Real Business Development: A Marketing Approach to Sales
As salespeople, we often have a reps-first mentality. Hustle hustle hustle. Do whatever it takes to get the win because our companies depend on it. And that is a good thing.
Grit matters. The ability to lean in and work harder is something that is valuable, and in my eyes reflects positively on your character.
But,
It’s a mistake to let that define our thinking and approach. What do I mean?
In my first sales job I was told to just put in the reps. So that’s what I did. Reps, reps, reps, often without any logic or sense of connection between my actions. As I’ve mentioned before, I felt I was not part of something that scaled (actually developing a business), and was not engaging my brain. In many ways I was actively discouraged from doing so — I simply had to do what everyone else did, and couldn’t even write my own copy.
I pursued a different approach upon leaving, to positive results. But I really accelerated this strategy, what I call a marketing approach to sales, after taking on an after-hours project.
I was working full-time, but was approached to support an early stage startup in stealth. They didn’t have anyone on the sales-side, or even a real sales playbook. I also did not have as much time — my main job took absolute priority — so I couldn’t pursue a reps-based approach.
You see sales is often viewed through reps and results. Marketing, however, is viewed through experiments and results.
So, without any real precedents in place, any marketing toes to step on, and the advice of a very senior marketing and sales mentor, I set out building the outreach funnel.
The first step was to prospect. If you do that first, do it in large volumes, and do it right, it makes the rest a lot easier. I was able to get a few thousand high quality leads, categorized into different categories and personas. I would use a sample size of around n = 500 for all my experiments. Next the team put together an in-depth breakdown of the entire customer journey, step to minute step, trying to understand customer problems with the tiniest microscope.
That’s when I started testing channels. First I put together an email sequence, trying to summarize the value proposition (personalized to personas and other details) as concisely and as effectively as I could. But that’s not all I did.
I also wrote a few articles. I created an ROI calculator customers could use. I spent some time figuring out the backend, when I realized only a few people would fill it out, and that I should just create a form people could submit and calculate the rest manually (that was the right decision, and let me move faster). I then created a separate email sequence to test these items.
I also put together a list of all the influencers in this domain, and tangential domains, and reached out to them (often including the materials I’d developed earlier), trying to form relationships and get on to their platforms.
I wanted to be creative with my messaging. Instead of just trying to sell to them, I emphasized that we were an early project looking to have conversations. I also used the profile of one of the founders — he was a doctor, and people love speaking to doctors.
Ultimately all these channels had varying levels of success. But what had the most success? One of the lowest effort experiments — I added people on LinkedIn using the co-founder’s profile (300 characters), mentioned we were working on a project, and that he was a doctor. With a 100–200 invitations sent I’d get 15–20 meetings, 2/3rds of which would move on to a commercial opportunity. Pretty soon, the team was overwhelmed with sales.
Using this approach is not only about efficiency. It’s about learning something and being a part of something bigger. This was a real revenue pipeline — we really built something scalable and repeatable. It allowed us to learn more about our positioning and value proposition. And ultimately it was a lot more intellectually engaging, which is important to avoid drudgery.
Everyone needs to work hard, with discipline, and with focus. Sometimes work can be boring. No one wants to engage in such work forever, even if they are capable of doing so.
What many salespeople miss is that they often don’t have to.
