How to Build Your First Outbound Sales Motion: A Comprehensive Guide for Technical Founders

Oct 22

Welcome to part 1 of 3 on how to stand up an outbound motion after you have achieved Product Market Fit!

As a technical founder, you've built a product that fits your market. But now comes the next crucial step—scaling your sales through a structured outbound motion. For many technical founders, the first instinct is to hire a VP of Sales and let them handle the outbound strategy. However, this approach can be risky, especially if you don’t yet fully understand what makes an outbound sales strategy effective.

This blog will guide you through building your first outbound sales motion, explaining why you should take an active role and how to implement each step to ensure your efforts succeed. Whether your business has 11 employees or 50, this guide will help you turn your sales process into a scalable growth engine.

Why You Shouldn’t Hire a VP of Sales Right Away

It might seem logical to hire an experienced VP of Sales to build and execute your outbound strategy, but doing so without understanding the process yourself can lead to missteps. Here's why it's critical that you, as the founder, are involved early on:

You Know Your Product and Market Best
No one understands your product, your customers, and their pain points as well as you do. A VP of Sales will have to learn all of this from scratch, which could lead to delays or misalignment in strategy. The nuance of what makes your product valuable is something that only a founder can truly communicate, especially in the early stages of outbound sales.
Outbound Requires Iteration
Outbound sales strategies rarely work perfectly right from the start. They require constant testing, tweaking, and iteration. By being involved in the process, you can experiment with messaging, identify what resonates with your market, and adjust accordingly. Hiring someone to handle this for you before you’ve refined the process could lead to significant wasted resources.
You Need to Know What Works
If you eventually hire a VP of Sales, they’ll need your guidance on what works and what doesn’t. Having personally gone through the outbound process, you’ll be in a better position to support and direct them effectively. A VP of Sales can then optimize, scale, and expand upon the foundation you’ve built.

Actionable Step: Spend the first few months understanding the outbound motion yourself. Conduct sales outreach, track results, and iterate. Once you have a rough framework, then consider bringing in a VP of Sales to scale the strategy.

Understanding Outbound as a Form of Advertising

Outbound sales is essentially a form of advertising—it's about putting your product in front of the right people and creating interest. To build a successful outbound motion, you need to understand the different ways you can reach potential customers. Here are four key channels that technical founders should focus on:

1. Cold Outreach (Email or Phone)

Cold outreach involves directly reaching out to prospects through cold emails or cold calls. It’s one of the most direct ways to engage with potential customers, but it requires a well-crafted message and a deep understanding of your audience's needs.

Cold Emails: A well-personalized email with a clear value proposition can open the door to a conversation. Focus on understanding the pain points of your prospects and highlight how your product solves them.
Cold Calls: Cold calling can be effective for certain industries where decision-makers prefer direct communication. It allows for immediate feedback and engagement but requires confidence and skill in objection handling.

Key to Success: Always keep the message customer-focused and personalize outreach. Track open and response rates, and continuously optimize your scripts and sequences.

2. Social Selling

Social selling involves using platforms like LinkedIn to connect with prospects, build relationships, and engage with your target audience. It’s not about hard selling—it’s about adding value through content, engagement, and conversations.

Posting Content: Share valuable insights, product updates, or thought leadership content to position yourself as an expert in your field. This helps build trust and keeps you top of mind.
Direct Messaging: Engage with prospects through personal messages, focusing on understanding their challenges before jumping into a pitch. Social platforms allow for softer, relationship-based selling.

Key to Success: Build credibility over time through consistent interaction and valuable content. Engage genuinely with prospects to nurture relationships before making an ask.

3. Marketing/SEO (Including Paid Ads and Events)

Marketing and SEO focus on driving inbound interest to support your outbound efforts. A strong content marketing strategy can generate leads, while paid ads and events can create visibility and engagement.

Paid Advertising: Platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Facebook Ads allow you to target specific audiences with tailored messages. Paid ads can drive traffic and create brand awareness among prospects who may not have heard of you before.
SEO: Optimizing your website and content to rank higher in search engines ensures that potential customers find you when they search for solutions in your industry.
Events: Hosting or attending industry events, webinars, or workshops can build credibility and create opportunities for face-to-face engagement with prospects.

Key to Success: Align your content and paid marketing efforts with your outbound strategy to create a seamless customer journey. Use analytics tools to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and optimize them for conversions.

4. Affiliates and Referrals

Affiliates and referrals are powerful outbound channels where others promote your product on your behalf. This approach leverages the trust and credibility that affiliates or satisfied customers already have with their audience.

