Building a Flywheel: Part 1
❗ In the earlier days of joining Factored Quality, we didn't have a sales team or revenue leader. Quite frankly, in most cases of very early stage startups, your CEO should be selling and they should be an expert at that (feel free to debate me on this but I'll die on that cross). ❗
We already had our OG customers but we knew we need to start filling up our pipeline and giving it more momentum. Rather than devising some complicated sales outbound sequence and throwing a bunch of stuff to the wall to see what would stick we decided to attack, let's call it the, 🍇 🍊 🍏 "low hanging fruit". 🥝 🍎 🍓
Our network of advisors, investors and supporters for the ICP we wanted to sell to put us in a solid starting position. So we tapped in.
It wasn't overly complex or fancy or elaborate, we quite literally:
🔎 Identified target brands in our ICP
⭐ Formulated a long list of advisors, investors, supporters, and people in our close network
🕸 Mapped out the first degree connections of individuals at our target brands that fit our ICP (hired a contractor to scrape this- work smarter not harder)
📑 Created a template that asked each individual connection if they would intro us to the list of brands/ people in their network that our contractor scraped
♻ When they agreed, we followed up with another template which they could easily copy and paste to the brand/ person they were going to intro us to
This worked and this worked extremely well for three reasons:
🤝 1. Trust. It's key when selling any product or service and if someone you trust recommends it, well, you're probably in the very least going to explore it.
⚡ 2. Minimal work. If you are asking anyone in your network for a favor, especially and intro to someone, make it easy for them- as easy as, "Here is who I'd like to be intro'd to and here's what you can say to them...". Copy and paste, copy and paste.
🏎 3. We already had some traction in the space. This point should not be minimized because without this, I can assume there would have been more skepticism for providing intros.
It took off and enabled us to start building a more consistent and a top of funnel until we could hire a kick ass revenue expert ( 👑 shout out to the best of the best Andrew Hoagland) and gave us more momentum to start to be able to generate more social proof (more on this tomorrow).
So, that's all to say that in the early days, tackling the low hanging fruit can make a massive difference or at the very least get you from 0-1. Special thanks to all of our advisors, investors and supporters that continue to champion us including Shelley Lin Puja Bhatt and Chris Quinn (just to name a few) who absolutely crushed the number of intros they were able to make.