A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:40:53 · Pablo Srugo
[00:40:53] S1: It's interesting. It's like we all have obviously a bullshit detector. We always always have like a spam detector, like built in all of us because we get so many emails and whatever. So you're trying to find a way for you to not get... Yes. Like, don't wanna get caught spammed by the actual email provider, but you also don't wanna be flagged as spam by the person. And and I don't mean them actually flagging you as spam, but it's kinda like, you're scrolling through your email, and you're like, yeah. Yeah. That's spam, spam, spam. This person's sending a thousand of these. Why would I even read it? Like, if you didn't take the time to write it, I'm not gonna take the time to read it. Until you find the one, like in your example, for example, these... This is ever changing because the bar for personalization just goes up. It used to be if you just had a first name in there, you're like, oh my god, they know my name. They must be... You know, I've done research. Now, obviously, that's not the case. But like in your case, when you were sending these out, having a screenshot with a logo in there was different enough and implied somebody took time and sent me a one personalized email. Okay, maybe I'll stop on... Like, oh, interesting. And maybe I'll actually read what this person has to say just because they took the time to reach out to me. That kind of signals that there's a reason for it. And so it's worth me investing my time as well.
00:41:57 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:41:57] S0: Absolutely. And so personalization I've seen done so poorly because sometimes you would just be, look at their LinkedIn or some AI tools also do this. Hey, you went to this school. I am a great fan of that school. Yeah. So so so that didn't become... And this is why we actually had to do it manually because we were literally in the night, I would create those screenshots, add them to the email and send it out. What are you [00:42:20] S1: finding works today, by the way? So maybe that's a good question because things have changed. Like, what are some of your best outbound, whether it's email or LinkedIn or whatever, what's what's your protocol these days?
00:42:28 · Tushar Mishra
[00:42:28] S0: So today, at least on the email side, hyper personalization down to the level of, okay, I understand you're a VP of ops. I have other VP of ops that I can reference, like, within my customers and what they are doing. Looking at the last few posts or LinkedIn posts that you have, looking at open job roles that your company has, we do a lot of this enrichment through Clay opening or looking at number of locations that you opened last year, number of locations that you're opening now. We actually also look at the FDD data. So, this is FTC mandated document that efragizer needs to have where they have a lot of details about like what the tech fee is, how much revenue does the location make. So, we take all of that data in and then personalize it. So now it doesn't look like generic, hey, you're from x school, but looks very... I have done enough research on your brand. Even if I haven't personally written that email, at least I've done that research in going through the depth of finding different information about you and putting them all together. That, but better than email, what works for us today is calling. Calling and along with calling, doing hyper personalizations in terms of sending them something. So, we've started to do dinners in cities and we send them a postcard inviting them to dinner. We had this golf ball that we personalized for that nameless that we sent out. So that level of personalization and actually sending them sort of something, especially for the contacts that are engaged that are now in my list. So almost have an approach. So you have email. There are certain people who will engage with that. There are certain people who already booked, which is great. Now there are these people who engage with that, so I'm going to call them. Now I call them, I get some insights about them. Some of them book, a lot of them don't. But now I have more material on them where I understand their business better. So now I do one more level of personalization versus now I'm sending them something personal. Right? I'm sending them a text message. I'm sending them a gift card. I'm sending them something to sort of bring them in. So almost like that's target approach, but just relying on email today is probably not the best approach just because there's so much noise there.
00:44:30 · Pablo Srugo, Tushar Mishra
[00:44:30] S1: How are you finding LinkedIn? Like, I've had some founders tell me that LinkedIn reach outs, obviously, everyone's doing them too, but it's like the upside is you're one click away from them seeing your profile, which adds a little bit of credibility at least. Do you find that that converts a bit better than email? [00:44:45] S0: Yeah. So we don't do that on an automated scale at all. We do it very manually. So we have SDRs who... So what we do in order to enable them better is we have... We centrally manage a lot of content. So marketing would write like we build like an internal thing on Replit where you'll have these different posts that you can post like as an SDR from your account to make you more credible. So when somebody is going, it's not like a generic SDR. The only post that you have on your LinkedIn are like some random sales job that you like because you're not getting your quota. Right? [00:45:16] S1: So Yes. [00:45:17] S0: That and then you actually personally reaching out. And also cross referencing a lot of people, which is, again, going back to the basics of the fundamentals, which is spoken to three people in your organization. Now I've gotten more information. Now if I can name drop them or I know that you went to event where you also met this other customer who's actually one of our customers, referencing them. And in in that level, you can automate a lot of that now to an extent, but at least on LinkedIn, we do it on a one to one basis. That makes sense.
00:45:17 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:45:17] S0: That and then you actually personally reaching out. And also cross referencing a lot of people, which is, again, going back to the basics of the fundamentals, which is spoken to three people in your organization. Now I've gotten more information. Now if I can name drop them or I know that you went to event where you also met this other customer who's actually one of our customers, referencing them. And in in that level, you can automate a lot of that now to an extent, but at least on LinkedIn, we do it on a one to one basis. That makes sense. [00:45:43] S1: I think, yeah, I think it... It's like you've won as many of these things. Credibility, I think, goes a long way. Obviously, if, you know, the example is, like, if you're Bill Gates, like, you can email anyone, they'll open it. Just stupid example. But, obviously, the more credible you are, the higher open rates. Right? Different, just for the sake of being different, also works because it at least stops the scroll, whether that's a LinkedIn scroll, whether that's an email scroll, anything that looks different than the rest of the things, just more likely to to get open. And then the third one is, you know, kind of this personalized piece, which is really more more than anything about, is this email perfectly crafted to me? Which signals either you took the time to do it, or even if I know it's done by AI, it resonates so much that I don't really care that AI did it. The message is so... Such a fit for me. I still have to look at it and respond, hopefully, because it just solves the problem.
00:46:29 · Tushar Mishra, Pablo Srugo
[00:46:29] S0: Yeah. It... It's it's signaling that you understand my business, so that means you probably have something that can solve that problem for me. Anyway, going back to the metrics part. So outrageous metrics like I'll 2x your revenue, that gets ignored. But very specific metrics that you can stand behind actually help. So some of the metrics that help us in like our email is, hey, we can help you grow location count with less headcount. Here's how. We can help you reduce time to open new location by this much percent or by these months because we help x customer do it by this month. Like, those things people get behind. [00:47:06] S1: Exactly. It adds credibility and it adds personalization. Like, for me, it's the same way. If you send me an email, like, I'm gonna double your views on on the the BMF show, I'm like, ignore it. But if you send me email and like, hey. We work with this brand and this brand. Here's a YouTube thing. Here is their, like, average views before we did it. Here's average views after. I'm actually gonna open that. I'm gonna click them and see if they're relevant, you know, my chances of reply are actually pretty high. Perfect. Well, Tushar, we're we're at the end of time here. Anything you wanna leave founders with? Like any last piece of advice that that you find yourself giving founders, especially early stage founders pretty often?