Prospecting With AI

Our new start-up, Tacit, has been trying to find traction for nearly two years.

We’ve had potential pilots in the works for months, but nothing has closed.

Just last week, we confirmed a pilot with one of Australia’s fastest-growing health start-ups.

The time from the first conversation to getting an NDA signed has been < 3 weeks.

Every other pilot we’ve worked on so far has been > 3 months.

So we catalogued why they moved so quickly:

1. Their investor, Blackbird, introduced us to their head of AI (Blackbird reached out to us to see what we’re doing)

2. Their head of AI had a clear problem that our company solved

3. They’re a startup that has raised $96.6 M USD in < 2 years - they’re looking to grow fast

With this information in hand, I went over to ChatGPT and used the following prompt:

“Can you please help me find all VC funds and their principals that have invested in seed rounds for fast-growing AI companies (companies like (insert your best customer) are an example) - please rewrite this prompt for a deep research query”

(To access Deep Research in ChatGPT select “+” > “more” > “Deep Research”)

ChatGPT pulled together a 646-word prompt to feed to Deep Research - you can view it here.

I’ve now got a full prospecting list of VC funds to target:

I’ve now set up AOB to target these leads and scheduled chats with each VC partner, hoping to get an intro to their portfolio companies.

Most businesses can reverse engineer their best customers and find other companies doing the same thing - AI has just made this significantly easier.

Lead Maxxing

In 2022 when NZ was going Banana's, we were getting soo many leads at our gym that our funnel fell to bits.

At the time, our lead form only asked for a first name and an email address.

But then we'd have to put a ton of time into getting that lead into our gym and signing up for a membership. 14 day free trials. Email offers. DM's on Facebook to get a number so we could call them etc..

Basically we got as many leads as possible, then invested max sales effort to convert them.

But as "sales" got too busy we had to introduce friction to our funnel.

We started making people click a button to reach our lead form. Then we asked for their last name, then their phone number. Eventually we made people book a time to come into the gym with Calendly before we'd even speak to them.

That extra friction significantly increased the quality of leads we were getting, and saved us a ton of sales effort.

Conversion rates went up, cost per sale went down, etc.. etc..

Then what do you know. The ass-end fell out of the economy, our funnel dried up and we had to go back to lead-maxing.

Free passes, "kickstarter deals", free consults. We turned the friction way back down, and built 5,6,7 new offers to get people into our funnels.

And once again as things improved in 2024 and took off last year we ramped friction back up.

Friction up, friction down, friction up, friction down.

Essentially, we were optimising for two constraints.

1. Staff time

2. Gym floor space

By increasing and decreasing friction in our marketing funnel, we can manage our staff and gym-floor capacity.

Staff are quiet = tons of time to do sales.

Staff are busy = limited time to do sales.

Gym floor quiet = room for leads to trial

Gym floor busy = no room for leads to trial

It’s a pretty simple concept, so if this is all obvious to you, my apologies for the dry read.

But once upon a time, I didn't understand how this worked. So we wasted a ton of money on our staff & gym doing nothing.

So I find it handy to keep this framework (if you'd call it that) in the back of my mind and check in from time to time to make sure we've got that balance right.