268: Prospecting Mistakes that Hurt Lead Gen - with Wissam Tabbara

Matt Wolach: 0:10

Prospecting is fundamental to having a growing business. You've got to be able to get out there and drive leads, but how do you do it? And what's the most efficient way to do it? And should we just mass blast? Should we actually take time and focus on each one with psalms here was on came in to share exactly how to make sure we're doing prospecting the right way and the mistakes that a lot of people are making, it's costing them, it's costing them opportunities, it's costing them revenue, and it's not good. So definitely check this out so you understand the best way to handle your prospecting.

Intro/ Outro: 0:40

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach.

Matt Wolach: 0:56

Hey, welcome welcome to Scale Your SaaS really excited to have you here.Thank you so much for joining us. If you've been here for a while you know the deal. We are here to scale your SaaS we're here to help you understand how to grow through more leads,great leads people who want to talk to you, and then how do we close them? How do we make sure that those people are ready to sign up? So if you are not a regular person here, if you're not a subscriber, definitely subscribe right now, you're not gonna want to miss out on any of the awesome conversations we're going to have coming up and today's conversation is something I'm really looking forward to. I've got Wissam Tabbara is with me. He's from Truebase with some how're you doing?

Wissam Tabbara: 1:31

I'm doing great.How are you?

Matt Wolach: 1:32

I'm doing really well as well. It's been a fun day so far and a great week. And I'm really I've been looking forward to this. So thank you for coming on the show.

Unknown: 1:39

Of course happy to be here. I've been looking forward to it as well.

Matt Wolach: 1:41

Good, good. Well,let me make sure everybody knows who you are. So Wissam is the founder and CEO at Truebase with over 20 years of experience as an entrepreneur he has founded for startups, including true bass, and throughout his career,he has helped start several new companies and lead them to success. Truebase, it simplifies and automates prospecting to stick to it, what it does, it quickly discovers potential customers with high conversion likelihood. So you can prospect less than sell more. And really unlike other platforms, searches include many sources like websites, not just profiles of the people. So it really gives you a great bit of information.And somebody in the sales side like me loves that. So really excited to talk with you about what you're doing there at true bass. So thanks for coming on the show once again, with some of course. So tell me what's going on with you lately? And what's coming up?

Wissam Tabbara: 2:27

Yeah, well, you know, busy with true bass, you know, as an entrepreneur as like, you know, you spend time exploring new businesses, new ideas, new trends, and, you know, it sometimes means that,you know, you're like knocking on people's doors and trying to get their attention, but every now and then I heard about it before and here it is happening to us where people are knocking on your door. And being on the intersection of generative AI,which we leverage quite a bit and downturn economy where people are trying to do more with less. And you know, by either get leveraging more of their current team, or to cut on software, which is something we provide pretty well, so can't complain, I think, you know, the stars as are more or less aligned, at least for now. So we can that's keeping us busy and excited

Matt Wolach: 3:25

about that very cool stuff. I want to go back what led you to start true base How did that come to be?

Wissam Tabbara: 3:30

Yeah, I'm, I'm sure this, you know, this, like,I've been in multiple roles over my careers. I'm always it seems,for whatever reason, tasked to do three things, either grow the team or find more customers or go and fundraise. And in those three occasion, it's technically a sales process. And you're, I find myself spending a lot of time on LinkedIn of the world and I am a technologist I still write code till today and I just kind of 3d bugged me on how time consuming and manual this process is I find myself spending hours a day you know,really researching through LinkedIn clicking next writing Boolean searches and and you know, all these fun, basically exact keyword matches and then like using like have seven different tabs and Chrome extensions and all of that open and doing a lot of import and export and asking the world of how do you know this like building basically your business social graph, and we're like, oh my god, this is very time consuming, right? And in the world where you know, you open up your Netflix app and and it just reads your mind will be like, here's the shows you will like, right? And if you think about it, like the Netflix app of the world, and this is like more of a $15 problem a month,right like making a movie When in reality, if you're a b2b business, there are millions of dollars on the line, and yet it's being done manually. So just like this discrepancy on the status quo is just very,like alarming and challenging.So just when the time was right,I thought, like, I started building a little bit, you know,some my own tooling on top of LinkedIn, build my own Chrome extension, and you know, just little bit just kind of on the side to really speed up few things. Again, as a, as a hobbyist who's doing this not not full time. And I was like,there's a lot of things we can do to really just automate this little bit more. So it was a time to explore the next gig in my career, and I wanted to really tackle this problem and I'm, I'm deep, deep end. And across a drug like really approaching this from multiple angles right now.

