How we did sales development at Hemingly
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We first discovered our sales funnel when we emailed a few companies hiring junior roles through their job email. When over a quarter of them responded to our cold email, we knew we were on to something. It was then a question of scaling this process without being too spammy.
1. Find people who would care
First we had to find people who actually needed our product. For us, this meant Seed to Series A startups who are hiring junior non-technical people.
We found them by filtering and scraping the AngelList job board (a practice we now know is against their policy. Sorry.)
2. Get their contact info
To find our in, we looked for the email of any founders or VP-level people at the company. There are plenty of hacks and tools out there that lets you do that.
To scale this process, we outsourced the work to contractors in India and crosschecked their findings with email validation tools.
3. Reach out (but try not to be annoying)
This is by far the trickiest part. Cold emails usually range from annoying to downright spammy. To avoid this, we made sure our emails were 1. to the point 2.interesting. In just 72 words, we would say:
- what we can do for you (get your menial work done via Slack)
- that we can do it well (by providing some proof of existing customers)
- what we want (a 15 minute phone call to tell you more about it)
To cinch the deal, we made sure that our subject line was intriguing: “Do you hire half-human, half-AI biz dev reps?”
Conclusion
While this process definitely worked for us, it is by no means new. Yet we were getting some crazy good results with 10–15% response rates.
I think it work so well for us because we tried our best to be human in the cut-throat world of sales. We only reached out to customers we genuinely believed we can help. We recommended other (sometimes competing) services when we find that the fit wasn’t right. And we were genuinely sorry when the occasional spam accidents happened.
