Vaibhav Namburi: The Startup Founder's Guide to Finding Prospects on LinkedIn

Hello, hello everyone. Welcome to another Founder Institute event. My name is Daniel. I am a part of the marketing team. If you're here for the first time, let me give you a brief intro about the Founder Institute. The Founder Institute is the world's largest network to turn an idea into a fundable startup and a fundable startup into a global business. And today, keeping all of that in mind, what we do is we try to help founders you know, really kind of perfect the craft of, you know, finding customers, becoming better at what they do every single day, right? So keeping all that in mind, we have with us Vaibhav, who'll be talking about finding prospects on LinkedIn, right? Vaibhav is the founder of SmartWriter and SmartLead. Vaibhav's products are used by the likes of Facebook, WaynerMedia, Stripe, and more. So before we begin, like, why don't you guys let me know where you're all coming in from, right? I see in the chat we have people from Dublin, awesome. Pakistan, Vietnam, Nairobi, Kenya, awesome. Israel, we have Morocco, India, Amsterdam, Sri Lanka. Yeah, so typically what happens is our events are at 10:00 PM PST, but because we realized that our reach is kind of global, so we wanted to have these 6:00 PM Singapore events. So yeah, that's where we're at right now, right? Awesome. So while Akshay brings on Vaibhav to the stage, let me kind of go through the agenda for today. Vaibhav will go through his presentation. And that would be for around 20 to 30 minutes. It might go over as well. And then we'll do a Q&A. So if you look to the right side, there is a Q&A button. If you have any questions for Webob or the Founder Institute team, what you can do is drop your questions on the Q&A button. And right after the event is done, we have a networking portion. Hopefully Webob can stick around for the networking. The Founder Institute team will be there as well. And if you guys want, you guys can talk amongst yourselves, you know, share the experience of being an early-stage founder, or maybe even talk about the event itself, right? And if you look towards the bottom, you should see an emoji button. So if you like what Vaibhav is saying, if you enjoy what you're hearing, I encourage you to, you know, give us a thumbs up, give us a heart, let us know how you feel. Vaibhav, do you wanna introduce yourself?

Sorry, I didn't realize my video was turned off. Cool. Hi everyone, my name is Vaibhav Namburi. I go commonly by just my first letter, which is V, just to make life easy. Based out of Sydney, I've had the pleasure of working with a lot of interesting people throughout my entire career and currently help grow Smartlead, which is a cold emailing platform that helps people generate predictable revenue through outbound lead generation.

Awesome. So before we really, you know, let Vaibhav take over, we had a question for you and we want you all to answer, right? Here's the question. How many years have you used LinkedIn for prospecting? If you haven't yet, let us know. 1 to 2 years, 2 to 3 years, more than 4. And this kind of lets us gauge where our audience is at. So, okay, so it seems right now like half of the audience hasn't yet, and this should be pretty good because, uh, Webop will be kind of going over the basics and some really great tools that you can use. And at the same time, we have some people who have been using it for quite a while. So yeah, uh, we have a good mix when it comes to the audience, right? So what I'll do is I'll take this poll off the stage and wave up. I'll move to the back and kind of let you begin, right?

Cool. All right, give me one second. Um, how do I share my screen? There you go, right at the bottom. Yeah, yep, got it. We've got a whole screen. All righty, please let me know if you can see my screen. The vote of hands, hopefully. Yes. Yes. All right, we got a few yeses. Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic, fantastic. All right, awesome, great. I'll keep my introduction very short, short, short, short. I will jump into explaining what we do, which is basically I run a company called Smartlead. And I usually try to explain to people, when you're doing you're doing or listening to someone speak at a conference, why it may or may not make sense to pay attention to them or listen to them. So I by no means am an expert. I'm still learning every single day on how to go ahead and do outbound myself. It's definitely every single day is a new day to pick up new skills, topics, and strategies. But for context, with respect to what we do, we currently send about 10 to 11 million emails every single day through our platform. Grown over the past year, bootstrap business with the team of about 19 people, and we help thousands of companies across the world create predictable revenue through outbound lead generation using Smartlead.

Sweet.

