Developing Your Prospecting Strategy
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
In my last article, The Startup Guide to Finding Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), I talked about why early-stage startup Founders need to ruthlessly prioritize and focus on their ICP. Now it’s time to turn that clarity into a real pipeline.
This article is Part #3 of my Founder Led Sales Series, where I’ll break down how to build a prospecting strategy that creates a repeatable, scalable deal pipeline. For the complete overview of the series, see: The Founder Led Sales Guide.
The Objectives of Prospecting
As a Founder, your time is limited and every prospecting effort needs to count. That means being crystal clear about what you’re trying to achieve with each outreach. Without clear objectives, you’ll find yourself having pleasant conversations that go nowhere, sending emails that get ignored, or getting meetings that don’t advance your sales process.
Three Core Prospecting Objectives:
- Set an appointment: Get a committed meeting on both calendars
- Gather information and qualify: Learn about their situation, pain points, and buying authority
- Build familiarity: Establish trust and credibility for future interactions
These objectives will vary depending on your specific situation, industry, prospect base, product, and service. For example, if you’re selling a complex B2B SaaS solution, your primary goal might be booking a Discovery Call. But if you’re selling a simpler product, you might focus more on gathering qualifying information upfront.
The most valuable activity in the sales process is a set appointment. In B2B SaaS, every prospecting activity should ultimately drive toward getting a committed meeting where you can have a Discovery Call. An appointment that’s on your calendar and your prospect’s calendar and has been firmly committed to by the prospect.
There’s debate amongst sales experts on how much you should qualify before setting a Discovery Call. For Founders, especially as you’re getting started, my advice is to set the Discovery Call with every prospect and qualify later. You can then iterate from these experiences and layer on more qualifying criteria as needed.
Understanding the Sales Process
Now that we understand what we’re trying to accomplish, let’s look at where prospecting fits in the bigger picture.
Sales is a systematic process. Your prospects move through predictable stages from Awareness to Purchase.
In this article, we’re focusing on Stage #1: Prospecting where you identify and reach out to potential customers. This is the top of the funnel (TOFU) where we’re finding the right people (ICP) and getting their attention. Your goal is to move qualified prospects to Stage #3: Initial Meeting where you can do discovery about their needs and challenges.
Key Components of Your Prospecting Strategy
Prospecting is where most Founder Led Sales efforts stall. Not because Founders don’t care, but because prospecting feels messy, repetitive, and can be scary. It also takes longer to pay off than we want. And when you’re wearing lots of other hats, it’s easy to deprioritize.
In Founder Led prospecting, the goal isn’t to chase every possible lead, it’s to go deep with the right ones.
That means:
- Reaching out consistently to a prioritized list of ICP-fit accounts.
- Iterating your messaging based on feedback and conversations.
- Avoiding the “spray-and-pray” trap.
Over the next sections, I’ll show you how to develop your Prospecting Strategy:
- Identify the target personas inside your ICP accounts
- Finding your prospects
- Build a repeatable contact strategy and outreach process
Inbound vs. Outbound
You’ll likely start with outbound (you reaching out) before building inbound systems (prospects finding you).
Inbound takes time to build momentum. Content needs to rank, ads need to be optimized, and trust needs to be established. From a sales perspective, it’s reactive. Prospects have already shown interest by visiting your website, downloading content, or engaging with your brand. The key here is responding quickly while they’re still engaged.
Outbound can be started today, giving you immediate control and faster feedback loops. It’s proactive where you’re initiating contact with potential customers who may not know about your solution yet. This requires more persistence and relationship-building skills.
Most early-stage Founders start with outbound because they can’t wait for inbound leads to materialize. You need revenue now, and outbound gives you control over your pipeline.
This article focuses on outbound prospecting.
1. Identify Your Target Persona
The ICP accounts you go after will include multiple people: some with the authority to buy, others who influence the buying decision, and others who will be actual users of your product.
Before you send a single email or make a cold call, you need to answer one question: Who matters most for starting this conversation?
Your primary target should be the person who:
- Owns the pain your solution solves
- Has both decision-making authority and budgetary control to address it
- Stands to gain the most from solving the problem quickly
How can you identify these decision-makers? Often, their title gives it away.
- Example: if you’re selling sales tools, target the CRO, VP of Sales, or Head of Revenue Operations.
