#182: Using B2B Lookalike Targeting to Find Your Best Fit Prospects (Wissam Tabbara)

Speaker A: Before we start today's show, I want to invite you to join my community of SaaS, founders, agency owners and others who are sharing tips, tricks, strategies and tactics for creating successful cold outreach campaigns. It's a free group on Facebook called Cold Outreach Mastery and you can get there by heading over to morgandwilliams.com community.

Speaker B: And if Facebook isn't your thing but

Speaker A: you still want valuable cold outreach advice, head on over to Morgand Williams.com Newsletter and put in your best email to get first in line for valuable resources that I share on how you can fill your calendar with sales meetings and your pipeline with opportunities. Now let's start today's show.

Speaker B: In this episode, I speak with a Serial founder about a new technology he's developed that uses AI and automation to build lists of prospects who are most likely to buy what you have to offer.

Speaker A: Uh,

Speaker B: Welcome to hey First Name An Insider's Guide to Outbound Sales. This is the number one podcast for proven cold outreach tactics that get replies and book meetings so you can quickly grow MRR without wasting time on things that don't work. The most important part of your outreach campaign is your list. If your targeting is off, it doesn't matter how great your offer, copy or execution is, your campaign is toast or but if you can find the right audience, it makes everything else so much easier. Well, my guest in today's episode is a Serial founder who's developed a technology that uses AI and automation to build lists of prospects who are most likely to buy what you have to offer. If you're familiar with Facebook lookalike targeting, it's similar to that Upload a list of your best fit prospects or past customers and the AI will find companies that best match your list. In the first half of the episode, we discuss his background, how he discovered the core problem his product solves, and what he did to find his initial customers. In the second half, we talk about how he uses his own technology to find customers for his business, his results, and current trends in software sales. And if you're looking to sell more of your product or service and you'd like advice, guidance and support from over 4,000 other agency owners, SaaS, founders and others who are doing the same. Go to morgandwilliams.com community to join the Cold Outreach Mastery Facebook Group. It's free to join. I'm in there consistently dropping value and it's a great place to level up your results with cold outreach. And if Facebook's not your thing, you can get tons of value by joining my newsletter. Head over to morgandwilliams.com Newsletter and enter your best email address. By the end of this episode, you know exactly what it takes to build lists of prospects who are ready to buy now.

Speaker C: Wisam um Tabara is the founder and CEO of Truebase. Truebase enables B2B revenue teams to eliminate repetitive prospecting tasks and quickly pinpoint leads that convert. Wasam, you are a 3 time founder with 2 exits under your belt. You're also a startup advisor and mentor. I want you to take us back to what you were doing before your current startup, Truebase. What were you doing before you started your company?

Speaker D: Yeah, actually I was with Azukwa. It's a company that does workflow management system. Think of Zapier for the enterprise. It was one of the few companies that I did not found or be part of the founding team. You know, Morgan, startup journeys are amazing, but they could be taxing sometime.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker D: That was one of the one that like, let me take a break and join something somebody else. And I was there for a year. It was a blast. And um, we actually Okta came and acquired the company. And then I found myself thinking about the next thing.

Speaker C: Very cool. And what happened after Azukwa took some

Speaker D: time off, decompressed, thought about what's next and there was really like a very exciting thing happening in the blockchain space at the time. So that's where we started thinking about the problem that we're solving today with Truebase. We then pivoted away from blockchain for many reasons, but kind of that's how things got started. And after, uh, taking a year break from being a founder, it quickly came m back where I was ready to found my next startup.

Speaker C: Yeah, uh, I want to ask a question about that. I'm always interested in what makes people tick. The ones that are serial founders, serial entrepreneurs. What is it about that journey that you enjoy so much?

Speaker D: Yeah, you know, I had my chance to work at larger organization like Microsoft and my career was on all angles going very well. So it's like your typical corporate ladder. Right. So your title is growing, your team scope is growing, your salary and compensation is growing. So that's kind of a little bit what is measured in enterprise. But yet something was not there. Like something was missing. And after six years at Microsoft, it didn't take much other than like a call from somebody I know to join their startup. And that's where I joined as a founding member. And since then it was really hard to look back to going and working on somewhere else and don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to paint a very rosy picture here. There's tons of downs before there are ups.

Speaker C: Sure.