So that's us. Now what we can do is simply sort of jump into some base points as to how does the concept of lead generation even work? How do you actually kick off creating a premise where you want to have a customer you know, use your product or work with you or even ensure that you're building something that people want to use. So with that being said, the first thing I tend to do is try to work out what your product actually does. So usually this is my thesis when it comes to create— this is a product or service, by the way, it can apply to any combination of what, of what you're trying to do. These are the general 6 core principles that I tend to look for. When we're trying to build a product, which is it makes people money, it saves people money, it saves people time, it improves their confidence, it improves their convenience, it improves their social status, and it removes pain, right? These are the main ones we look at. These are 7, not 6, but that all works in the same alignment of what is the core emotional driver when someone is trying to make a purchase or someone is trying to make a decision to give you money, right? As the old-age, the perfect value quote goes is you want to ensure that the value provide super exceeds the cost of the product or service you're providing. And as long as there's an asymmetry between the value provision and cost expense, it's always gonna be a win for you. And that's up to you to define that rule for the customer. Great. So now that that piece of the puzzle has been said, what I want to do is sort of take this example of what we have, which is SmartLead, that is a lead generation platform, and how we went ahead and went from the top, which is a pain point approach, to then finding out exactly who is the persona, as people commonly know it as ICP, ideal customer profile, and then dripping that down into actual roles that we think and believe would be the ones would go ahead and buy our product, which will then let us go towards the LinkedIn prospecting piece. Cool. So if we want to worry about someone who makes, cares about making money, we want to look for someone who's a revenue generator within the business. We want to care about someone who saves money. We want to figure out who's a business optimization person. If we want to worry about someone who cares about saving time, we want to care about again, business ops, which is operational management, revenue operations, and so on and so forth. Improves convenience, effectively what we want to care about over there is we care about people who want to focus on sales targets, right? Because we want to make it convenient for them to achieve their sales targets. Improve social status, what we want to do is want to find people who want to focus on getting more deals closed, putting more value to their name, making sure they look like they're the hotshot of that particular company. And if you want to find people who care about, you know, removing pain, the basic thing is we want to make sure that the company has no loss. That means we want to target people who care about not losing money, right? That's obviously a pain for most businesses. So with that thesis being said, then we drip it down into the next level, which is the actual roles within companies that you want to target. So people care about money, revenue operations, those are sales leaders, right? The second place is people who want to save money, business optimization. You want to look at the VP of Operations as a general example, right? Then we want to look at people who care about saving time within the company, improving the experience of the business, or improving the overall operations of the company. We want to look for the Chief Revenue Officer. As an example, right? Or anyone in the chief level, they will be the right person to think about when you want to focus on someone who saves time. Then we want to move on to the next one, which is improves convenience, uh, which, you know, as we said, uh, tries to hit sales targets. So that type of people would be a head of sales or head of marketing. Those are the type of individuals that we want to look for as profiles to target within LinkedIn to sell our service or our product. Then improve social status. Well, that comes to the main person. We want to ensure that they're in a good spot, and that would basically be the person who's closing more deals? That would be either the sales individual in themselves or it would be maybe the VP of sales or the head of sales, right? They want to be looking like the main person who's solving for this. Again, remember all of this is in context of our product which is a sales enablement tool. So it will be contextually different obviously for you as well. And then removes pain. Maybe we're looking for someone who's owning the business, who's a freelancer, who's a single person, who's doing lead generation for other people. Those are the type of individuals that we would want to chase as a personification of a person we want to target. Great. Um, so far, is there any questions that, uh, you, you have? You can just type it down into the bottom right corner, and I guess I can look into it at the later stage. Sweet. Now that that's been said, let's actually figure out how we want to solve for lead identification, because finding a good lead is pretty much what defines almost 80% of your success, in my opinion, right? And finding a good lead is just not getting an email address, but it's finding intent-heavy leads. That means people are— that are looking for exactly what you're selling at the right time and at the right place. And that's obviously the hotbed. And if, if we all knew the answer, we'd all be billionaires at this point. So how do we go ahead and find high-intent leads? There's several attributive processes that you can do that. To keep this demo obviously straightforward and within a time cycle, I will explain to you some basic approaches. But before we jump into this, here's what you need to understand. So this is from a book called Sell Like Crazy, just attributing that. Intent is basically people who are looking to go ahead and make the purchase of the product or pain point that you're trying to solve for or sell to. At any point in time, in general, in a market, 3% of the people are actively buying what you're selling, right? 