finding good customers — Aayush Priyank

When I started my agency about 13 months ago, I qualified clients based on two parameters:

Am I confident about being able to book meetings for them?
Can they afford to pay INR 10K per meeting?

If they qualified, I’d offer them a generous pilot (specific outcome within 3 months) and then move to a retainer.

I had three clients for whom I could get meetings, but who weren’t a great fit.

These are additional parameters that I now look at, to decide who to work with:

Ability to close: If the client doesn’t know how to close deals, the meetings won’t convert. Without ROI, the partnership is unsustainable.
# of existing customers: No existing customers = difficulty in generating proof (which is a very signficant leverage in outreach) + more effort from my side to validate who the product would be a good fit for.
Product price: If the product is expensive enough, one sale could justify an year’s worth of outreach. I have a high quality client who has seen no closure in the last 4 months, but is willing to continue because of this.

If I had to choose only one parameter, I would choose product price - assuming the client has enough cash in the bank to survive for a year.

Which reminds of a related parameter: don’t work with desperate clients, by which I mean clients who need results yesterday and don’t have the patience to commit to a channel and make it work.

I don’t want to work with businesses that need a great outreach process to make revenue.

I want to work with businesses that are making money with a shitty outreach process and give them a great outreach process instead.

I recently onboarded two clients that fit that description - one selling a low LTV product at scale, and another selling very expensive products to enterprise clients.

For the low LTV client, I’m exploring a sales training angle to develop their team. I’m a bit skeptical about the scalability of it (it takes a lot of time to train people), but I’m open to giving it a try.

For the high LTV client, I’m doing email outreach (highly scalable, async service) and I’m excited to build a case study around using email outreach to land enterprise clients.

These are my discoveries, assumptions, and intentions so far. I will update on what happens.