Speaker D: But there is something about and it doesn't fit everybody but there's something about ability to work with the unknowns and ability to move fast and figure things out on your own and apply really kind of different skill set from all the way business to technology and able to oscillate between those often.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: Which really doesn't happen out of the startup world as often.

Speaker C: Yeah. Working for a big company you just you know put this, bang this into the hole and just keep banging this in the hole and get it done and that's it. Totally get it. Awesome. So going from Azuka acquired by Okta and then the blockchain company you're working at or you, you founded True Protocol that led you to now founding truebase and what was it that you saw in the market or the opportunity that led you to start this company? What was the real problem that you saw?

Speaker D: Yeah, it's actually a problem that I experienced on firsthand. A lot of companies I'm involved with experience as well and um, I'm sure others as well. So in any companies I've been part of or team I always find myself doing one of the three things like I'm either looking for candidates to expand my team or I'm um, looking for customers or I'm looking for investors and I constantly find myself is spending endless hours on LinkedIn running like Boolean searches and clicking the next button.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: I have to wake up tomorrow and do exactly the same thing and it becomes like a little bit more of a chore. I'm like I don't um, think I'm enjoying this. I think I'm sending hundreds of inquiries to be like how do you know this? I'm building like my business social graph and I just like it felt like such a time consuming effort and not productive and being a technologist I still code till today. So I started writing some of little bit of automation because I was just sick and tired of doing this over and over and when the time was right I started like asking around. I'm like hey, everybody's seeing this problem. What are the solutions out there? So I even got my hands on some of what are perceived the standard in automation and I still found it's still inefficient. So that's when M started kind of a little bit thinking more about this problem and that's where truebase was started.

Speaker C: So this the Discovery problem on a platform like LinkedIn. Let's say for a salesperson, they're looking to build that prospect list and they're looking to put in all different mentioned Boolean searches. So they're putting in all different sorts of operators and trying to find that refined list of people to target, which takes a lot of time. Can you give an example of a sales search or type of search someone's doing that you found that could be automated.

Speaker D: Yeah, it's really whatever you're looking for, Morgan. So it's kind of a little bit different way of thinking. So let me give you an analogy on something that maybe everybody else know here. Imagine you open up the Netflix app tonight and it tells you you want to pick a movie, and they expose 50 filters for you to pick a movie, right? The genre, the actor, the keyword, the year, you name it, right? How easy will it be for you to find a movie instead? What they do, they give you a homepage. Uh, this is curated, personalized to you. And for whatever reason, you might most often find what you like just there based on what you previously watched.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: So this is, I call it the $20 problem because that's how much you pay for Netflix a month. But imagine with the world where you have millions of dollars sometimes on the line, and you're building teams and you're asking them to pick the movie based on those 50 filters. So instead there's a different way to think about this problem. You can say, well, those are the people that bought from me. I don't know why, but here's their websites, here's maybe their LinkedIn profiles. Okay? And now feed that to the AI and have the AI understand what's common between them.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: And then now the AI can find you lookalikes of those companies. So you're not spending time filtering and searching, understanding why definitely all the ICP insights can be surfaced to you so you can learn more. But how you group them, cluster them, all of that, there's a lot of science behind it and usually the machine can do it a lot better and more efficiently.

Speaker C: That is definitely a massive problem, because I can tell you, if you go to any sales team, individual contributors, the managers, and you ask them, like, who are top three customer Personas if you ask, or, uh, why do they buy from us? If you ask 20 people, they'll give you 20 different answers. And that's hard to figure out, uh, manually for sure, 100%. So you discovered this problem, you've asked around, it's painful um, you've built some scripts, initial scripts to start solving this problem. What happened after that?

Speaker D: Yeah, well, I really subscribe to the Lean Startup methodology. So you build the hypothesis and you start like business model Canvas are a great way to really compile all your ideas into one page. And then what I do is usually write my assumptions. Right. So like you're building a startup, there's so much unknown out there, but you cannot also go and figure it all out. Right. You don't have the time to do that. So a common exercise I go through and I kind of usually companies I'm helping with, I always propose that is write your list of assumptions. For example, like I need to build a website and people will come to it. Well, that's an assumption. Or I need to go sell this as uh, a service and people have the pain point and they will pay me $10,000 a month. That's maybe another assumption. So you can write all these assumptions of the business in terms of all figuring out. So you're almost like defining that world. Now you take that list and use score on it. Right. Like, so you put it like, how much if I got this assumption wrong, um, I'm doomed with this approach. And how much if I got it right? It's important. So you say like how important it is in terms of the assumptions that you make to your business. So that's one column. If you think of a spreadsheet, the other column would be like how easy is to go validate it. And there's different way to validate things. So you can validate by creating a mock up website or by talking to 100 people. Right. So it kind of really varies uh, how you want to validate specific assumption. Now you can sort the list by which one are the lowest effort to go validate with the highest risk assumption. And that's where you start, that's where you spend most of the effort in terms of the priority. And I give you a little bit more a framework on how you can start gaining more ground and taking your idea to a product and to a business and to approaching this product market fit faster because you're kind of gaining more ground. We're working on the highest risk assumption. Uh-huh.