17% of the market are gathering information to make a decision about becoming a buyer. 20% of the people are probably aware of the problem that you're trying to solve. And 60% actually don't even know that this problem even exists. You never want to be in this spot, but this spot is obviously the bulk of the audience, as you know. But for the concept of lead generation using LinkedIn, this pro— this part over here is usually solved through content, ads, and other avenues, right? We're not worried about that. We care about these two people over here, but more importantly, we care about this set of people here. And that's where outbound marketing works extremely well because it helps us easily gather information about a lead who wants to go ahead and make that decision immediately. And that's the premise of hot selling, which is you want to sell to the person right when they're ready to also give you their credit card. Great. So with that being said, let's go ahead and go through the next piece, which is how do we go ahead and use hiring as a premise to go ahead and attract the right person? So when I say hiring, a fantastic place to look for potential leads of companies that may want to buy your service or offering is people who are creating jobs for the exact role or pain point you're trying to solve. Take an example where you have a project management tool. If someone's got a job ad for project manager, you know they're looking for someone who'll handle an existing project or a problem they're trying to solve. In our situation, if someone's putting a job ad for a salesperson, anyone in the sales space, in the marketing space, we know they're hiring for a role to bring in more revenue for their business. and we can sell to them optimizations or pain point solutions. And I'll show you how you can try do that as an example. Cool. So let's just take a situation where we're hiring for people from our sales role. What I'm simply going to do is go into the jobs section of my LinkedIn page, which you can always do. One second, let me just try to find that as an example over here. One second. Uh, cool. So the view you see over there is the Sales Navigator view, and I realize that some of you may not have Sales Navigator and it might be, uh, out of budget or in budget for some. So you can also do majority of what I am suggesting over here simply through looking at the job ads that are here. Now this is basically jobs that I am searching for. So this is jobs for me. This is obviously not the case. I want to go ahead and look for people who are pushing, pushing out a whole bunch of jobs. So I can easily go ahead and put in, I don't know, um, sales. And you can also put in the location, but I didn't in this case. So this is the same exact view that you see over there. It's the same view that I have over here. Cool. All right, and what I'm basically showing in this little GIF is You can go ahead and set the job structure. You can set that you want to find someone who's maybe— the job is within 40 kilometers. You want to see when the job is posted, the experience that they're looking for, the size of the company, the type of the job, and a bunch of other pieces of information. What I also want to do is I usually recommend people looking when they're trying to filter over here for remote jobs instead of on-site, because it's a higher— it's a harder sell when someone actually wants someone in sight. But if you're trying to sell to someone as a service or a product, it works really well when you're trying to sell to people who are accepting remote people, right? So what am I doing over here is I'm actually searching for people who are looking for sales managers or people in the sales space or looking for people who are actively hiring sales individuals, right? Because what I will do at this point is scrape out or pull out the information of all these companies, take these companies' information, find out the owners or leaders of this particular company and sell to them with intent. And tell you what that means in a quick second. So we go to the next piece over here. I will go ahead and use this little URL that I capture, right? And I will use another tool. And that tool that I'm referring to, that's for you all to check out. Um, I'll give you the link of the tool as well so you know what to— how to work with it. and you need to pay for a subscription for this, FYI— it's called TexAu. So TexAu is basically a LinkedIn aggregation software that will help you automate pulling a bunch of this information that I'm referring to. So the next few slides will be basically focused on using TexAu to go ahead and drive and extract that information. So what I've done over here is I've basically found a URL of a current job ID, which will give me this search. I will take that and I will pretty much just go ahead and feed that into TexAu's user interface and follow the instructions that they've given you. Again, for the context of the space that we have for this call, I didn't want to go through the whole process because it can take away a bit of time. But if you follow the steps, once you sign up to TexAu itself, they'll guide you through how to go ahead and scrape, yeah, or pull out information from LinkedIn, which is what we're doing over here. As you can see, we're extracting jobs from LinkedIn using the search URL. So I'm just going to copy this URL over here, which is what we've got. I will go ahead and put in a few pieces of information and capture the number of jobs that I want to pull out. So once I've done that, I will simply go ahead and let this job run by itself. And the second it runs by itself, it will immediately start pulling out the actual jobs that I want, right? So this was basically a representation of this job, this job, this job, this job, this job, and also all the companies that are hiring and their company profiles. So now I've gone from absolutely nothing to searching for people hiring for the role that I'm trying to fulfill as a service or a product. And I've now got the company URLs for that particular position, right? And then what I'm going to go ahead and do is effectively use this piece of information to capture or gather information about that company or the leaders within that firm and reach out to them, right? And I'll show you how to do that in several ways. Just give me one second. I'm trying to get my deck in place.

