Week 5: cold outreach and avalanche debris
It’s been one of those weeks where I don’t feel like I’ve made the progress I wanted, but I have got more organised with a strategy for outreach.
On Monday, I took a YouTube course on how to do cold outreach. Three things stood out:
- People don’t have much success with LinkedIn messages. Personalised emails work better. I used Phantom Buster to enrich the list of people I have in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, to get email addresses for everyone I want to contact.
- The sales process they described lines up with the user-research-focused approach I’m trying: find a way to connect personally, then listen to their challenges.
- Use a CRM like HubSpot to manage the outreach. I’ve set that up, imported all the contacts, and can use it to schedule the emails. That’s the focus for next week.
On Tuesday, I started looking for co-working spaces in Geneva, and events to go to for a bit of old-fashioned networking. I may go next week and try one out for a day. Inspired by the course, I also started thinking again about the proposition for Kollektiv: how to land it, how to describe it, and what problem we’re solving for people. I’m not happy with how I’m talking about that yet.
Then I took the afternoon off to go skiing with a mate. We skied over some recent avalanche debris that made the news. The avalanche killed one person, and it could have been us if we’d been there a few minutes earlier. I didn’t sleep easily on Tuesday night.
I took Wednesday off to go skiing with my partner in Italy. No avalanches this time.
On Thursday, I had two good conversations, both thanks to introductions from friends. The first was with someone at a tech PR agency, who shared tips on getting started. It was a good way to stay motivated and practise the pitch. When they started out, they created a report showcasing the top 500 influencers in tech, which gave them an excuse to talk to people. I’ve been thinking of doing something similar for a while, along the lines of what makes a high-performing team that ships great products and services (working title).
The second was with someone working in a small startup. We talked about transformation. He said one of the most impactful things he’s ever seen was a service map showing holistically how things worked. He didn’t quite get the proposition about building resilient environments for change, which tells me I need to articulate the benefits better.
Today, I’ve been trying to find good reasons to email people to start conversations. Life was much easier when you could just pick up the phone and talk to someone.
I hope you all have a great weekend.