Speaker C: What were those initial low effort or like low risk, high reward actions for you?

Speaker D: Yeah, well, the whole thing is like, for me it was a lot of the technology. Right. And the compliance even behind it. Because as you know, like, uh, we are very data heavy. Mhm. Today Truebase has almost 200 million professionals. Ah, data comes from 18 data source ability to um, join all this data in real time and build a lot of algorithm on top. So it was very much technical compliant problem. We quickly find out that this problem is real there from the customer perspective. So it was one of those things where we had to pull a lot of data, write a lot of code to really make sure are we able to really automate this and to get all this data and does it make sense to provide it and at what price point? So that was a lot of the effort that was in place to really kind of de risk this high risk assumption that we made.

Speaker C: Got it. So when you have say sales teams that start using this and you're seeing those users and how they're interacting with the product and what types of ways are they using it, did you find anything fairly interesting when you notice what they're doing, what types of results do they get? I'm curious as to what people's experiences

Speaker D: for like yeah, and I was also learning, right Morgan, the learnings never end because we, I will tell you, we launched the product initially and we gave basically people the homepage of Netflix and we say, well wait, I want to search. We're like no you can't. And that was not a great way to start because people will come, they're excited. But we're like, well, I need to train the AI, you need to trust us. That was a change of behavior and you don't want to be in the business of change of behavior. So later we discover and we expose search, but we give a lot of AI. So now you can go search with topics and modules and a lot of other things that you cannot search anywhere else. Now going back to your question, we actually look at the whole process right now to how can you speed up prospecting? So with generative AI today we do a lot of things that we were not possibly able to do. For example, like if you think on a prospecting journey, you spend time researching website, you spend time composing a hyper personalized message on one to one basis. So that could be very time consuming to do that. So today we rely a lot on also our AI to be able to produce that for you. What we're seeing, we're seeing really good early stage results and people able to gain more productivity to really able to do their job on daily basis. Where we are heading right now, and we're seeing some customers starting to get there is that how can you put the whole thing on autopilot, top of the funnel, autopilot. If you think about it, Morgan, like CRM has been very well resolved. Outreach, there are incredible tools out there. Top of the funnel remains the pain point and remains manual.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker D: So what we are really trying to do here, how can we automate the stop of the funnel for you? And how does that look like will be like you generate leads with personalized messages in Truebase. You load them into your outreach tool, they get sent and now who have positively interacted with your campaigns as if they took a demo or they replied or they say contact me in a month and those feedback to the AI and automatically set up this loop so you can continuously be learning.

Speaker C: Got it. So the AI is actually looking at who responds and what type of person that is and then that has that

Speaker D: loop, that feedback to the training. Exactly.

Speaker C: Ah, uh, okay. Very interesting. That's very interesting. So ideally a salesperson would come in, they would generate these leads in Truebase based on who their customers are, put them into a sequencing tool and they're essentially generating leads or generating replies, having, finding hand raisers and then every time they go back and do that, it gets better and better and better.

Speaker D: You got it. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker C: Awesome. What were some of the challenges that you have faced building this product? Kind of like a sales point of view or what are sales issues or salespeople running into with this?

Speaker D: The technical challenges are tremendous, but as hard as they are, those are usually not the one that like kind of will make or break the business. The go to market, we are still in the early journey figuring that out. But I can tell you Morgan, like if you look at what's out there, it's a very established market. It's not like, hey, this is a new market that's opening up and now you can go and establish yourself there. We're talking about very well established market. I was talking to a CEO friend yesterday and he's like Wisam, I get like 20, 30 emails a day, people selling me prospecting solutions. So that's very challenging. We feel we are very differentiated, but yet it's very established. And even more so people who are using all these prospecting solutions out there, they kind of like it or they think this is how it works, that's how they've been doing it for 10 years. Right. So penetrating into that is kind of little bit of a challenge. And because in startup you also how can you do that? Fine. And how can you do it at scale, which is more important?

