with your new venture!!

Absolutely. Sales is the way to go early on as it gives you a dialog with customers too.

It's not just outbound outreach though. It's important to follow up and talk to people finding you through other channels. Those leads already know you and are interested in your product!

This is helpful and the other way to sky-rocket your SaaS product would be by launching an LTD to increase your user base.

Good post and agreed. Even as a veteran marketer whenever I have struggles it’s because of focusing to much on marketing and not on sales. Even just a little marketing, if you can do good sales it’s so much easier to succeed, why I envy people a good at sales whether it’s writing good sales copy for an automated funnel or direct in person sales.

This is why I have now stopped 90% of my marketing activities recently and dedicated myself to mastering cold outreach and sales, it’s the missing key.

This is an incredibly useful post. People are either interested or they are not. We send something similar to our prospects but what happens in the subsequent contact is easy. Once you get that initial reply just be yourself because the person wants to learn more!

This is an interesting take on things. Just one question in regards to the marketing side of things. SEO takes a long time to get going so would it not make sense to work on SEO in the background of your sales efforts so you can see the results faster?

I always feel so intrusive when cold emailing

But in your view, how do you effectively get potential customers on an idea validation interview, judging that people would be conservative about their time?

Thanks for the insight steve, want to try it, so could you give us some template(or sentences) you are using to direct outreach a potential clients?

👍

Thanks for your advices! I need to improve my sales 👍🏻

So true about the pattern. As a person with tech background, now that I'm trying to be more vocal about my startup I see that focusing on sales is all about being consistent and interacting more with people.

Thanks for sharing your experience and I wish you luck with venture cards!

Great article Steve! How do you strike a balance between talking to users and building? Sometimes I find I get in a circular loop where I don't build because I'm waiting for user feedback but potential users don't give feedback because I haven't shown them what I've built.

This is actually sound advice! Nothing else but sales matters when you launch a new product. Everything else is just vanity metrics!

Thanks Steve! I'm certainly going to try this. I had to do cold-calling once and it found it a depressing experience, I took the rejections as a sign of personal failure. Maybe email will suit me better.

Nice perspective. I think though that you should try different avenues in a reasonable timeframe and see what are the effects. In this sense, I agree that building an audience takes a long time and should not be a core growth driver. But if you have built one in the background and can use it as an additional channel (i.e. audience fits your product), why not try?

Great post! Ive been doing cold email and it’s tough, although it depends on the industry - cold emailing to ecommerces is more challenging and difficult to get a reply than sending to SAAS companies (assuming both are small medium companies).

I’ve been doing cold calling and you get more replies, but, more rejections too😅 you need to be really passionate and believe on what you are selling. I’m going to try outsourcing this from next week to see how it goes 👍👍

Best advise. Ever.

Great post!

It's great advise, will use it for my startup Utopiops.

So far I had just focused on promoting on Twitter and ofc it's not effective at all specially if you don't have a large following.

Will reach out directly from today.

Good luck!