Matt Wolach: 5:53

So cool. I love that it's, it's funny when something comes out, you know,from your own needs, you know,they say necessity is the mother of invention and perfect example here. Why do you think it is that most people struggle with prospecting?

Wissam Tabbara: 6:07

Yeah, well, you know, if you if you think about the problem, if you're a b2b company, you want to have millions of dollars in the bank,right? What do you do you want to discover new customers, you have, you know, obviously your inbound and outbound right, the inbound, a separate process is more a marketing effort. It's a one to many conversation, you can now on the outbound even if you're you start building a team of SDRs, or the titles may vary inside sales, as the are the manager and all of that,depending on how your infrastructure, but basically,you are tasked to set on LinkedIn and others like zoom info, and Apollo, and there's many, like really good tools out there. But they all the same,right? They're all basically you have to teach somebody your ICP STRS. And not by the way, that's usually an entry level position,right? Because they're trying to really enter a revenue organization. It takes four months to hire and ramp up an SDR because it's an entry level position, they lost a limb with more than a year on the job,right? So if you think of the units of economics here as like,it's not great, right? If you're a business, and what do you do,you end up hiring more, right?And when you do hire more, you under basically, it's very hard to translate your ICP have them do the process? Well, and it turns out a lot to be like the quantity game or a number game,it's a spray and pray it's one size fit all and you get 1%response rate, right? And that's the top of the funnel problem.But it carries on, right?Because now well, you're bugging demos that are not super valuable, you know, they're dragging you sometimes in longer conversation, you're nurturing those leads that you're getting,but are they really good leads or not? Right? Sure. And, and it gets a little bit challenging and how to do this, right? So if you want to do your work, right,right, there are technically like seven steps in prospecting.And as you know, like you can use you today, the state is like UK, you can use a prospecting database, you discovered companies, you want to kind of see how well they match your ICP, right? And you hop on their website, you continue the research there, which is usually also super time consuming, or it could be and then you go back to the prospecting database. And now you're trying to figure out who are the people I can't contact within this company. And now you spend more time you know, discovering their email,if you want to do your work,right, you have to debounce the email, I will not trust any email that's being generated unless it's debounce, at least few other places to protect your sender reputation, then the real time the real work start, which is hyper personalized the message, then put them in an in a prospecting outreach, that takes a lot of time that takes around seven minutes per lead,if you really want to do it.Right.

Matt Wolach: 8:45

And if you go fast,that's I mean, that's, that'd be quick or fast.

Wissam Tabbara: 8:49

Exactly. So this is very, very time consuming process when done, right. But also, when done, right, the response rate go from 1% to you know, and double digit right away, if you're really able to do it, as expected.

Matt Wolach: 9:02

Very cool. So what are some of the most successful factors of someone who's doing well in prospecting?

Wissam Tabbara: 9:07

So it's really like it's kind of fine tuning those seven steps that I described, right? So if you kind of want to start there and work backwards to be like, do you have your ICP well defined,right? Most people think of their ICP of like, three, five filters, right? Here's the company size, here's the industry and that's, you know,maybe they have one or two things for technology they use or revenue or that kind of thing. But in reality, you know,rarely you have one ICP, right?Even if you're a small company,so, and that that varies quite a bit. Right? And so to be able to, and it's a moving target,right, because you're running campaigns and your ICP is also continuously growing, right? So how can you really define that at scale? That's actually you know, sometimes a big part of the battle and now how can you efficient Literally match people to your ICP and personalize from there. And that's also another part of the battle. The other part is like if you really think no matter what product you're selling at one point of time,especially when it comes to cold outreach, like it's in the single digit of people that are ready to buy your product right now. So most people are going and looking for the magic wand,right? The intent data, who's gonna sell me the magic wand,and then I'm able to really pinpoint to those customers and they're ready to buy tomorrow.All right, I know reality,especially in the b2b space, you know, 7% of the people are ready to buy your product right now,you might have caught them on time, you might have not. But that does not mean you can start building the relationship over time, right? So when the time comes, right, you are top of mind, okay? For your product to buy that real estate in their,their target customer mind, and to really stay in that place and their mind top of mind, if they're targeting problem X or Y, that also takes an effort,you have to take a long term approach to do that.

