Hello {{First name|Predictable Revenue community}},

A few years ago, a client went around town telling my entrepreneur friends I was a scam artist.

The funny part is that it was one of our better runs. We booked them about 7 meetings a month for three months. That's not glorious, but it's not nothing, and it was more than our agreement called for. It also wasn't a collaborative relationship. It was "you will book exactly the meetings I tell you to book, or you're fired." They expected to close business and be profitable inside three months. Nobody who has ever built a sales development team will tell you that's how it works.

I can understand someone who got zero results being frustrated with the process. This wasn't that. I'm still unhappy about that whole engagement, and about how it was handled.

But it stuck with me, because it put words to a question I asked myself all the time back then. Is this a scam? Am I just taking people's money?

I ran a cold email agency for years that eventually pivoted into an SDR agency. I don't think we ever did anything nefarious. We never misled a customer about what we offered or the results we expected. But there were stretches where I was less excited about what we were selling, because of the results it was getting. It was never zero for anybody. Still, when I looked at our success rate across all our clients, there were very few times I was happy with the overall picture.

Here's the one that bugs me more than the scam person.

We had a customer where we booked 54 opportunities. These weren't cold calls where a charismatic SDR talked someone into a calendar invite. They were meetings accepted over email. Each one came after a considered conversation about the value prop, where the person looked at the website and said yes, I'd like to talk to that company.

Their rep didn't get one interesting conversation out of all 54. Not a single closed deal.

There is zero chance that was about meeting quality.

A couple of months in, I did an impromptu pipeline review with them. Then I put in extra time and sat down with the rep for call review. He was a junior kid with no training, and his boss thought he was a pro salesperson. He'd ask two or three questions, then jump straight into his pitch. There was no discovery at all.

I brought my feedback to the founder. He didn't come from sales, and he didn't agree with my assessment. He thought I was trying to put the blame on somebody else.

We were the ones who got the can.

They hired us because they had a revenue problem. It turned out they only wanted help fixing one piece of it.

That's the worst part of running an agency like this. Your success or failure depends on their sales system, their sales management, and the quality of their account execs. You can do your part well and still lose.

We asked ourselves one question constantly: how far do we need to go? If we deliver meetings a good AE can close, is our job done? Or is it not done until the customer is profitable on our engagement?

We always worked toward the second one. But think about what that requires. To succeed at sales development, you need to be good at building the list and starting the conversation, on whatever channel you use. You need to run a strong discovery call, manage a strong pipeline, and nurture the people who aren't ready to buy yet. We were hired for the first two. The client's results depended on all of them.

If I'd really wanted what was best for that client, I would have fired their rep and closed the deals myself. That's the extreme version of going the extra mile. It was never on the table.

This is where an idea from The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers came from: the strength of product-market fit is a multiplier.

I didn't just think that up. I battled with it every single day. I saw it in every hard customer who struggled, and in every easy customer who seemed to get results no matter what we did. It was my answer to a part of my working life that didn't make sense. Why did some customers do so well while others completely fell apart?

The question is back on my mind because of Predictable.ai, the GTM tool I've been building.

I've got about 20 beta customers, and I'm doing weekly calls with every one of them. Most are going pretty well. But every call raises the same question I used to ask at the agency, just pointed at a product this time.

How far should Predictable go to make a customer successful? Is the job done when the list is built? When the conversation starts? When the meeting is booked? Or does it go further, into how they run discovery and manage their pipeline? And how much of that should the software do, versus me on a call?

Weekly calls with everyone have a ceiling. If I keep doing them forever, this business has a natural cap: the number of 30-minute conversations I can handle in a week. That's a pretty low number. But a cap like that is not why you build software.

If I'm not taking a 30-minute call with everybody, I need another way to support people using a tool for something they're new at. Maybe it's courses, maybe help docs, maybe an agent that does it for them. I haven't picked one. For now I'm playing it by ear, week by week, figuring out what I can do to serve my beta customers better.

Those weekly calls are the last step of the customer development funnel. I'm hands-on, and I'm letting customers tell me what's missing. I'm not asking it out loud every call, but I show up with one question in mind: what do I need to build to make this person successful?

Once I’ve made them successful, the last question is, “what do I need to build to get you to refer me to three friends?”

Last week I got my first referral. It hasn't closed yet, but it looks promising.

That’s the whole game for me. Make a customer successful and you earn the referral. Referrals aren’t the only way to grow, but they’re the best way I know to get viral-looking growth. People come to you instead of you chasing them. And if every new customer brings in 1.5 or 2 more, the math starts working for you instead of against you.

At the agency, I could only control my piece, and someone else's sales process decided whether we won. Building a product, you get to choose. Every founder has to decide how far down the value chain they're willing to go, and how much of their customer's success or failure they want a hand in. Go too shallow and you're the agency waiting to get fired. The right depth is however far it takes for your customers to win, because that's the only version where they send you their friends.

Collin

PS - I’m looking for one more founder to join the Predictable.ai beta next week, if you’re thinking about GTM, I have something interesting to show you.

The Terrifying Art of Finding Customers is the playbook for founders who never planned to do sales but have to figure it out anyway. It pulls together 13+ years of building software startups, building outbound systems for hundreds of B2B startups, and more failed experiments than I'd care to admit, into a practical guide for finding your first 10, 100, and 1,000 customers.

It will help you build a repeatable way to find customers without losing your weekends (or your soul).

Order now and you'll unlock a stack of exclusive bonuses I actually use with my consulting clients: Email me the receipt and I’ll share the resources.

Email me your receipt and I’ll share the resources.