Founder-led sales: a 20-minute weekday routine
You are the sales team. Here is a 20-minute weekday routine, starting with a 7am digest, that a busy founder can actually keep up.
Outrun team2 min read
If you are a founder, you are the sales team. There is no one else, no pipeline, and no one to hand it to. It is a lot, and it is also the best way to learn what customers actually want.
The trouble is time. You also build the product, answer support and attend meetings that could have been messages. Sales gets whatever is left, which is nothing.
So here is a routine small enough to survive a bad week. It takes about twenty minutes.
The routine
Minutes 0 to 5: read the digest. It lands at 7am every weekday. Skim each lead and read the source behind it. Ignore the ones that do not fit what you sell. That is most of them, and that is fine.
Minutes 5 to 10: choose one lead. Choose the company where you can say something true about why you are writing. If you cannot say it in one sentence, move on.
Minutes 10 to 15: look at the contacts. Leads come with named contacts and a work email where we can find one, plus job titles and LinkedIn profiles where we have them. Decide who feels the problem you fix. Look at their profile for ten seconds.
Minutes 15 to 20: write the email. Yourself. Two or three sentences. Mention the announcement, say why it made you think of them, ask one question. Send it.
Then stop. Go and do the rest of your job.
Why this works
- It is small. A habit you can keep beats an ambitious plan you drop on Thursday.
- It starts with a reason. The first line is something that happened, not a compliment.
- It sounds like you. You wrote it, so it reads like a person wrote it. Because a person did.
What not to do
- Do not send a template with a name swapped in. Everyone can tell.
- Do not chase a long list. One good email beats ten careless ones.
- Do not wait for the perfect pitch. Send the plain one.
Keep a tiny log
A note with the date, the company and what you said. When someone replies, you will know what you wrote. When no one does, you can try a different angle next week.
What Outrun does
We do the boring research. Funding rounds are one of the signals behind the leads in the digest, and every lead links to the source it came from.
You do the human bit: the judgement, the email and the conversation.
The same company can show up in other digests, so what you write is what makes you stand out.