Matt Wolach: 11:03

I totally agree.And I love the way you're you're putting it because I think it's so important for people to really understand this. I want to talk about your background,you started several companies,have you been able to learn something new at each one? I mean, it was was there obviously, when you start a company you learn but the next one, you might have an idea?Were you able to acquire some new knowledge each time?

Wissam Tabbara: 11:25

Yeah, great question. Matt. I will tell you one thing is like you always think that you did and you can next time is going to be easier.But the reality that's not necessarily true. Now, you always learning from your mistake. And I will say one thing, instead of asking what have I learned? What have you learned what to do in a specific style? The more important question is, I've learned what to not do. Right. And sometimes,as you know, this is this is more valuable of a lesson, each startup is a different beast that always comes even if you are within the same domain or industry, there's a lot of moving parts, technology is moving customers moving people,the way people buy software are changing over time, there's always new ways to take product to market. So you have to stay,you know, on top of that, so what usually previous startup experiences gives you those are the super valuable thing are,you know, great network investors, you know, employees,partners, people you can go to right away, and they will return your call super valuable.Another thing depending on your success might give you a lot more financial cushion for you to you know, bat more, right.And that's sometimes that's everything. And the rest is like all kind of really able to run inside the house a little bit better, right? Like, how can you build the company? What are the things that matters? What are you think you should not ignore?And I always think, like, one of the most common mistakes is where people they almost start with, with a solution, right?And they're looking for a problem. And usually it's like,Hey, here's a technology, what's new, let's go see how we can fit something to it. And they really like they put the blinders on.They're very focused product product product, which is great.But in reality, there's amazing products that have been built over time that they've never seen the light and they would never take into market. Right?And if anecdotally if I'm gonna think about what is the number one failure of a startup is because they didn't build the right culture. And I will not put go to market or team or product or all of that is right culture and means a lot of things. So I will draw an analogy to Amazon, Amazon, like they're still, you know, they you know, about the 14principles that they put in place, it's really an amazing operating system to produce other products to quickly validate to quickly communicate,right? And that sometimes it feels like, Hey, I'm startup,I'm supposed to move fast and not think about bureaucracy, and like all these HR stuff, if you're thinking about it, that enterprise do, and I'm not saying go write a book about it,but kind of just really taking a step back and thinking about what are the values that you really prescribe to and build the whole company, because that's going to impact what it's going to impact what feature you go build, who's gonna hire next and a lot more, and it makes a lot of decision easier. So if you, for example, like prescribe to be like, you know, to we are a one team, we are data driven,we have to talk to customers first, right? As cliche of basically values that they are,if you're really able to put them in use, you can really build a better product, and we can really take product to markets a lot faster, which is very important for a startup. I

Matt Wolach: 14:40

totally agree. So I love that you said culture there because that's what I haven't heard in quite a while a lot of people really think about if I'm getting started, am I going to focus on product? Am I going to focus on marketing and in fact,you know, I've kind of long held the contention that too many times founders focus too much on product and don't start marketing early and If don't start that, that go to market when they should, and they wait too long after you've done it once, and then it doesn't go well, most second time founders realize we have to focus on marketing. But I do agree culture is really important. And having that right culture can help everything else work well,right?

Wissam Tabbara: 15:15

Absolutely.Absolutely. It makes or breaks the company, in my opinion. And not only like, it's not a one hour meeting where you can go back, okay, I defined the culture, how can you really iterate on that culture because you know, every, it's not the guy cannot bring like, a culture from a different company, or values and try to fit them and discomfort, so ability to iterate on them as a team and really have people believe in it and really think and operate of them and constantly refer to them as their value as the operating system of the company.That's how you can grow a lot more smart in a smarter way.

