Disciplined Entrepreneurship Startup Tactics

TACTIC 6Sales: Early Customer Demand Generation

Entrepreneurs need a systematic approach to outbound sales outreach. It begins by targeting their ideal Persona exclusively and with precision. This tactic explores how to visualize your sales pipeline in a way that allows you to track progress toward your sales goals, build a highly targeted lead list, and construct an outreach strategy to source early customers. Entrepreneurs can explore tools to assist with sales automation making this process simpler, which has been made possible by emerging technology.

In This Tactic, You Will:

• Build your pipeline and use it to estimate value of each lead and prospect.
• Build a lead list of companies and/or individuals who are potential customers for your venture.
• Craft a sequence of compelling outreach messages to send to those on your lead list.
• Reach out to potential customers!
• Evaluate outreach to potential customers using standard metrics and revise based on the results.

“What Does Your Pipeline Look Like?”

I was once asked, “What does your pipeline look like?” At that moment, I realized I did not have a full appreciation of the way marketing and a sales pipeline contribute to the development of a business. As the CEO and/or founder, it is your job to manage pipelines.

In addition to customer pipelines, however, you must also manage the pipelines for product development, recruiting ...