the tldr: Raise your visibility. It doesn't mean becoming an influencer but focusing on what is relevant to your customers. We all hate LinkedIn, but it is where a lot of our customers spend time, so meet them there. Post articles, comment, show that you're knowledgeable and not a bot.

I'm launching a new website (helping to detect fake AI candidates for recruiters) and you'd think the ICP would be pretty straightforward....it's not. Knowing your ICP also requires you to know the pain they're experiencing in their company and within the market at the same time as the pain they're experiencing personally. It is not easy at all.

Cold outreach is hard, but if you can get the person, the company, the market pain points and the outreach right at the right time, it can be a gold mine. I've been using my friend's website https://salesbrief.co (you can sign up for free and test it) as it helps with this. It's showing some promise for me and might help you too

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

ISBN 0241242533

Make about 1,000 calls.

Like, you want to call up a company and get them to buy your software? To pay you to make them software?

Because while either way I'd say be more targeted -- try to network IRL and have linkedin (retching noise) just the place you go to get their email... and then make a targeted pitch to a smaller number of people you've met IRL. Budget to go to a few conferences.

But that's a strategy I think works best if you have good product and want to get businesses to pay to use it, and is less effective in selling "consulting" (sarcastic finger quotes).

Either way though, going to conferences where people will be legitimately interested in your product (Think going to HOPE instead of Blackhat)... offer to take people out to dinner, expense it as marketing.

Also I don't reccomend buying people alcohol, just food. For whatever reason, people will overdrink and turn into asshole reasons when alcohol is free... by all means point them to a decent dive bar.

(For example there's one behind Bally's that's attached to a convenience store. They used to let folks buy shit in the store and eat it in the bar if they weren't entitled about it.)

If you're selling that you can make cool stuff, software wise? Try more academic conferences. A lot of people would kill for a decent software engineer, it can be extremely hit or miss with academic CS types, they often would love people who can do stuff like set up a limesurvey server or whip up a nice looking static site for their lab or do really basic stuff like make R scripts to automate stuff done in the opendocument equivalent of excel...

But no course, book, or framework for outbound sales will ever Trump face to face interaction. A lot of companies discount who being the "cool guy at the conference" can lead to sales... especially as people age (because again, I said go for authentic gatherings, not sport coat fests).

Over time, if you combine being friendly with having something of value, sales will happen -- those in person leads will be your most valuable IMHO.

1) "inbound marketing"

2) The lean startup / MVP