Um, is that it?

One moment, sorry. Yeah, uh, okay, I believe that should be it. All right, cool. All right, so there's a bunch of stuff over here. So what we'll do next is effectively go ahead and map the fields, telling it that this is again part of, uh, Texau. And what you're effectively doing over here, you're just mapping all these columns that you've gotten, right? Job URL, location URL, company URL, and blah blah blah blah. And you're just mapping these fields, and all you want is to capture the company URL because you want to scrape that piece of information, right? You execute that data, and now what Texau has done is it's gone ahead and fetched me the entire information about that company that exists on LinkedIn, and I've also got their websites. So we've gone from absolutely nothing, right, you know, a few slides ago I've searched for a particular role, I've gone ahead and scraped out their first— the job companies, uh, the company's profiles from LinkedIn, but that's obviously jargon because we don't know what this company actually refers to. Then I've gone ahead and pulled that piece of information out and then I've gone ahead and gathered their website all from nothing, right? So that's, that's a nice easy win for us. The next step I'm going to do is I'm going to use another tool and it's called Apollo.io, and I'll show you that in a second. Now, by the way, uh, the softwares that I'm mentioning, they're dime a dozen. There's thousands of them quite literally in the market, and it's really up to you to decide which one works for you. So this is the tool that I'm referring to over here. Which is Apollo.io at this point in time. Cool, sweet. So what I will do is I will export all this information that I've captured, which is basically the bunch of companies, and then I'll feed that into Apollo. And what Apollo will do is it will let me go ahead and paste in the profiles or the URLs of the companies that I'm searching for along with the titles of the roles that I'm looking at. So in this situation I've got this information, I've got the leaders that are the companies that I want, and I may be looking for the sales manager or the founder because I can then go ahead and pitch to them about the role that I just posted online. So I've copied the URLs of these companies and I've gone ahead and effectively asked to, asked Apollo to go and find me people who are sales managers or sales leaders within this particular company. And this is within the formatting or the experience of Apollo itself. Cool. And the way I've done it, I've done it as GIFs. So you can pretty much go ahead and use this later on whenever you're doing your own research, because I know that's, it's only so much information you can, you know, capture at a point in time. So this, use this presentation as mainly more so as conceptually understanding how to do a certain cool hack and or trick, and then you can then implement that when you are ready as well. Great. And this is kind of it, right? Because what we've done is we've captured the leads, we've captured people, companies, we've gone ahead and found now managers and sales leaders. Who are looking for a particular, you know, who are hiring for a particular role, and pretty much gone ahead and found the founder/owner of that particular business to send them a message, right? So we're done from the top to bottom. There is one slide deck that I needed to show you all, and that's this one. So now that I have all this information, right, I have their LinkedIn profiles, I've got their messages, I've got content about what the company does and the fact that they're hiring for a role. It's honestly a very straightforward message, right? It's as simple as just saying, so you've got a job post on about this particular problem, call out a pain, simply tell them why do you wanna hire, train, and manage more people and create more benefit for your business? And we've got an efficient solution to improving your team's current efficiency by replacing this with a software or an external team that's, you know, pre-built salespeople who can do it for you without having to risk trying to train and manage a whole sales team. Set of individuals. Now there's a few things to mention that's not covered in the slide over here, which is for you to understand that LinkedIn works very different from selling on emails. This, this blend over here is, is both. When you want to make a direct pitch, email is generally a significantly better option to go and do that. LinkedIn is more of conversational selling. And when I say conversational selling, it means you can't just go ahead and directly pitch this, what I've shown over here. This pitch, once you capture your lead's email address, you can easily do that, and I can guarantee you will definitely get a good potential of responses if you have a large enough pool of people that you're reaching out to. But if you're doing this on LinkedIn, you want to go ahead and firstly connect with that person, right? You want to maybe interact with them socially. You want to interact them with recent posts or comments that they've made. And there's definitely ways you can do that as well on LinkedIn. When you're searching for individuals in the search query, you can always search for people who are active in the last 90 days, right? So you want to go ahead and ensure that you've got that search criteria in place and you're interacting with these leads. You can use automation or you can do it manually. There's tons and tons of automation tools in the market that you can check out. And then once you've gone ahead and done that, that will effectively warm up the lead. It will build a conversation