Choosing your Dream 100

The best and fastest growing companies are using outbound sales to drive revenue growth.

It makes sense: you can choose the exact companies that you want to sell to. The ones that are the perfect fit for your product.

But how do you get customers’ attention when they don’t know your name or your brand?

I’ve written before about how we closed $1.5MM in the first 18 months at Levelset.

The ideas aren’t new or innovative. They are simple.

If you want to scale your revenue with outbound, you need to build a prospecting system that delivers high-quality meetings with your most-desired prospects.

These are the meetings that could change the trajectory of your business or your career.

The biggest customers. The most strategic partnerships.

The top 1% of all the companies that could ever buy your product.

There are no hacks or sales tricks.

The work is hard.

‍It’s going to take longer than you think.

But if you commit to this effort for 6+ months, you will see results. I guarantee it.‍

Here’s exactly why you aren’t getting more meetings with prospects

This is what most salespeople do:

Wait for inbound leads to come in
Dig through the CRM for leads that look like a good fit
Buy lead lists from crappy lead generation services
Send 1,000 emails out, spamming potential customers
“It’s a numbers game”
Send 1 or 2 emails. Make a few phone calls. Then give up.

If any of these tactics sound familiar, you are in the right place.

You have the right intentions. You want to get in front of more potential customers and you are willing to do the work, but you aren’t getting results.

I have been there before.

When we started selling Levelset, we didn’t have a recognizable brand.

We hardly had experience in the industry.

We didn’t even know how to service enterprise-sized customers.

But we knew that our product was valuable and we were confident that we could perform for customers if they just gave us a chance.

Our first few outbound prospecting campaigns flopped. They were dead-on-arrival.

We built a list of over 2,000 companies that could be customers and we sent an email blast asking for a meeting. ‍

Absolutely zero responses.‍

As we say in the South “that dog won’t hunt”.

‍The bright idea that changed how I prospect: Dream 100

I had spent months trying to book sales meetings with very little result.

The “spray-and-pray” method just wasn’t working. I needed a change and I needed it fast.

Then I came across The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes.

This book changed the way that I think about selling to enterprise customers.

Specifically, Chapter 6: “Dream 100: The High Art of Getting the Best Buyers”

The concept behind the Dream 100 campaign is not new or innovative.

Quite the opposite, this idea slaps you in the face with its simplicity:

Be highly-specific about the customers that you target. This is the most important part of the process. A bad list will hurt your conversion rate. Or worse, it will leave you with customers that you don’t want.
Prepare a “sales letter” or a compelling value proposition that will get your prospect’s attention.
Create a schedule of actions where you can directly reach out to your target customers.
Complete the actions on your schedule. Over-and-over until you get the meeting or the customer tells you they are not interested.

That’s it. The magic is in the discipline of each step.

If you are deliberate with picking the targets and you stick with your schedule for long enough, you will get meetings.

It just works.

‍Picking the right target is the most important

The most important piece of the Clockwork Prospecting playbook is to pick the right targets to pursue.

The lifetime value of your customer needs to be big enough to put them on your Dream 100 list.

This is not a list of targets for $50,000 per year customers, or even $100k per year customers.

The Dream 100 list should be reserved for companies that will change the course of your business. Companies that you are a little nervous to sell to.

The average conversion rate from lead to meeting is about 12% in a 12-month period.

For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume that 50% of your meetings turn into customers. That’s a 6% conversion from your dream 100 list. 6 new customers.

If you are selling to $50k per year customers, that’s only $300k in new ARR. Not enough.

If you are selling to $500k per year customers, that’s $3MM in new ARR. Much better.

‍But what if I don’t have a $500k per year product?

That’s OK. This campaign still works. You can use it to book meetings with the most important strategic relationships in your business.

Focus on the customers or partners that you want today, in 3 months, in 3 years.

‍Exercise: Evaluate your top 5 customers

Pull a list of all customer revenue over the last 12 months. Look at the top 5 customers on that list, the ones that spent the most money with your business over the last 12 months.

Write down what you notice about these top 5 customers:

Are they profitable?
How did they learn about your product? Was it an easy sell?
Are they a happy customer? Are they fun to work with?
Where are they geographically located?
What industry are they in?
What is the main stakeholder’s name and title?
What is the economic buyer’s name and title?
How big is the company by revenue and employees?
Why did this company buy your product?

Be as specific as you possibly can when describing your top 5 customers. This is the foundation of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). We will use this ICP to build our Dream 100 list.

‍Create your Dream 100 List

Now that we have defined your ICP, it’s time to pick the companies that occupy your Dream 100 list.

Be as specific as you can.

For example, Levelset sold into the construction industry. It’s a big market, so we needed to narrow down our list to 100 companies from over 100,000 companies in the construction market.

By looking at our top customers, we learned that our best target customers were building material suppliers. But not just any supplier, we specifically focused on suppliers who had:

- more than 50 locations across multiple states

- more than one line of business (sales and install, for example)

- an established credit department (that’s the department our champion worked in)

- had recently filed a lien (we had to get county-level data for this)

When we pulled this criteria together, we learned that there were only about 350 companies that fit this description.

We focused on selling to these 350 companies for the next 10 years!

That’s why it is so important to take your time with this list. It took me 3 days to get my list right.

3 full days of mind-numbing research to get all the right companies and contact information for the buyer personas that we were targeting.

The information you are looking for is simple:
- Company

- Champion contact info

- Executive contact info

Make a copy of this template and fill it in with your Dream 100 list.

Dream 100 Template

If you aren’t sure where to find the right companies to target, here are some helpful resources for you:

Lead data sources:

Pro tips:
- Use Hunter.io to confirm valid email addresses

- Use TruePeopleSearch to confirm valid phone numbers‍

Here’s how to make sure you have the right list

You have painstakingly created your Dream 100 list. You’ve combed through thousands of companies and contacts and you have landed on your target prospects.

Take 30 minutes to go line-by-line through your list. Each company should be an obvious fit for your product.

If they aren’t obviously a great potential customer, throw them out.

You want to be 100% confident in every company and contact that’s on your list because you will be working to get in touch with them for the next 10 years.

Be protective of who you let on your list.