Affiliate Programs: Partners promote your product in exchange for a commission or incentive. This can rapidly expand your reach to new markets and audiences.
Customer Referrals: Satisfied customers are often your best advocates. Encouraging referrals by offering incentives or simply providing an exceptional product experience can drive highly qualified leads your way.

Key to Success: Build a structured affiliate and referral program that rewards partners and customers for promoting your product. Ensure you track the effectiveness of each referral source to optimize efforts.

Choosing the Right Channel: The key to building an effective outbound strategy is to select the channel that best aligns with your target market's behavior. Whether you’re doing cold outreach, engaging through social selling, focusing on SEO and paid ads, or building a referral network, each method has its unique advantages. Start with one, master it, and then expand into others.

How to Choose the Right Outbound Channel for Your Business

The success of your outbound sales strategy largely depends on choosing the right channel for your product and your market. Not all outbound methods are created equal, and the right one for your business will depend on your target audience’s behavior and preferences.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Channel:

Where do your customers spend their time?
If your potential buyers are in the tech or SaaS space, LinkedIn might be the best platform. If they’re in traditional industries like construction or manufacturing, cold calling and email outreach might be more effective.
What stage of the buyer’s journey are they in?
Are they actively looking for solutions like yours, or are you introducing a new concept? This will influence whether a direct sales approach (like cold calling) or an educational approach (like webinars or content marketing) is more appropriate.
How do your competitors engage with customers?
Look at how similar companies in your industry approach outbound sales. You can learn from their successes and failures while developing your own strategy.

Examples:

B2B SaaS: Social selling on LinkedIn combined with email outreach is often very effective because decision-makers are active on these platforms.
E-commerce: Paid ads on social media platforms might drive better results, especially for products that need high visibility.

Actionable Step: Choose one primary channel that aligns with where your customers are, and focus on mastering it. For instance, if your customers are tech buyers, go deep on LinkedIn outreach. If they respond better to direct interaction, prioritize cold calling.

Go Deep on One Method Before Expanding

It’s tempting to launch outbound sales efforts across multiple channels at once—cold calling, emailing, LinkedIn, paid ads—but this approach often leads to diluted efforts. Instead, focus on one method and become highly proficient in it.

Why This Works:

Learning and Improvement: Mastering one channel allows you to refine your approach, messaging, and technique, optimizing for better results over time.
Resource Allocation: By concentrating your efforts on one method, you avoid spreading your resources too thin across multiple untested avenues. This prevents burnout and ensures better ROI from each attempt.
Scalability: Once you’ve mastered one channel, it’s easier to scale. You can replicate the process for other channels, having already built a foundation of success.

For example, if you’re focusing on cold emailing, spend time refining the messaging, subject lines, and sequencing. Track responses, tweak your copy, and develop a process that generates consistent leads. Once you’ve achieved that, move on to adding LinkedIn outreach or cold calling.

Actionable Step: Select your primary outbound method and devote at least three to six months to mastering it. Track your KPIs, experiment with messaging, and refine the process until it’s repeatable and scalable.

Proving the Strategy with Customer Feedback

Before fully committing to your outbound strategy, it's essential to validate your efforts with customer feedback. This helps ensure that you’re focusing on the right channels and targeting the right customer segments.

How to Gather Feedback:

Talk to Your Customers: Reach out to your existing customers and ask them about their buying journey. Where do they spend their time online? How do they find solutions like yours? Would they be more likely to respond to cold emails or calls?
Test Different Messaging: Experiment with different outbound messages and track which ones resonate the most with prospects. Compare response rates and engagement to refine your approach.
Look at Your Competitors: If your competitors are succeeding with a particular outbound strategy, it’s worth testing a similar approach to see if it works for you.

Actionable Step: After a few months of running outbound campaigns, take the time to analyze your results. What’s working? What isn’t? Use this feedback to improve and iterate on your outbound strategy.

Conclusion: Building a Scalable Outbound Strategy

Building your first outbound sales motion isn’t about hiring someone to take over the process; it’s about understanding how to create scalable, repeatable results yourself. As a technical founder, you already know how to build amazing products—now it's time to build a sales engine to match.

Here’s your roadmap:

Take ownership of the outbound strategy before hiring someone to manage it.
Choose one outbound method that aligns with your target market, and go deep.
Validate and iterate your approach by gathering feedback from customers and refining your process.
Master your chosen channel before expanding to other methods.

By taking these steps, you’ll create an outbound strategy that drives consistent growth and allows you to scale your sales without losing focus on product development. If you’re ready to take the next step and build your outbound sales motion, start by owning the process and understanding the dynamics of outbound yourself.

Zac Blakely and Ari Barmapov