or open an opportunity for you to build a conversation with them. Ask them what their problems are. Speak to them about what they're doing. Share value. This is, I know, an overused term and phrase, but genuinely share some guides, article content pieces in their niche, which is obviously the niche that you're trying to solve for, about something that is unique that you have access to. Maybe data that you have access to, data that you paid for, information that you've gathered, and a report or PDF that is maybe linking them to your website to get them a bit more aware of what you're doing, right? Share that and then directly jump into seeing asking as a qualification, look, here's this guide, here's this thing that we found, I think that might help you because you're in the sales space. You'll get a thank you or sometimes, you know, just an F off. But for those thank yous, you can easily ask them if this is something that they're trying to solve for. And some people will say, yes, I'm actually looking for a solution over here. Do you have something to offer? And you can easily send them a booking link, jump on a call with them, and then obviously it's up to your sales skills to try close the deal and prospect a lead. But yeah, so So that's what we've done and it works for us almost like clockwork. Now comes the second point of intent-based outreach, which is under the umbrella of social selling. What you wanna do is you can do something called comment-based intent fetch, right? You want to go on your LinkedIn over here and you wanna just search at the top for a particular topic, right? That particular topic can basically be cold email, Right? So I went and searched for people who are talking about cold email. And that will basically find everyone who's made social media posts about cold email, right? So you have the groups, et cetera. We don't care about the groups, but we just care about people who posted about cold email. And you want to find someone who's recently posted in the past, maybe 3 to 4 days, maybe even 2 days to be honest, to be more relevant. Because what we're doing is we want to find posts that have a high amount of engagement, 161 comments, 63, 161 likes, 63 comments, reposts. It's a high-engaged post, and you want to pull out everyone who's commented on this particular post, because what you care about is the fact that this person has engaged in a post about the topic that is our focus for you, right? That's the name of the game over here. So again, same thing, we want to go back to Texile, and you want to go to now use something called Extract LinkedIn Post Commenters. And what that's going to do is effectively go ahead and pull out everyone who's commented on a particular post. And now you've got profiles of individuals who've commented on a particular post, and then you can easily reach out to them on LinkedIn. You can do manually or you can automate it, purely up to your risk profile. And you can use that tool to go ahead and send a message saying, hey, I saw you commented on Jesse's post about this, this, and this. Now here's where AI comes into a whole new element as well. I would go ahead and extract these comments because I didn't show that piece over here, but you can extract the comments of what the person has said. You can upload that into a G Sheet. And then once you upload that into G Sheet, you can use the ChatGPT G Sheet integration Chrome extension and effectively make ChatGPT write responses or introductory messages based upon the comment the person has made in context to the original post. Write a simple prompt saying, hey, write me an introductory message on LinkedIn that is focusing on this person's original post based upon the comment made by this individual. That I can then use to DM them as an introduction. Keep it less than 15 words, right? So then you've got the entire process left to right automated, and you've got AI writing the introductory, uh, introductory messages for you, which then you can easily paste manually, or you can use an automation software to send out those messages, uh, for your LinkedIn prospects to directly connect with. Now another thing I want to mention is you can use tools like Findymail and EvoBoot So these are two tools I can just mention to you very quickly to search for your leads, you know, basic lead filter criteria. I'll just mention what I'm referring to over here. So in this particular case, let me just get my notes out. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to go ahead and find people using Sales Navigator, by the way, this is for Sales Navigator only, for you to go ahead and find people who meet a very specific criteria, right? Maybe you want to find people who work really well for your offer, right? And my offer is basically less than 10 people within the company, right? I want to find people who are within a certain company, right? I want to use the company type to find out whether I'm searching for public or private businesses, right? So this is what I'm doing over here. I'm just explaining to you, um, I'm going ahead and effectively trying to find a company within a certain locality, in this case United States and Canada. And then I'm searching for people who've got a certain title, which is the the ICP that, you know, I previously defined originally. Seniority level is important because I want to sell to business decision makers, which are the people over here. And then the geography will let me also expand onto companies who are globally based in a certain location. And we want to find people in that industry. In this case, I'm looking for people in the retail industry. Then the other thing I want to do is I want to ensure