October 3, 2022
newsletter
Research is the game-changer in the outreach world.Namely, do your research right, understand your prospects right, and the riches will flow thereafter.Research is just 1 of the 4 cold email pillars I teach, chronologically: research, copywriting, getting-in-the-inbox and AB-testing. But still! It is that important that I’m about to write a small blog to cover it.What are some tips to become the best researching SDR?I start my searches on Apollo. Say I want to go after Fintech companies. I will first target 5-50 employees fintech. CEOs, founders and other relevant C-Levels for me which might include CRO, CMO, CSO, etc. I may target funded companies only. Or companies searching for specific jobs.Then, a bunch of companies will pop. I will search each company and check the keywords associated with each. In this niche, I might get “credit card” “insurance” or “loans” for example. I will decide from there if I want to sub-niche in these micro niches.After I’ve picked a micro-niche to target with my services, I will dig out the companies, and make sure to truly understand them.I will go on their websites. Go through all pages. Save blog posts on my Pocket app.I will go through their full LinkedIn team to understand the structure of the company. Do they have more sales people than they have product people? How many cofounders? I’ll dig out the backgrounds of each team members.I’ll then Google out individual team members on the exec team / founding team. I’ll also google the company. I’ll check out relevant links / save longer blog posts for bedtime reading.I might check the company’s website Techstack via apps like BuiltWith.com. I may check traffic stats and so forth.I may look at their social medias, and dig out every web-based information availableIn parallel, I will also start sending out invites for my podcast, to interview founders of these companies to obtain more info via the Socratic questioning methodI will also start writing various copy-angles and test them out on them, to directly obtain feedback from my services.After 1-3 months of sending campaigns to this segment, and more than 1000 contacts, I may become an “expert” in their niche.From friending these folks on various platforms, I may interact with their content, learning stuff and asking questions. I will get similar profile recommendations and only grow smarter on the topic.I may even go deeper and start reading top books on the topic. Listening to podcast and YouTube vids, I will have carved myself a spot at the 0.5% experts on the topic after 1+ year.I will also cross-reference this knowledge with other similar sub-niches I dug out.If some prospects become clients, I eventually become smarter than the founders of these businesses, at knowing what works at and what doesn’t work (product market fit)I eventually get multiple clients in the same niche, providing us an unfair knowledge advantage over the non-clients.The Apex of this research loop is eventually launching your own startup in this very niche, and becoming the #1 in the tight niche you carved out for yourself. This is the ultimate goal of my startup lab.Hope you enjoyed my thorough research process.What would you add to it?