- Example: if you’re selling HR software, look for the CHRO, VP of People, or Director of Talent Acquisition.
SMB vs Enterprise: How It Changes Your Target
- SMB: The decision-maker and user may be the same person. The CRO might also directly manage Sales Operations or the CEO might personally approve software purchases. Start at the top and go direct.
- Enterprise: Decisions are more distributed. You may need to engage multiple stakeholders
- Primary Decision-Maker: The executive who owns the problem and controls budget.
- Complementary Decision-Makers: Internal customers of the primary decision-maker. These are peers in other departments who feel the pain and can advocate for your solution
- Influencers/Users: lower level employees whose day-to-day work improves with your product. These people can become internal champions.
Building Champions
A lot of sales experts talk about building champions within the organization you’re trying to sell. A champion believes in your solution and sells it when you’re not in the room. They can:
- Advocate to decision-makers
- Open doors to other stakeholders
- Keep the deal alive when momentum stalls
However, I would caution against spending too much time with champions. They can help but they can’t sign. Always start with the highest-level decision-maker, then recruit champions to strengthen your case.
2. Finding Your Prospects
Once you know who you’re targeting inside an account, the next step is finding them.
Beyond their networks, here are common ways Founders find their prospects:
Prospecting Databases
Paid tools give you fast access to large contact lists, filtered by title, company size, industry, location, and more.
- ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, Lusha have high-volume and updated B2B contact data.
- These are great for quickly building an initial list, but the date quality and costs can vary.
This is the best free, or low-cost with Sales Navigator, prospecting platform for B2B SaaS.
- Use advanced filters to search by title, company, industry, and geography.
- Connect directly or build targeted lists to export into your CRM.
- Join relevant groups and follow hashtags to surface warm prospects organically.
Industry Lists & Communities
Targeted lists from associations, trade shows, or niche online communities.
- Example: Conference attendee lists, Chamber of Commerce directories, niche Slack/Discord groups.
Don’t try to master every channel at once. Pick one or two that fit your ICP and focus there. It’s better to have a small, accurate list of high-probability prospects than a giant, messy database you’ll never work through.
Once you’ve built your list, you’re ready for the next step: creating a repeatable contact and outreach process.
3. Build a Repeatable Outreach Process
Once you’ve built your list, the next step is deciding how you’re going to reach those people and doing it in a way that’s consistent, measurable, and scalable. This is your Contact Strategy.
The right contact strategy depends on the target personas within your ICP and how they prefer to engage. The CRO at a 50-person SaaS startup will respond differently than a Fortune 500 CHRO. The channel mix, message style, and follow-up cadence should match the person you’re targeting.
Balance your channels. Your contact strategy shouldn’t be one size fits all. Use a mix of phone, email, LinkedIn, referrals, events, and even in-person when possible. Every territory, industry, and buyer is different. Over-relying on one channel (all email, all phone) limits your reach.
Exclude what doesn’t fit. You’ll want to exclude certain contact methods. Match your channels to your audience. For example, if you’re selling to sole proprietor restaurant owners, LinkedIn DMs is probably a waste of time.
The Multi-Touch Approach
Your contact strategy should be designed as a series of purposeful touches over time, using different channels.
Tips:
- Multiple channels beat single-channel outreach.
- There’s no universal formula. Build the right mix for your ICP.
- Track every touch. Most salespeople overestimate their activity. Tracking keeps you honest and shows you what’s actually moving deals forward.
Most Founders underestimate how many touches it takes to break through with a prospect. Here’s an example of a part of a sequence my BDRs used selling B2B Enterprise SaaS.
We’ll dive into CRMs and outreach tools later in the Founder Led Sales Series, but for now, the takeaway is simple: a repeatable process turns random outreach into a predictable pipeline-building machine. Your success depends on your ability to build systematic, repeatable processes that consistently fill your pipeline with qualified prospects who match your ICP.
Next up in the Founder Led Sales Series: Cold Email That Actually Gets Responses, where I break down the strategic framework behind effective cold email campaigns. You’ll learn the pre-campaign planning process, The 5-Step Email Framework, core principles, and the tactical email writing tips that separate compelling outreach from spam. All demonstrated through real examples from successful campaigns.
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