A few months ago I met with an early-stage founder about his growth strategy and his messaging. He hasn’t found messaging that attracts his ideal target customer profile, so he isn’t growing at the rate he’d like. We discussed some ideas and his current sales pipeline. He told me about a new outbound sales strategy that wasn’t part of his original plan, but it’s working. He’s working with a company that specializes in providing sales development representative (SDR) services to clients who don’t have dedicated SDRs or sales teams. It finds prospective customers, does cold outreach to them, and sets up demos on behalf of its client companies. It gets paid only when it books demos with prospective customers that it sourced. Said differently, it eats what it kills.  

This founder is having early success with this firm. I wondered how this SDR firm is finding the right type of prospective customers. What messaging is it using? Turns out, the founder had given it high-level information about the problem he’s solving and the solution he built. He instructed it to come up with fresh messaging that it believed would be effective in landing demos. The firm created new messaging based on what the founder provided.

Creating messaging is hard. Founders and their teams who’ve been in the weeds working on a product for months or years may struggle to come up with great messaging because they’re too close. It may be challenging for them to view things from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with their company or solution.

Working with an outside firm whose incentives are aligned with yours but that brings a fresh perspective is an interesting hack to get better messaging. You both want the same thing—more sales—but it’s able to see your solution from a perspective you can’t, which enables it to create on-target messaging easier than you or your team.

It sounds counterintuitive, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. An outside sales firm will take what you’ve built and explained to it and come up with simple messaging that’s more effective because it understands the outsider’s perspective (that is, the customer’s perspective!) better than you or your employees do.

This early-stage founder may have found an interesting way to solve his messaging problem in a cost-effective way. He pays only when good messaging created by an outside firm leads to demos with prospective clients. He doesn’t have to pay one firm to create the messaging and another to book the demos. He’s getting a two-for-one deal.