Nathan Barry's Direct Sales Propsecting

How Nathan scaled his sales process from $1K/month to $30K/month

Author

Jacky Wong
February 10, 2024

Nathan Barry’s Direct Sales Prospecting With BuiltWith

TLDR: He used BuiltWith to find similar technologies to prospect clients and went niche by niche.

In this post, we go over:

  • Who’s Nathan Barry

  • The technology he used to prospect

  • The email copy he used

  • Pros and cons with this method

  • When you should and shouldn’t try this

Who’s Nathan Barry

Nathan Barry created ConvertKit and scaled it to $30K/month by himself before he hired employees. ConvertKit is an email marketing tool built for creators and competes heavily with email juggernauts MailChimp and MailerLite.

The Technology Stack

Below, we go into detail of how he used BuiltWith to prospect for new customers and how you can do this with your business as well. You can see an example of what this looks like below.

An example of the technology list using BuiltWith

Now if you need to get a list of all competitors in your field, simply google or ask ChatGPT “alternatives to”. Similarly, you can apply the same technique for products yours goes well with. For example - if you are selling AI-driven chatbots for e-commerce stores, you could research stores built on e-commerce.

Email Copy

The below email is an example of one that Nathan used “over a thousand times”. He focused on asking and not pitching (fairly generic advice now). In particular - he asked if there were any frustrations with the product.

Sarah,

Is anything frustrating you with MailChimp?

The reason I ask is I run ConvertKit, which is an email marketing platform for professional bloggers. We’ve got a lot of great bloggers using us like Katie and Seth from Wellness Mama, Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income, and Chris Guillebeau.

I’d love to hear more about how we can build it to better serve bloggers like you.

Talk soon,

Nathan

Nathan Barry

Here is what great about his email:

  • “Is anything frustrating you with ___” is a good way to differentiate yourself from competitors and allows you to use the user’s language

  • Giving the exact technology provider makes this personal and that’s a key component otherwise this just looks like spam

But - it’s not all great, there are a few issues with this approach that aren’t really stated.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Cons

Free, scalable way to identify list of prospects

Relies on BuiltWith giving highly accurate results (difficult to be sure this is true especially if you are selling backend technologies)

Great way to identify and learn directly from customers

Incorrect name or technology provider could give bad first impression of user but they can just ignore you

Great if you are already doing email outbounding and this can just be another method for lead lists.

Terrible if you need to learn and pick up a new outbound channel. Setting up email campaigns and learning to write good e-mail copy can take a bit longer.

When You Should Try This

You should use this approach if you are in the following scenario to maximize ROI:

  • You are doing email outbound and want another way to add to your email list

  • You have direct competitors where technologies may be obvious in the frontend (backend technologies can vary significantly in accuracy)

When You Should Not Use This

  • If you are running extremely low-ticket sales with no scalable upside (e.g. low-ticket e-commerce). What worked with ConvertKit was that it was a SaaS with highly scalable upside with people paying more each month - this method does not work if you are selling 1-off products that are low-ticket.

  • If you are new to email outbound, this can also take a while. There is a lot to get right when you are doing email outbound such as ensuring your email copy is not terrible.

If you are looking for the best email outbound software for solopreneurs, we recommend using SmartLead due to its email-warmup, pricing and simplicity.