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13 Comments

Let me craft you a killer B2B prospecting strategy 🚀

Cold outreach is still a super effective way to grow your business. In recent years I've sent a ton of cold emails for myself and my clients.

At first, it was crazy tough. I was getting terrible open rates, and my reply rates were through the floor! I poured over my copy, tweaking it every day, testing countless versions of my value prop, all to no avail.

But I think I've cracked it. Two things that really changed the game for me:

  • 🎯 Pinpoint targeting
  • 👻 Deep (borderline creepy) personalization

On targeting: great targeting is good for everyone. Cold email gets a bad rap, mainly because it's often seen as spammy. But it doesn't have to be that way, my friends! A well-targeted email will get your time-saving product or service in front of the right people at the right time. They will literally thank you for reaching out to them.

On personalization: This is what catches your prospects' attention. It's what gets them to click that subject line. This is what, when combined with pinpoint targeting, will light a fire under your product or service! 🔥

So why am I writing this and why am I offering to help you guys out? Well, firstly because it's in the Indie Hackers spirit, and this community has given me a lot over the years - I feel like I haven't paid my dues. And secondly, because - like you guys - I'm also trying to grow a product: a B2B data provider called Coldlytics.

Shoot me a message in the comments with the nature of your business & your ideal customer, and I will get back to you with:

  • A tailored targeting strategy that you can use to find prospects on Coldlytics right away. I'll also throw in some free credits.
  • A list of data points that you can mine via Coldlytics to highly personalize your outreach, along with some email copy recommendations.

Thanks for reading and see you in the comments! 🙏

  1. 1

    Hi Richard,

    This is awesome! My product is hotglue, a tool for developers to easily add native integrations to their product and put into production really fast. We are currently targeting B2B SaaS companies with less than 25 employees who either need accounting integrations (Quickbooks, Xero, etc.) or need CRM integrations (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, etc.). We do offer more edge cases as well for integrations, but these are the customers we are targeting right now. Thanks a lot (:

    1. 1

      Hey David! Sorry for the late reply. Hotglue looks cool, although I'm not sure we have a huge need for it now. Each of our integrations is a serverless app, provisioned via "infrastructure as code". So it's super-efficient in terms of cost, and to throw up a new one all we do is duplicate the repo and change the domain logic.

      Our integrations are 2 way - so we pull data down so our users can control field mappings, deduplication based on email/company, and so forth, then we push data up to a queue and a lambda picks out batches to push to the destination service.

      Hopefully, the detail helps - I will definitely keep an eye on your service and if you have any more questions just shoot me an email!

  2. 1

    Our product, Organisely is an appointment reminder & CRM solution for Small Businesses (specifically dental clinics, barber shops, beauty salons, and others). I would be very interested to see how I could use Coldlytics for b2b growth

    1. 1

      Hey @catalinionescu 👋

      Check out my comment below in response to @SteLofo - he has exactly the same target audience so definitely check that. I think it'd work well for you too. In fact, you guys should probably connect 🙂

      You just need to think about which area you wanna target. Can you target clinics and salons in your current city/locality? If so, that might be a good idea as you can always drop in for a chat.

      Anyway, use the invite code [EXPIRED] if you want to signup to Coldlytics and we'll give you 50 extra credits when you subscribe for the first time. You can hit us up at any time via the website chat too. Hope that helps and let me know if you have more questions!

  3. 1

    B2B SEO SaaS
    Ideal customer : SEO agencies

    Impress me :)

    1. 2

      Hey @Sheepp! Apologies for the delay - busy couple of days 🙂

      So I'm looking at SEOwl (I assume that's what you're selling). There are obviously a lot of SEO agencies out there - I'd focus on a specific subset.

      In terms of agency size, you're gonna struggle to onboard the big boys (they'll be hard work to convince + generally risk/change-averse), but you also don't wanna go too small, as it's a competitive space and many of them probably won't survive.

      Clutch.co has a great list of SEO agencies and they allow you to filter by client budget. Agencies servicing clients with huge budgets are probably not your target - they will need to provide a high-touch service. But those working with lower budgets are gonna be open to automation & having their clients receive generated reports. You'll also want to filter by headcount, as the larger (higher throughput) agencies will likely have their automation down. Go for 10-50 employees. Here's the link.

      Now, how do you find the key decision-makers? Paste this link into Coldlytics (our "Custom Sales Signals" strategy) and select "Owners/Founders" as seniority level. Once you have your prospects, set up an automated sequence using lemlist or similar, and make sure to stress how your tool can save these guys a lot of time and ultimately serve more clients! 🚀 Also important to highlight the free trial and no commitment, but you know that 🙂

      Use the invite code [EXPIRED] to sign up and let me know how you get on 👊

  4. 1

    Okay, here's a use case -
    I'm trying to promote this: redacted
    to people who own dentist clinics, barber shops, nail salon and beauty salons.

    How would you approach that?
    Will it help me reach those people? What's the advantage to something like Lemlist?

    1. 2

      Hey @SteLofo! Ok so first of all, cool product 👍. Here's how I'd approach it.

      Targeting
      In this case, I would definitely opt for Google maps as your "data source" - clearly your target customers are going to be listed there. On Coldlytics we have a strategy called "Custom Sales Signals" and there's an input specifically for Google Maps URLs.

      So concretely:

      • Go to Google Maps and search "Dental Clinic"
      • Adjust the zoom level until it encompasses your target geography
      • Click "Search Again" to refresh the results
      • Copy the URL and paste it into our targeting UI
      • Repeat for barber shops, nail & beauty salons

      You should also select a target country in our UI (it's redundant in this case but the validation expects it, so please excuse for now), and set the "Seniority" dropdown to "Owners/Founders".

      Personalization
      The next step is to choose your data points. By default, our researchers will find first names, company names, job titles, and of course email addresses. I would recommend adding "Locality" and "Business Type". That way, in your outreach you can write something like:

      Hey {{firstName}},

      I came across your {{businessType}} and I'm pretty sure I can get you more bookings. In fact, I already have a couple of clients in {{locality}} who are seeing great results!
      ...

      Outreach Tool
      You mentioned lemlist, with whom we have a direct integration. Essentially, you feed your prospects into these tools and set up automated email sequences, meaning it'll shoot out emails and follow up a couple of times. If someone responds it breaks the sequence and you can step in to engage.

      Lemlist is a great tool and I'd definitely recommend it. You should take some time to read their invaluable Cold Email Marketing Guide by @Azovtsev_Il.

      Hope that all helps and let me know how you get on!

      1. 1

        Nice! Really well presented.
        I will definitely give it a go and report results.

        Thanks for taking the time to go through it!

        1. 1

          @SteLofo Almost forgot - you'll need an invite code to sign up. You can use [EXPIRED].

        2. 1

          Awesome - yeah please keep me in the loop. We're really responsive on the website live chat by the way, so feel free to use that if you need help.

  5. 1

    Hi Richard,

    Am working on edfone, a homework app for K-3 tutors which allows them to collect responses as audio + image. As you see, it is a super niche. My ideal customer is K-3 tutors, schools. Thanks in advance and all the best for coldlytics.

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