that I'm not selling to people beyond a certain amount of revenue. And the reason why that's important is because you don't wanna work through companies that have a very long prospecting or sales cycle. So usually the $10 million mark is usually the good spot to go ahead and sell less than. The company headcount is important again on the same premise where if you sell to people with a larger headcount, it will become more of a process. Now the other thing you want to focus on, these are these two pieces of the puzzle over here, which also come with the concept of intent. LinkedIn gives you this really cool option where you can actually find and filter people based upon the technologies that they use. So if maybe you're selling a product that is a competitor to Google Ads or Shopify, or maybe a tracking software, whatever it might be, you can easily search for that over here in the technologies used. Or you can— other tools are used, tools like BuiltWith, which you can then find and filter leads to then reach out to them with the intent of personalization, saying, I saw you use a competitor, we've got a better solution, bang, bang, bang, as to why. Simple, right? This one over here is particularly important for us, is simply because we want to look for people who have smaller marketing teams because our whole sell is efficiency, more bang for your buck without having to hire more people. So it's up to you as to what you want your pitches, but the lower department numbers are great because it's a signal that that department actually exists and you're not selling to a company that does not focus on what you're even trying to solve for. And if it's not a large enough department that's got its own set-defined processes and systems, which makes it even harder for you to embed yourself, service, or product, into that particular company, right? So you want to find that sweet spot. And for us, that sweet spot was about 5 company, you know, people, or 5 or 3, etc., etc. And, and that worked really well for us. So that's what I would do. And then once you get this leads, you can simply create a lead and you can export it using, um, EvaBoot, simply following the process. Oh, sorry, in this case, Find Email, just export it. And that will just give you the list of the companies, the profiles, the individuals, and everyone else, uh, as to where they sit. And you can do the same process that I've explained beforehand in terms of going ahead and finding that particular lead and sending them a DM and so on and so forth. Now that, that's the crux of this entire presentation. There's one more thing I did want to walk you through, which is a tool that if we have time we can look at, or I can send a follow-up presentation because it can take a minute. And that's basically to shout out a software called Clay. I have no affiliation with them. It's generally a product I like using. And what Clay will let you do very, very easily is actually allow you to do a lot of this work automatically, from using GPT-4 to scraping LinkedIn profiles to finding information and so on and so forth. You can sign up for it, you can give it a shot and see all the stuff they can use. So you can see a whole bunch of stuff already, right? You can get work emails simply from the LinkedIn URLs. You can find people open jobs at a company, which is exactly what I showed you. You can automate that from Clay itself, right? You can find when someone changes their job, so you can send them a message immediately saying, congrats on the new role, I saw you've become a VP of Sales, are you looking to make changes in your 'cause this is the best time for me to introduce SmartLead. You can also do that based upon email address. There's a whole bunch of stuff that you can do simply with this particular software, right? And let's just say find open jobs at a company and let's just show you very quickly how to do that. Great. So what this is is going ahead and adding the company website, which is ClickStart, KO, Brinca, SureSoft, et cetera. It's found the company profile and it's actually gone and looked for active job openings. So it's found that there's 6 job openings, 3, 2, and 4 job openings over here very, very easily. And if I expand on this, it will actually show me the jobs that I have. So there's a Job 1, Job 2, Job 3, Job 4. So an easy way to find out there's a bunch of people hiring for a particular role. And you can look at the job title itself and they'll actually get you the job title. And you can also do a bunch of stuff where you can run GPT-3 Power Apps. You can do a bunch of other really cool stuff. You can see you can use ChatGPT, you can find other information about getting their personal email address, a whole bunch of things you can do over here to make it more and more powerful for you to run something. So in this case, I can go ahead and get the, I believe it's the find job ad. I don't know why that's not showing up over here, but I can go ahead and collect this particular role or this particular job title. Write a ChatGPT prompt about summarizing that job post to find and create a pitch for me that I can then use to go ahead and sell to that individual, all completely automatically using Clay.com. So just a quick shout out on a very, very cool tool that we use and we recommend to everyone simply because it's just got so much value. And compared to all these predefined data providers, I do believe Clay's got the best one in the market because you can do genuine unique queries and searches that you can't do otherwise. So yeah, that is the crux of it, and I am happy to answer any questions that anyone has right now. Or perhaps I'll wait for Daniel to jump back in.

