Turn Your Alma Mater into a Gold Mine

How your alumni network can transform your business: results from 50+ experiments.

Will Nitze, CEO of CPG brand IQ Bar, was on The Consumer VC Podcast with Mike Gelb and talked about some unconventional GTM experiments he ran to launch his business.

Will went to Harvard and used some creative (and as Will puts it “grey area”) tactics to get email addresses for 98% of the people who ever graduated from the school.

He proceeded to mass blast 100k email addresses.

The result:

• Quickly marked as SPAM
• A few very upset people
• One of their most successful experiments ever in terms of sales and ROI

How can you duplicate this experiment for B2B and without getting flagged as spam?

Hint: Slow down. Be more human.

9-step process to get the most out of your alma mater:

1. Create a boolean search in Sales Navigator for people who went to your alma mater and who match your ICP. Use the filters of [redacted].
2. Add contacts that match the criteria to a lead list. Start with ~100 leads or less.
3. Use a tool like Evaboot to validate results from Sales Navigator
4. Use a data enrichment tool like Seamless.AI or Clay to find contact information
5. Upload the list to a Google Sheet
6. Create a 5 step sequence over the course of 21 days that engages the contact on Twitter, Linkedin, and email
7. The objective of the outreach is to NOT ask for a sales call, but [redacted].
8. Rapport is built by sharing experiences about going to your alma mater. Example scripts include [redacted].
9. After 3 or 4 back-and-forth messages over the course of two weeks, you make a soft sell to book a meeting. The keyword here is SOFT.

Results:

Out of the 50+ experiments we’ve run for our clients, the alumni campaign has performed the best. One client booked meetings with 20% of the people they contacted.

The probability of success depends on 1) The strength of the school’s brand and 2) If the alumni network has been saturated with other people doing similar tactics.

For the first five people who comment with their alma mater, we’ll send you a list of leads who match your ICP and went to your school.

📢 For the complete, un-redacted story (and to get access to templates that generated 15%+ positive reply rates) be sure to subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

🕖 Every 1st and 3rd Tuesday at 7am PT / 9am CT / 10AM ET discover step-by-step instructions for implementing unconventional GTM experiments, drawn directly from the operators who ran each campaign. Each post will offer the specificity and the actionable steps that are often missing in today’s GTM discourse.