Goal

Develop a customer list and schedule the first customer contacts

Checklist

Make a list of 50 customers to test your ideas on
- You are less interested in brand names than you are in who will give you the time
- Don't be a little snob
- You want to spend time on those people you think fit your hypothesis of user profile
Get leads of who to call from:
- Investors
- Founders
- Lawyers
- Headhunters
- Trade magazines
- Business Reference Books
Begin to develop an innovators list. Ask others who are the most innovative
- Company
- Department in a company
- Individuals
Create an introductory email:
- One paragraph company introduction
- Have people who gave you the leads, send the email
- Follow up with a call
- 50 follow up phone calls should yield 5-10 visits.
Create a reference story / sales script (why are you calling / emailing)
- Focus on the solution / not the features
- What problems are you trying to solve?
- Why is it important to solve them?
- Don't try to sell anything but just ask for the time to understand how the company works
- Give them a reason to see you: what's in it for them?
Ten phone calls or emails a day
- Call / Email until you are booked with 3 customer visits a day
- Get used to being turned down but always ask: "If you are too busy: who should i talk to?"
- For this first meeting you are "level-insensitive"; you don't care about titles, you just want to gather data.
- Keep hit rate statistics (any pitch, leads or level better or worse than others)
- Log all contacts in a database with enough detail about the call.