Did you ever wonder how some startups seem to have an endless stream of customers and testimonials?

Well, I did, so I asked founders I knew who were bringing in 10-20 new clients a week how they did it.

Here is the formula I devised based on their collective answers.

While it sounds obvious, making sure that you are messaging the correct people is the 1st step to booking more calls. Many people will just spray and pray in the general vicinity of their target market, this doesn't work. While when you first start your audience will be more general, you should constantly be niching down as you receive more indicators of who will pay for your services.

If you want to be efficient in this process, having a list that you can easily take leads is crucial. There are many ways to build a list, but some of the best are using tools like Sales Navigator or Apollo. Many 3rd party tools will allow you to take a Sales Navigator list and export it to a CSV which you can then upload to your outreach tool of choice.

Don’t listen to the gurus who tell you that “x is the best platform to find leads”. While that might be the case for him (or he might be an affiliate), you have to find the right platform for you. Starting out, I tried Twitter, and LinkedIn, with LinkedIn having the best outcome. This can take some time, but if you attack multiple avenues early, a clear victor should emerge.

Unless you’re something special, you will have to play the numbers game. The numbers game is simple, you have to hit a certain number of messages sent to get the desired number of responses. While many people struggle with actually getting a ton of messages out, many tools can help you achieve this with minimal effort.

When playing the numbers game you should be trying multiple messages to see what your target customer responds to best. As with finding your platform, a clear victor should emerge as early as a week after you start sending messages out. You should generally try for a simple, 2 line message, declaring the benefit of your service and asking if they want to chat, and a more nuanced message that really covers your offering in depth.

While this process will help you book new calls, you should never settle on your conversion rate. If you're closing at 20%, adjust your messaging and aim for 30%. Once you start taking these calls, you will start picking up on important issues that your targets mention. These issues can be incorporated into your original outreach message to increase your close rate.

As you start closing more new clients, receiving testimonials from them is important. Testimonials can be leveraged to help with your inbound traffic. Getting these testimonials onto social media can be a huge boost to your reputation and customer base. As your inbound grows from referrals and testimonials your outbound can decrease in urgency.