Matt Wolach: 15:50

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. What advice would you give to new software leaders who are starting out? You've done it a few times? What advice would you share for others who are just getting going now.

Wissam Tabbara: 15:59

So you have to really be able to work with the unknown, right? Especially if you're doing startup of technology, the unknown, you have the unknown unknowns,right. So there is both of those. So I think setting up the right culture and the value,understanding the domain in general, and the problem you're trying to solve and be very flexible to the solution, right.So I'll tell you, like we've done so far, three pivots, land where we are today, because we're flexible solution, but we really wanted people to be more productive and discovering new business, right, we were in the recruiting space. And even that we started refining and refining until we landed, we still as excited but you know, the solution change over time,right. And there's even more timing around it, like we were doing recruiting, and it was COVID had massive layoffs, you know, there was a lot of stuff,you have to be able to adapt and not, you know, start with one thing and be stuck to it,they're stuck with it. And the other thing is like learning the stage of the company, right? If you're in a pre seed, it's different than your seed round,or series A like The Matrix is different, the mindset is different. What you need to figure out is different in a way, you're always trying to add product market fit. Technically,once you had product market fit,right, you graduated, you're no longer startup. But the idea is on daily, weekly basis, you're approaching Closer, closer to product market fit. Okay? So now if you think you have the product, and you have the market, and you will be like this is my hypothesis of what I think people want, right? Or what I think I can build, and here's what the market I think they need. So what have you done here you have wrote you have like, basically came up with a list of 10s of assumptions you made. And now each assumption,right, you can say, Okay, what?Well, the naive way to think we like, well, I need to go build validate all these assumptions.And then I can figure out, do I have a business or not great,great academic exercise and reality, you don't have the time or resources to do that super time consuming, and you will run out of money, the market will move on even before even if you're able to do that. So by thinking about it this way, be like okay, if these are all my assumptions, let me do a prioritization exercise. And you right, each assumption, you say,Well, this one, if I don't have that, right, I have no business,my whole value proposition is different. Like, for example,like one of them will be like, I want to build a website. But that's not a higher risk assumption, because there's a lot of people that's being built every day, by day, can I leverage a specific technology to solve a specific problem?That's a high risk assumption?If you don't have that, right?You cannot make it happen? Or do people will people want to buy your specific problem? Or do they even have that specific problem? So if you take that,like exercise and write all these assumptions, and mark them are this high risk assumption,or this is low risk assumption,the next part of the exercise will be like, well, what's the effort to validate this assumption? Is it low? Or is it high? So now you have like, kind of think of a spreadsheet, you have the high and low of risk assumption a high low and effort and now you're always always refining and revisiting those,and where do you start with what's the most yield is the lowest effort with the highest risk assumption and the more you're approaching there, the more you're validating more the whole value proposition and you're able to refine, right pivot, adjust on high level,alright? Which and every time you adjust, you come up with a higher list. Higher, sorry, a longer list of assumptions that you have that you also have to continue this exercise on and on. That's how you kind of like start making covering more ground at the early stage so you can approach your product market fit and have more conviction in what you're building.

Matt Wolach: 19:30

Excellent advice. I hope people take it I want to make sure that our audience is able to learn more about what you're doing and true bass. How can they get in touch with you or learn about true bass?

Wissam Tabbara: 19:40

Yeah, LinkedIn is a great place with some to borrow one word. I'm always happy to answer your question there. Also email with some a true bass.io I'm always love to hear from others. Great Minds.Great, like minded ideas. Yeah,

Matt Wolach: 19:55

perfect. Well, this has been a lot of fun. I really appreciate you coming on the show, Wissam. Thank you, of course. Matt's been fun.Absolutely. And thank you for listening for everybody out there. Make sure you're subscribed to the show. You will not miss out once you subscribe.I can't wait to see you next time. Take care. Bye bye.

Intro/ Outro: 20:11

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS.For more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com