Most prospecting advice stops at the list. The hard half is the other one: what goes in the email once you know who you are writing to. These are field notes on both, written from teardowns of real businesses with real numbers on the table — not from a keyword tool.
Find the one practitioner, give the reading two days at most, then make the first call badly. The procedure is the same for cold calling, direct mail or anything else — and the step everyone gets wrong is the second one.
A persona describes a person. A job describes the moment they reach for you. Two companies in different industries with the same job are one segment, and the persona cannot see it.
Four things, and none of them is worth building. The arithmetic that settles it is about the value of your hours, not the price of the subscription.
Advertising is the wrong acquisition channel for most small B2B companies and an extremely good research instrument. The deliverable is not customers. It is four words that make the right person click.
Someone asks the question you did not prepare for. There is a four-part shape that gets you through it sounding certain — and a rule about what goes in the middle that decides whether anyone believes you.
Using someone's first name is not personalisation — and the people you most want to reach read it as proof that a machine sent the email. Here is the line between the two.
There is a revenue number below which nothing sales-related should leave the founder, and it is higher than most people expect. The gate before any hire is not a budget — it is a count.
Sponsoring the community you belong to feels like marketing. It is usually a way of spending your marketing budget among people who are not your customers, and the tell is a question you can ask in ten seconds.
Some customers churn because the product failed them. Others churn because they finished. Those are not the same problem, and averaging them together hides the only segmentation decision that matters.
Three of the most successful bootstrapped founders in software launched to audiences of twenty to thirty thousand people. Here is what those audiences produced, and what they did instead when it did not work.
The objection to niching down is always the same: we would be turning away everyone else. The observed effect is the opposite, and the mechanism is not the one most people assume.
Most B2B pitches describe what the software does to a task. The pitches that get answered describe what it does to the person reading them — and there is a bar the claim has to clear before anyone acts on it at all.
Two ponds. One has ten times the fish and everybody is fishing it. The other has fish that jump into the boat. Most teams pick the first, on the grounds that it is bigger, and spend two years learning why that was the wrong reason.
Divide your new revenue each month by your churn rate. That number is the size your company stops growing at — and no marketing channel, however good, can push you past it.
The playbook that said pick a channel and go deep was written for a search engine that judged you on your own pages. Three things changed at once, and the minimum viable channel mix went from one to three.
You will lose most first meetings. The ones you lose are worth something only if you left with an answer you did not have before — which requires deciding, before you dial, what you are trying to learn.
A week is not enough and six months is too long, and the number matters less than the thing it protects you from: quietly retreating into the work that feels productive while the question you were testing goes unanswered.
Whether you can afford demo calls, an account-based motion, or only a self-serve funnel is not a strategy question. It is arithmetic, and the thresholds are specific enough to check yourself against this afternoon.
Most lost deals were never deals. They were people who agreed the problem was real, took the meeting, and then went back to the two things their job actually depends on.
Naming a pain your prospect discusses openly proves nothing — they hear it from every vendor in the category. There are two deeper levels, and the third one is where deals are actually won.
Most growth plans die on arithmetic nobody did. Four crude numbers, multiplied on the back of an envelope, will tell you whether a segment can produce your target at all — before you spend a quarter finding out.
Roughly seven people have to agree before B2B software gets bought, and they are measured on different things. A pitch that makes one argument is a pitch that convinces one of them.
A direct customer's spend is flat from the day they sign. An agency's compounds. That difference changes what you can afford to spend acquiring one — and it is the argument most B2B teams never run.
A four-email structure built by someone who sells to sales teams for a living. The first email is designed to get roughly zero responses — and that is what makes the other three work.
Their customers love you. You win their app-store search. They still will not return your emails — and there is a structural reason that has nothing to do with your product.
It is the most common answer on every cancellation survey and every lost-deal note, and it is almost always false — because the customer already decided the price was acceptable when they bought.
Prospektor reads a company's own website before it says a word about them, scores partnership fit against what you are actually hunting for, and drafts the deck, the emails and the call prep in your voice. The scan is free.
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