Unfortunately, in the first half of the week, I got heavily hit by a cold and I couldn’t work.

However, I was able to move forward with outreach and I’d like to share what’s my process. ✨ 

Last week I mentioned already that I’m using Attio and LinkedIn Sales Nav, but let me show you more in detail how this works.

Table of Contents

• From lead discovery to onboarding

  • Discovery

  • Prospecting

    • Attio CRM setup

  • Outreach & Follow-ups

  • Onboarding

• Outreach as a habit

• I tried using an AI-first IDE

From lead discovery to onboarding

Let’s start from what were my requirements:

• be able to find well-targeted leads,

• not spend too much on tooling,

• have an easy, flexible, customizable way of tracking the progress of leads and accounts.

From now on, I’m going to borrow the same vocabulary used by LinkedIn:

• Lead: an individual working for a given company, or as a freelance, or agency owner, etc.

• Account: a business entity like a company, or an agency, or a no-profit org, etc.

Discovery

The discovery phase serves to find persons to reach out to.

For this step, I’m only using LinkedIn Sales Nav which costs 99EUR/month.

It provides a way more fine-grained way to filter leads and accounts compared to the search provided by LinkedIn.

These are all the available filters for leads.

Just in case it’s not obvious, you must know who you want to target.

For HeyEcho I’m looking for leads with a role spanning from VP Marketing and Head of Content to SEO Specialist and Content Marketer. For this, I’m using the filter by job title. I’m also filtering for SMBs that might be more open to experiment compared to enterprises so I filter also by company headcount.

Linkedin Sales Nav allows you to save different searches so that you can easily switch between them.

This is very handy so that you can resume from when you left. Actually, there’s no “real” way to resume from where you left off because AFAIK there’s no “status” associated with leads other than being part of a list.

When you prospect a lead, see later, you can add a lead to a list. You can leverage this to resume from when you left. I have two lists:

• “HeyEcho”: for all the good leads,

• “[Exclusion] HeyEcho”: for all the excluded leads.

Then I can add a filter to exclude showing that are in any of the two.

Maybe there’s a smarter and easier way to do it, but this works for me. 😄 

Prospecting

We found some leads during the discovery, now we want to find those that are really good and worthy of reaching out!

I go through each lead one by one, check the profile, and open the corresponding account to assess the quality of the lead itself.

In this phase, I check for things that I couldn’t filter before. For example, if the lead is passionate about generative AI, if the role in the last year has been focussed on content marketing, if the corresponding account has an active blog post, etc.

Finally, I assign this lead + account combination a score from 1 to 5. This is my very simple framework:

Let’s say that I bump into a lead who is passionate about AI and works as the VP of Marketing at a B2B SaaS company. Both lead fit and account fit are strong, so I score it as 5.

You might have noticed that the scoring is not symmetric. For example, having a strong lead + mid account is not the same as having a mid lead + strong account. That’s because with a mid lead, if the account fit is strong, you can look for other leads for the same account that might fit better. On the other hand, a mid account or worse might not have the right use case for the product disregarding how much the lead is excited.

This is where Attio kicks in. Attio is a very customizable CRM where you can associate to your records (leads, accounts, etc.) whatever you want. Attio also has a very handy Chrome extension that allows you to import a lead, and the account automatically, and associate them.

Now the problem is that I was using the Free plan with a trial of the Pro that has expired so I don’t have credits anymore to do it. 😭 

The number of leads that can be imported using the Chrome extension based on the plan is:

• Free: 20,

• Plus (29EUR/month): 200

• Pro (59EUR/month): 1000

The alternative is to add both lead and account manually.

Let’s have a look at my Attio setup.

Attio CRM setup

First of all, you need to understand a concept from Attio. There are records and there are lists.

The records can be seen as the base entities in Attio. For example, there are "People” and “Companies”. When importing a lead from LinkedIn the lead is inserted as a person record and the account as a company record. Each record type has its fields.

On the other hand, a list is a higher-level representation of a record. I created a custom “Sales” list that extends the “Companies” record type. By default, every list entry has a Status field and I also added a view of other custom fields:

• Quality: the value from 1 to 5 we discussed before,

• Initial contact: a pointer to a person's record,

• Decision maker: a pointer to a person's record,

• Annual deal value: the ACV of the account,

• Deal first contact date: the date I first reached out,

• Deal first usage date: the date the user first logged in,

• Deal won date: the date the deal converted to a paid subscription.

There are many templates available, but I prefer having my own created from scratch.

This is very handy and you can set up different views. I set up both a Kanban view and a table view. In both of them, you can customize what fields are shown, and how they’re sorted.

At this point, you might be wondering:

All the fields that I added to the “Sales” list are useful during the outreach process. However, you might be willing to run other processes for the “Companies” record type, and having those fields would be noisy. Let’s say that you have VCs in “Companies” and you want to track a fundraising process, the solution would be. to create a “Fundraising” list with its own custom fields to extend “Companies”.

Finally, I have an automation that automatically creates an entry in the “Sales” list for every new company added.

Outreach & Follow-ups

Now I have a list of leads to reach out to! 🎉 

Creating the custom message is no different from how I approached it already for EchoWords many months ago.

This is the structure of the message that I send:

The custom hook is anything I find from their profile or their activity that could be used as an icebreaker and that can help introduce content marketing, AI, etc. If I’m not able to use anything I just use a default hook.

This is what the message looks like:

When sending LinkedIn messages also the subject is required. Right now I’m using the same subject every time:

“Beta testing something for content creation—would love your feedback”

But I started considering to personalize that one as well, in the end, that works as a hook too.

If no response, I’ll manually follow up. If still no follow-up after X days and the account is a strong fit, I’d look for other leads, otherwise, I’d move to a closed lost state.

If there’s a positive response we move to the onboarding step! 🚀 

Onboarding

This is super easy, I just need to send the invitation link and I’ll then move the entry to the trial/demo/beta column.

Outreach as a habit

Last week I shared that the goal is to:

• add 40 leads/day

• reach out to 20 leads/day

Well… this is how it’s going.

I was able to add 40 leads last Friday and another 40 last Saturday, but I started actual outreach only today, but I was able to hit 20. As I mentioned, cold hit me hard early this week. 😭 

But I already see that doing one or the other is easy, but doing both requires a lot of time. Let’s see next week what happens.

I tried using an AI-first IDE

This is a bit off-topic but you might find it interesting. This week I tried giving an AI-first IDE the chance to replace my Emacs. It didn’t go well. 🤣 

Check it out here:

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed this update!

For next week I’m planning to continue outreaching and also ship some product updates. 🔥 

Let’s continue rocking! 🤘 

If you’re interested in following my journey, make sure to subscribe or follow me on Bluesky, X, and LinkedIn!