Yeah, awesome, awesome. That was absolute gold, wey, Bob. Yeah, I don't know if you were paying attention, but you were constantly getting heart emojis.

Oh no, I was not, sorry.

Yeah, even right now, I think the people loved it. Super, super helpful and insightful, right? And we do have a couple of questions. Folks, if you want to keep asking, if you have more questions for Vaibhav, I would encourage you to put them in the Q&A section, right? The buttons right on, Yeah, right on the screen. So yeah, before we kind of really get into the audience questions, I kind of wanted to begin with how people use ChatGPT when it comes for like, you know, initiating that first conversation. Sometimes it comes off as a little salesy, right? So how do you recommend like, you know, you monitor for that or how do you kind of fix that or is it okay to, you know, come off as salesy?

No, no, no, it's not okay to come off salesy. It's It's just a constant game of optimizing that prompt again and again and again and again and again and again. There's a whole this movement nowadays of people talking about prompt engineering, right? And that's kind of what programming was always, which is basically coming up with prompts of code to make it perform something. And you would reiterate that code 1,000 times to make it do exactly what you want in the most efficient way. So if you're getting a prompt that is salesy, just keep doing it again and again and again and again until you find that exact message structure that works just to make it okay. Um, here's an example of a prompt. This prompt was not good enough, and the output you gave me was not right. The prompt— if you're going to give me an output that looks like this, I need you to go ahead and change it to, to read this way with certain sentiments, certain terms, certain verbiage, right? Tell them to go ahead and not exclude something, uh, make them not speak like a salesman. So I feel like with ChatGPT, the more detailed and structured, more importantly, the prompt is the easier it is for you to get exactly what you want. And I usually, when we do chat prompt creation, I go ahead and break it down. Maybe this is a topic for another day. I break it down into a few segments and then I A/B test every single segment top to bottom and then change that every single time because then I can find out exactly what variable is causing what outcome to come for ChatGPT and then keep updating that bit by bit until I get my exact version.

Right, yeah, and I think that makes sense because even if you look at how you apply ChatGPT or like any AI generative tool, right, you have to definitely have a really rigorous Q&A, you know.

Computers are dumb. Like the assumption that AI is gonna replace us is a far-fetched thing because a lot of it is still, it's generative tools, right? It does not know what it's saying. It's simply using math at the back to go ahead and give you what you want. So the more you give it, the more feedback you provide it, the better it becomes. So it's an iterative cycle.

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, kind of going back into the audience questions, right? So we have one from Harold here, right? And I think I kind of feel like I kind of know the answer to this. It's probably you have to just work really, really hard here. but the question is, how do you identify an ICP if their role, title, function in, you know, if it's different across, you know, organizations and industries?

Do you want to use, so there's something called search parameters, search queries, or operators, right? I would encourage you to look into LinkedIn operators or Boolean operators, and if you have people who have a function that have 20 different names, according to the industry, just use a Boolean operator on LinkedIn. Search for the term Boolean operator LinkedIn search, and then use that to understand how you can create a bunch of OR conditions or AND conditions, else conditions, or, you know, deepened condition structures to figure out and filter down more and more into the exact funnel of the person that you're looking for. That's very, very common and it's very, very possible.

All right, awesome. There you have it, Harold. Okay, so this is a bit more of a technical question. I'm not fully sure if I understand it, but we're about like over to you. So the question is, how do you typically organize these across multiple runs of these automations?

Do you keep everything in a single database, dated batches? How do you keep— so that's honestly just a structured question. We just use GSheets, right? We break it down on a persona level. We push everything into persona into different folders, and everything's run within the folders on the persona, and then we date it just like you said. For each month that we're trying to do. And then once the lead, the, we do the outbound messaging for that particular lead, we have a whole bunch of automations we built on the backend to go ahead and change the status of that lead that we've reached to the lead or the lead has qualified, the lead hasn't qualified. A large part of just letting you know, by the way, outbound sales in general or prospecting in general is very different to ads in the sense that you definitely want to be doing a lot more in volume to expect the income that you want to get in. And if you're trying to sell a $39 product or $49 product, you probably don't want to start off with outbound as your main engine. You obviously have to do it to drive some revenue and sales when you're starting off fresh, but that's not the long-term game. Outbound works really well once you've gone ahead and established an inbound system through content, etc. And then you've got a product that's actually of value, maybe, you know, at least a couple of hundred dollars. In monthly recurring, uh, you know, value to go ahead and drive, um, actual ROI for your ad spend. So, but yes, the reason why I said that is because you want to create all these structures and systems in place and automate as much as you can. Um, if you want to succeed in ad spend, you want to automate as much as you can. So yeah, awesome.

So yeah, we have— okay, so, um, just so that everybody knows, most of our audience is made up of early stage founders, right? And I feel like this question Maybe if this is, maybe if you have some insight to it because Vaibhav himself, he's been a founder many times over. So yeah, the question is, do you have any tips specifically for prospecting and outreach for validating your idea?