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: So those are all the things that, you know, going back to your even way earlier question, what make this very interesting. So how can you really kind of able to crack into, uh, an existing market which is actually, I will have to say I was not into such situation before because always I was working into new industry, new trends that are in place. And here I am right now in a more established market.

Speaker C: Yeah, selling to salespeople too. That sometimes that's not very fun.

Speaker D: You know, I have to tell you, it's challenging, but I also like it a lot more.

Speaker C: Okay.

Speaker D: Because they sympathize with you. You know, how many times we they come tell us, hey, I will reply to you because I get a lot of cold outreach and nobody replies to me. So they're kind of doing us some courtesy and they take the call. And I actually really enjoy talking to salespeople. So so far it's been a positive experience for sure.

Speaker C: Me too. I am never rude to telemarketers who call me, even on the phone. I'm always nice. And it's tough calling people, emailing people, and maybe that person really needs to hear that that day and kind of keeps them going. So I want to know, I know you guys are using this, uh, you're using your own tool. Can you walk through like high level since Truebase is building a prospect list and personalizing your messaging like a campaign you all have run that was successful and kind of how the tool helped build that campaign?

Speaker D: Yeah, we definitely used truebase to prospect for truebase. I want to mention, Morgan, that we only generate the leads and the messages, we don't send them. Right. There's a lot of still human aspect of this and figuring out who do you want to send, who are your decision makers and all of that. And this is where a lot of the learning is. You know, we experimented quite a bit. I will say the most important part of this, at least what we learned is understanding that this is a journey. Actually it's a scientific problem. What do I mean by that? This whole like gut feeling, it's great, but apply it and measure it and iterate on it. So we have spreadsheets and spreadsheets and tools in place to measure. Every campaign have variable, always a B test and every week we're very proud that we're able to inch sometimes few percentage point and reply and we're able to really leverage. So we experiment with a lot of things. I'll give you an example. What do you ask somebody from in your cold outreach? Do you pitch them your service or do you have permission to pitch them their service? We experimented with things like that. Do you send them um, if they accepted to be pitched, do you send them a one minute video or do you send them your calendly link?

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: So we start into digging into that and we're always experimenting with one thing at a time on a weekly campaign because it gets also very complicated when you're running those campaigns. It's not apples to apples because it could be you added five new things and you launch a new website and the quarter end and suddenly all your results are skewed from number perspective. So doing one thing at a time and doing over it slow down the iteration process. But at least you have more confidence in finding the right baseline for your campaigns.

Speaker C: Got it. For example, what prospects have you found that are more likely to buy Truebase? What's one example of messaging that's worked with them?

Speaker D: Yeah. So the one thing we experimented with is a bottom up approach. So we target the end users and the hypothesis there is that uh, targeting the end users like an sdr, they are the one with the problem. Right. They are the one who must book X number of demos a week. But they don't have decision power. So we started reaching out to the end users and we were telling them hey, just try it out. Here's a free trial. You don't have to just at the very least you get few leads. And few took us up on that. And then they were able to find basically value and generate more leads and then they went and pitched it on our behalf to their decision maker. And all that we saw is a credit card charge from the um, manager. Yeah, that worked well. That's by the way is the pattern how software is sold on the engineering part of the house. Like that's most. And the business side, it's kind of catching up.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker D: The challenge with that is uh, because they don't have decision power, they quickly tell you sometimes I'm not decision maker, it looks cool, but I'm not decision maker. So we're really experimenting or where do we want to spend our time here? The flip side of this, decision makers maybe have the decision power but they cannot really differentiate easily and they get marketed to very, very often. Everybody wants stock decision makers. So this is some of the challenges right now. I actually think there is no right or wrong answer here. You really have to have full contact campaigns I really believe into multiple touch points. So right now we approach from bottom up, top down marketing and inbound and outbound. All of that combined to really get somebody's attention.

