If no one knows that I exist, no one will buy from me. There are only four ways someone can find out about what I am selling.
- People you know * 1 to 1 = warm outreach
- People you know * 1 to many = posting free content
- People you don't know * 1 to 1 = cold outreach
- People you don't know * 1 to many = Run paid ads
The "Core Four" is a concept that comes from Alex Hormozi.
Cold outreach
I decided to focus on cold outreach because it I think it would have the longest long term benefit. My reasoning is that it would develop my people related skills the fastest which is something that will always be useful for the the rest of my life. I imagine it would also help me develop my sales skills the fastest since it is the one that is likely to have the most repetitions which means more practice.
The plan
My plan is to do at least 10 cold emails and 10 cold calls a day, a minimum of 20 total reach outs a day. I chose twenty because I still work a full time job and the only time I'll have free to talk to cold call other business is during my lunch hour from 12pm - 1pm. If I did 20 reach outs a day for 100 days straight I will have improved faster than if I only did a few a day. Alex Hormozi recommends 100 reach outs a day, and that is the eventual goal, but I can't manage that yet with a full time job. Now that I have the plan, I need businesses to contact.
Building a list
My options for creating a list is to either pay for them, or make the list myself. I chose to go with building the list myself since I don't have the funds to pay for quality software to create me the list.
Scraping Facebook
My minimum requirements for me to create a lead was first name, phone number, and a website worse than what I could make. After thinking about all the ways I could manually create my own list of, none felt efficient. Creating my list manually by pulling up different local businesses on google maps didn't seem efficient but it was what I was leaning towards doing, that is until I remembered that Facebook groups exist. I had recently join group with nearly 4k members.
I found a script on someone's github that will create a csv file for all the members in a Facebook group. When you scroll down in the members area of the group it'll add the newly loaded members into its list. I then prompted chat gpt to create me a complimentary script that will auto scroll the page and it can be toggled off and on with the push of a button.
You can find the Facebook scraper guide here and the scripts are below.
Scraper:
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function scrollToBottom() {
window.scrollTo(0, document.body.scrollHeight);
}
const toggleButton = document.createElement("button");
toggleButton.textContent = "Stop Auto Scroll";
toggleButton.style.position = "fixed";
toggleButton.style.bottom = "20px";
toggleButton.style.right = "20px";
toggleButton.style.zIndex = "9999";
toggleButton.style.padding = "10px";
toggleButton.style.border = "none";
toggleButton.style.borderRadius = "5px";
toggleButton.style.backgroundColor = "#007bff";
toggleButton.style.color = "#ffffff";
toggleButton.style.cursor = "pointer";
function toggleAutoScroll() {
if (autoScrollInterval) {
clearInterval(autoScrollInterval);
toggleButton.textContent = "Start Auto Scroll";
autoScrollInterval = null;
} else {
autoScrollInterval = setInterval(scrollToBottom, 1000);
toggleButton.textContent = "Stop Auto Scroll";
}
}
toggleButton.addEventListener("click", toggleAutoScroll);
document.body.appendChild(toggleButton);
let autoScrollInterval = setInterval(scrollToBottom, 1000);Both of the scripts are pasted into the console in your browsers dev tools. You first paste the Scraper and then the auto scroll.
Filtering the list
After I exported the CSV file I created uploaded it into Google sheets and created a filter that only includes rows whos bio description contains the keywords of "founder," "owner," or "CEO." From there I manually went to the facebook profile and found the owners first name, business name, phone number, email, and website. It took me a week to create 100 leads that met my criteria.
Takeaway
I'm glad I spent the time to manually create this leads list. It taught me the value of a lead. The importance of a lead is easy to forget when using software to create a list. I think every first time entrepreneur should manually create their first 100 leads. Doing this almost guarantees that you are less likely to waste leads when you start using software, or at least I would like to think it does.