Welcome to the second installment of "How to land your first 50 customers when your product barely exists."

In the last edition, we started looking at the secrets of sales guru Armand Farrokh. We covered how to make a list of prospects for your sales outbound strategy. You can read it here.

To refresh your memory, you have to:

1. Build your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
2. Understand the different buyers at the same company
3. Shortlist the companies and contacts to reach out to

There's a bit more to it than the above summary, so you should definitely read part one.

In this installment—the second in a 4-part series—we cover the next step in Armand’s strategy: building your Customer Advisory Board (CAB).

Let’s go!

What is a CAB?

It’s simple. A CAB is a group of selected customers (generally 5-50) you invite to use your product and share insights and feedback related to it. For example, if you’re selling fintech, you’ll invite 20 influential CFOs within your ICP who can speak to your problem space and help you hone your product.  

But why build a CAB?

1. You’ll understand your target audience better and build a product that suits their needs.
2. You’ll receive honest feedback on new product ideas, features, and improvements.
3. You'll know how the industry works, how your customers use your product, what features they use the most, and what you can build to increase their usage.
4. You’ll have a group of loyal customers who’ll promote your product.
5. Insights from the group will help you tailor your marketing and sales messages to better resonate with your target audience.

So how do you get building?

First, shortlist people you think are ideal for your CAB. These people should be within your target audience, need your product, and understand the industry better than most. Ideally, you should shortlist 200-300 people.

Second, send them an email invitation to join your CAB. Armand’s former boss at Pave, Matt, emailed 200 people and got 50 meetings off of it. Here’s the exact message he used to attract these people. (The company was first known as Trove. It later rebranded to Pave.)

What makes this email good?

1. It’s personal: Matt mentions why he thinks the person is a good fit for joining his CAB. It shows the recipient that Matt did his research.
2. It has a clear problem statement: He describes the problem his product is tackling. Notice that he’s not using jargon or feature language. He uses simple words and a scenario (that the CFOs commonly face) to build the initial connection.
3. It has an incentive: Everyone’s busy. No one will trade their time for free. So, Matt offers shares in exchange for their valuable feedback.
4. It highlights the founding team: He also mentions that the founding team is from Penn and Wharton to establish credibility.
5. It builds scarcity: The “I only have 4 spots remaining” sentence builds urgency and a sense of exclusivity to persuade the recipient to join the CAB.
6. It’s easy to respond to: If the recipient is interested, they only have to reply to the email or book a time to chat. No unnecessary filling forms or other complicated processes.
7. It’s brief: The email is over within one scroll, which will persuade the reader to read it.  

Once you persuade customers to join your CAB, prepare a schedule on how and when you’ll communicate with them. Share the meeting agenda in advance—so they’re well prepared. You, too, should be ready with your interview questions to save both of you time.

Finally, implement their advice to show that you value their feedback.

That’s it for today.

Coming up in Part 3: Connecting with a cold lead and sending impactful follow-up emails in your cold email sequence.

Happy CAB-building!

Sameer

(pinch-hitting for Kera while she’s on maternity leave)

This article was written by Sameer Ansari. When he's not writing for technology startups, VC funds, and investors, he's obsessed with human psychology and soccer.