Why build Reach in public?

My co-founder Guillermo and I are salespeople building a sales tool for other salespeople. As we endeavor to build our company Reach, we thought others might benefit from following our process as a sales team and company from the very beginning. Therefore we have decided to “build in public”.

While there is no shortage of sales related content on the internet, we have struggled to find many examples of salespeople or sales teams documenting their process over an extended period. It’s even harder to find anyone doing this who is also building a company at the same time. Our goal is to share our learnings and in so doing create a modest community in which we can exchange ideas and strategies.

Here’s what you can expect.

Since we are too new/early to rely on inbound sales, we will be building a high-volume outbound sales infrastructure and process until we are in a position to build a well-oiled inbound sales funnel. (FYI outbound refers to cold contacting relevant leads to propose our service and get them interested, while inbound refers to leads who are coming to us to sign up).

Our approach is: test → analyze → iterate → repeat. We are starting with some assumptions around who our buyer personas are: SDR Managers and VP of Sales. Both personas are actively involved in figuring out how to optimize the outbound efforts of their sales teams. Both personas are unique and therefore we will create unique sequences for each with differentiated value propositions of our product.

As important as the process itself are the tools we will be using. We will reference these tools as we leverage them in our processes and will likely add or replace tools over time depending on performance/needs. Our current sales tech stack is the following:

• Apollo → used for lead generation and email sequences. We chose Apollo because it has very powerful filtering for finding the right leads and exporting the lists. Pricing is monthly and accessible.
• MixMax → used for email sequences and pre-built templates for quick responses / follow ups. We chose MixMax because of its simplicity. It doesn’t have all of the bells and whistles but it covers most of our needs when it comes to sequencing. It also has a handy Gmail integration that gives you many features when composing an email. Pricing is accessible.
• Pipedrive → our CRM for tracking leads, tasks, conversations and deals. We chose Pipedrive because it does a good job of providing an intuitive and relatively simple CRM while still having enough features to track our sales conversations. Pricing is accessible.
• Reach → our own tool for hyper personalizing our emails at scale. We use our own tool because it’s perfect for saving time and boosting our response rate when sending cold emails. We can personalize each email now in a fraction of the time.
• cal.com/calendly → used for easy call/demo scheduling. The functionality is extremely simple but helps speed up the process of organizing meetings. They have free tiers.
• Chartmogul → used for tracking signups, purchases and churn so we can track the impact of our sales efforts. We chose Chartmogul because it’s easy to customize and get quick insights for SaaS companies. They have a free tier.

From a workflow perspective it’s Apollo → Reach → Mixmax → Pipedrive, with support from Calendly and Chartmogul. We’ll go deeper into how they all work together in our next post.

Each week we will share new strategies we are trying and will share details about what we are testing as well as the results we are getting. It’s our objective to be honest about what is working and what is not working so that genuine learning can take place.