Well, if that’s what you really have in mind, that will require a
lot of experimentation, to learn what works and what doesn’t.
You need to first of all have an ICP or Ideal Customer Profile, then design your experiments around this fictitious profile. (You’ll also need to identify buyer personas. HubSpot has a nice article that covers ICP and buyer personas.)
For instance, assuming you have a lot of experience with a stack like Ruby on Rails, you could decide that you want to target small businesses
of a certain size within a
certain industry, that depend on their customized website (built on RoR) to remain in business. For them, they are stuck on a legacy tech that has been customized to handle major aspects of their business e.g. appointment scheduling, lab test administration, report printing, customer refunds etc.
Essentially, you want to identify customers who are large enough to afford your services but too small to afford a full time RoR dev on their payroll.
So, your ICP could look like this:
• SMBs with a RoR-based website and/or back-office;
Industry: Health e.g. Dental Clinics;
• Revenue: $1 - $5million/year;
• Geography: North America;
Now that you have an idea of your ICP, the next question is figuring out where to find these businesses.
There are several ways you could go about this.
1. You could use the local businesses function on Google Maps to shortlist dental offices that could fit your ICP;
2. Your could also use LinkedIn, as you’ve done in the past;
3.
BuiltWith.com supports searching by technology stack, so it
might be possible to shortlist websites that fit your ICP using their search tool;
4. Web scraping the website of professional bodies that license/regulate/manage continuous education for dental practitioners may also a viable way to shortlist dental clinics.
Now that you have a list of domains, you could use tools like
hunter.io and
Clearbit.com to obtain enrich the data your have to include other info like email addresses and phone numbers, which you will need for the final step of cold emailing.
Next, you want to clean up all of these info and put them in a CRM. A decent CRM (e.g.
Close.com) will allow you to do a lot of things including e.g lead scoring—qualify leads so you can prioritize which prospects to pursue first so you can make your first sale.
Alternatively, you could start with a spreadsheet, then move up to a CRM once a spreadsheet gets too tedious to manage.