A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:40:00 · Colin Zima
[00:40:00] S0: Yeah, but they hopefully like us and we had a large group of Looker continued. So there was some, there was some love and they want their business to run better too. And the thing that people forget about selling is that good selling is just connecting someone with a problem to someone that can solve their problem. And if we can just be trusted to help solve a problem for you like, someone will take thirty minutes out of their day to see if their problem can get solved. If I'm just asking for money that's not a helpful situation. If I'm saying like I bet that I can either reduce your cost or make you guys smarter and give you a better product. And make it really easy for you, that's a pretty easy message. People like free money and they like having their job done for them. So we just found a lot of people were willing to connect us with other people in their org. And then the other thing I would say is when founders of startups, especially ones that know their space well. Ping other people, very often your ICP customer early does want to talk to you and the reason is because people like discovering new products and they like seeing new things and they like being part of the build out process. Not everyone but if you ping a hundred people maybe thirty of them are curious about what you're building and want to see it. And you got to be careful about wasting your time like plenty of people will kick tires and things like that. But if you know what your customer looks like and you can get other people to engage that look like your customer, then you've now created this match. So like the qualification is on you to figure out who a good person to talk to is. Because again, there'll be lots of time wasters. But a lot of people want to discover the next product. And they want to see it early and they want to touch and feel it.
00:41:40 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:41:40] S2: I think this makes total sense. Let's get into the specifics. How do you set this up? Are you every day you're doing ten outreach. Every week you're doing a hundred. You have quotas. How do you? Because LinkedIn is not, it's like got so much data, but it's not really set up to help you run a workflow. And, you know what I mean? It's just not that clean. [00:41:55] S0: Yeah, yeah, I mean, we just tried to ideate on things. So, like, we literally ran a campaign where I sat down with a BDR and we looked through every single person that used to work at Looker. We decided whether we thought that they would, find value in our product and we sent them a note. [00:42:10] S2: Manually. Boom, boom, boom. [00:42:11] S0: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It doesn't take that long, like, two hours. You can get through two hundred people. I also printed out every single LinkedIn connection I had and was like, this person could be interesting, this person could be interesting, this person could be interesting. No, no, no, no. Yes, yes, yes and sometimes it's your real friends and you hadn't even thought about it. And you send them a message and you're like, hey, will you look at this thing with me? [00:42:32] S2: And that's the other question, the message is what? Like, hey, I built this. Do you want it? What's the craft in that message?
00:42:32 · Pablo Srugo, Colin Zima
[00:42:32] S2: And that's the other question, the message is what? Like, hey, I built this. Do you want it? What's the craft in that message? [00:42:38] S0: We tested every message you could possibly imagine. Some of them were about the product. Some of them were like, I'm a founder and I'm building something new. Would you like to look? That's what I'd say. You aren't going to know what messaging works. You need to play around. [00:42:55] S2: What worked for you? Did something work better for you or would you find it was all kind of similar? [00:42:58] S0: Shorter is better, more direct is better, less flowery language is better. So we just found honesty and simplicity to be the easiest approach. So that's where you need to be a little bit careful. If you ask for feedback, you will get closer to a tire kicker than anything else. Which can be good depending on the stage that you're at. But, the ask could be clear. If I think I built you something good, then like, hey, I think this would work for you guys. I would love your thoughts if that's true. People are afraid to say what they actually mean and you can just go on, and if you can describe your product crisply. And it solves the problem for that person, you can say like, hey, I bet you have this problem. We solved that problem. Would you like to see? The worst is that someone's not going to respond. Again, if you're doing this inside a social network, very often people will respond and you get an opportunity to say like, hey, did what I say come true? How was that?
00:42:58 · Colin Zima, Pablo Srugo
[00:42:58] S0: Shorter is better, more direct is better, less flowery language is better. So we just found honesty and simplicity to be the easiest approach. So that's where you need to be a little bit careful. If you ask for feedback, you will get closer to a tire kicker than anything else. Which can be good depending on the stage that you're at. But, the ask could be clear. If I think I built you something good, then like, hey, I think this would work for you guys. I would love your thoughts if that's true. People are afraid to say what they actually mean and you can just go on, and if you can describe your product crisply. And it solves the problem for that person, you can say like, hey, I bet you have this problem. We solved that problem. Would you like to see? The worst is that someone's not going to respond. Again, if you're doing this inside a social network, very often people will respond and you get an opportunity to say like, hey, did what I say come true? How was that? [00:43:50] S2: Walk me through the expectations, because I think this is another big one. If you were, and I don't. I know they have the numbers in front of you, but just high level. You sent a hundred of these. How many should you expect to respond? How many meetings should you expect booked and whatever?
00:44:03 · Colin Zima
[00:44:03] S0: Yeah, yeah. So when our BDR team was doing this, they were getting like a three percent response rate. So they'd get three responses out of a hundred LinkedIn connects. I might get a fifty percent connect rate and on a message, depending on the group. Like to the Looker group, I probably got a ninety percent response rate. Wow. Because these are people that I knew. To real LinkedIn connections, I probably had a ninety percent response rate and I had five thousand, six thousand LinkedIn connections. So, again, not all of them are data people. But if we find one thousand good people in there, there's nine hundred responses and look, there's probably two hundred people that are a reasonable demo there. That's enough funnel to get started. Because, all we're trying to do is start the flywheel at that point. But you need to be able to describe your customer really well and you need to give LinkedIn a little bit of money. Those are the two things that you have to do. Which money on LinkedIn is that just for the SalesNav account or were you running ads on it? No, just for SalesNav. We didn't start running ads for a couple of years, but it's like a SalesNav account and then you just need to ping people with a message that actually targets a problem that they have. And like you need to create your own credibility. So like, hey, I'm Colin. We tried a lot of the, I worked at Looker for eight years thing. That works really well to a Looker account. It doesn't work great to a non-Looker account. So you want to tune up your message a little bit based on what you're saying. But if you've been using Looker for the last five years and it's like, hey, I'm Colin. I led product at Looker for eight years. I built something new. It's awesome. Do you want to see it? You get a lot of yeses. It's really not as complex as it sounds. If you're not getting response rates, I think it's probably a good indication that there's a Product Market Fit issue at some level. But you got to be able to describe what you're doing also and we've found different success over different times with different features and things like that also. Plenty of people ignore you too.
00:45:50 · Pablo Srugo
[00:45:50] S2: The other thing that you did that I'm a big fan of, it's a weird one where it's like, I think anybody could do this. You were better suited to do it, but anybody could do it and it's done so little, which is hiring from your own industry. Tell me about what you did there and how you did it, why the thinking behind it all.