Speaker C: Yeah, totally. It takes so many Touches across multiple people and departments now. And this is why I think this is a really good time for a product like this. Even though you mentioned like it's a mature market, there's a lot of fish in the sea, it's tough to break in. I do think it's a good time because in the past few years I've noticed talking to people working at companies, reply rates have been steadily declining. I think ever since COVID I don't know if you've heard this from the people you've, your prospects you've talked to. I'd be interested to hear that. But reply rates are going down, cold emails getting harder and harder and people are looking or hungry for something that can give them an edge with that.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker C: Have you heard that from a, uh, lot of the prospects you've talked to just over the past few years?

Speaker D: From a timing perspective, we can't be more excited. So definitely the response rate is 1%. Right. So we're really, really challenging from outbound. Number two is with a downturn economy, a lot of teams are getting smaller and a lot of software stack are shrinking as well. So you really want to get do more with less. So with leveraging automation and AI and we are priced for a downturn economy. That's another thing we haven't even talked about comparing to the current established market, how expensive it is to even try it out. We think that's changing a lot. We are kind of in a way commoditizing this. And once you see this improvement in rates and quite honestly the one part I'm really excited about is that I feel like sales and cold outreach gets like a bad reputation. Right. It's like somebody trying to just like sell you something where I can't tell you how many times I discovered incredible products for somebody that just reach out to me as long as they were respectful, uh, when I say I'm not interested. I really found some amazing vendors and partners that I'm working with. They're all from cold outreach. I see value in that when it's done right. So if you think that only 7% of your target customers are ready to buy at a certain point of time, if you're able to reach to them and you get this deferred, like talk to me later, I'm not ready now. And you build this relationship over time, that cold outreach, if you're really targeting your ICP and you've done your work in terms of personalization, I think it has still a lot of value. It's been around For a while right now with automation of outreach, it really populated this and uh, kind of there's so many emails we got and I think that could be improved quite a bit.

Speaker C: Yeah, totally. It's harder to find that I'm going to send an email, someone's going to reply and they're going to buy pretty soon. Like that's harder to do now. But like you were saying, building that network, building those relationships, there's no more cost effective way to do that than cold outreach, like hands down. So that's still super effective for connecting with people. One, um, hundred percent reply rate. So like what do you guys see reply rate wise? And I know you're not using, you're not the tool that's actually sending emails, but we're experimenting.

Speaker D: Depends on the campaign and the time. And uh, by the way, the one more thing I want to say, I work with a lot with customers as well. We've seen the 40 and the 50%, but again those are extremely niche and narrow. Right. So I don't want to like in some cases maybe the 2% is incredible. Right. So it really depends on what you're sending, what you're trying and what's your call to action.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. And who that audience is. Right.

Speaker D: 100.

Speaker C: Do you guys see like with a cold audience, are you seeing like in the neighborhood of 5, 10% or somewhere around there?

Speaker D: Some of our best performing baseline, we've got like sometimes to the 6% and we feel this is really good. Right. 6%, uh, on that rate and we're looking at way to improve it. It's not consistent. I think there's a whole, especially when you're selling to a sales team. As you know, Morgan, it could be cyclical. There is this whole concept of quarters, sometimes month quota where people just like sometimes even on weekly. Right. It'll be like nobody wants to talk to you on a Monday or Tuesday for whatever reason. Sometimes I find sending on the weekend might be better. So it's all about being open and experimenting. We accept that sometimes it's seasonal and we look more on average rather than anything else.

Speaker C: Absolutely, I totally agree. So what's next for Truebase moving forward, you and the team?

Speaker D: Well, I think we're still barely getting started. Great roadmap on what we can accomplish with the technology. We are very happy about the timing and the product we built, Morgan. We just really want to grow this all the way and put it on the hand of a lot more sales fellow that can hopefully see the value the way we do.

Speaker C: Totally, totally Truebase IO uh, Wisam, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker D: Of course Morgan. That was a lot of fun.

Speaker C: Likewise.

Speaker B: I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you're looking to level up your cold outreach gaming, you'd like advice, guidance and support from over 4,000 other agency owners, SaaS, founders and other who are doing the same. Go to morgandwilliams.com community to join the Cold Outreach Mastery Facebook Group. It is free to join. Um, I'm in there consistently dropping value and it's a great place to level up your results with cold outreach. And if Facebook's not your thing, you can get tons of value by joining my newsletter. Head over to morgan d.williams.com Newsletter and enter your best email address until we meet again. Please remember outflow equals inflow. I'll see you next time.