Yeah, I mean, exactly what I said, that use the intent-based thing, right? I think that's the, just to not expand on more ideas and hopefully try to make this more actionable. Search for the topic that you're trying to solve for Everyone who's commented on a topic, reach out to them saying, hey, I saw you spoke about cold email, you responded to someone on cold email, I'm doing something on this space, are you open to trying it out? It's just as simple as that, right? Go to Reddit. That's actually where we got one of our first customers who's still with us over a year later. I shout out Rowan if he's watching this. You want to post your product idea everywhere you can, or your solution to the problem you're trying to solve for everywhere you can. Reddit forums, Reddit groups are a great place to start. Facebook groups where, you know, people are speaking about the topic you're speaking about. LinkedIn is another place. When you're starting off, you don't have a budget, you're trying to validate, the best place is to go to communities and forums where your topic of problem is being solved for or addressed in that community. If you're in a real estate space, you want to go to Facebook groups. There's thousands of Facebook groups where people are speaking about real estate in general. And yes, maybe the admin will not like you spamming every single comment, Yeah, if you can build, if you've got the sales skills to build a relationship with the admin, do a two-way sync, fantastic. Otherwise you can just DM them, right? Take them into a DM and tell them, hey, I saw you mentioned in this group, I'm a little shy, but I'm working on this thing, can you help me out? I assure you the world is not as bad as, um, you know, Facebook and social media makes it to be. There are a lot of really nice people that are willing to help you.

Awesome. Yeah, exactly. And so one of the things that we do is we focus on connecting mentors who are super passionate about what they're doing and helping founders out. So we've also kind of noticed that across the board, right? People do want to help out. People do want to, you know, help you grow, right? And okay, so maybe you could just kind of go over this a little bit, right? And we've done a couple of, you know, events about email marketing, right? So according to you, right, just, top-level stuff, like what does a good cold call or cold, you know, sales email looks like?

No, it's a great question, but there unfortunately is no direct answer for that. There's no direct pitch, but to not evade away from the question, and if someone who's asked this question, a cold email is simply introducing the problem that you're trying to solve, the solution that you've had, a case study of what someone else has experienced and how quick it is for them to achieve success as well. So, hey, first name, saw your LinkedIn post about how, you know, saw your comment on Jesse's post about how you view LinkedIn, you know, cold emails. I completely agree that it's a difficult problem when you want to solve this at scale. We've fixed that for 17 other companies similar to you in your niche, right, by automating email rotation or something unique about what you're doing, right? It will— it's taken these 17 people 5 days to generate their first lead. Can I go ahead and show you how to do that, right? I've personalized it. I've called out their problem. I've told them we have a solution with a unique approach so they know it's just not something generic. There's a unique way that we've solved it using multi-rotating mailboxes. And then I've mentioned to them that don't feel alone, there's other people, 17 people in your niche that also use us. And then I've minimized the, the effort and timeline they think you'll take and told them that There's these 17 people, some of them actually got their first customer within 5 days, right? Can I show you how to achieve that? I'm not saying sign up, right? No one's going to click your link and sign up. Just, I've simply made it a soft sell and I've said, can I show you how? And you don't need to jump in a call, you can just send them a Loom video. Simple, right?

That sounds like a pretty solid structure. So what I want to do is I want to kind of go into our last question here, right? We do have the networking portion after this, so folks do stick around. So the question is kind of going back to, you know, what should you use, right? So Daria asks, they've identified their decision maker, so what channel should they focus on? In mail, LinkedIn, or directly over email, given that they know that they're pretty active on every single, you know, medium.

Yeah, but no one's ever active on every single medium at the same time. So I think that's a, That's a question for you to test and figure out. It's free to do all this, so you can easily just put a bit of reps in, figure out what works best for you, and then work through that. So I don't want to give a bias and, you know, lead you down a path where you won't end up with success. When you're starting off, you want to test every channel possible in the best way without spreading yourself too thin, and then run back into something that's giving you the best response, however small. You can just be reaching out to 50 people and if one of them responds, you can use that as a positive signal. So it's completely up to you. I would test everything in a structured way and then programmatically move onwards and upwards.

Awesome. So yeah, that's kind of the name of the game, right? Testing and iterating, testing, iterating, right? Awesome. So Vaibhav, thank you so much for taking out the time to be here. Folks, if you don't know, this is actually Vaibhav's second time around. Doing an event with us. We had to have him back because like I said, he just drops absolute gold. Thank you so much for being here.

No problem at all. Just one last thing. Someone said, do I run ads? Yeah, there's nothing wrong with running ads. Put a small budget. Ads are great because they give you direct responses. So run ads if you want. There's a bad rep against not running ads. There's nothing wrong with it. Run it, but just be, don't just depend on that alone. So yeah. Awesome, man. Thank you. Have a good day. Cheers. Thank you.

Thank you everyone. So if you wanna learn more about Fy, go to fy.co. We also have a co-founder event happening later today. So if you're looking for a co-founder, someone to partner with in building your startup, so make sure that you do attend that event as well. Weba, thank you so much. Thank you to the audience too. We'll catch you in the next one.

Cheers, mate.