Define the ideal customer profile
You want the ones whose supply chain has already outgrown a spreadsheet. In this case, complexity is the thing we’re filtering for.
You could have a $2 billion company with one plant and one warehouse. They will have smaller problems than a $400 million company with nine sites in four countries. You want the second one because there your product will have the highest ROI.
These numbers are my example. Everyone who can get an ROI from you fits in here. Make sure the math works.
| What needs to be true | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Goods move through more than one node | Plants, distribution centers, stores, carriers and ports. More handoffs mean more places for the plan to break. |
| Enough scale | For this example: $500 million plus, five-plus distribution centers or 100-plus stores. |
| Someone already has a title | A VP of Supply Chain on the org chart means the problem was big enough to hire someone to fix it. |
| Build lists for | Criteria |
|---|---|
| Manufacturers | $500 million plus with three or more plants |
| Retailers | 100-plus stores or five distribution centers |
| Consumer goods and food | Cold chain or a short shelf life |
| Automotive suppliers | Multi-country Tier 1 supply |
| 3PLs and logistics providers | Running client warehouses |
| Wholesalers and distributors | 1,000-plus SKUs |
| Filter out | Why |
|---|---|
| Single-site companies under $100 million | In this example |
| Software, services and drop-shipping-only companies | Anything without physical goods |
| Current customers and open deals | Filter these out of outbound messaging |
| Recent competitor contracts | Anyone who signed a competitor in the last 18 months |
| Titles that would lose work | Go higher up in the company |
Map the pain
Run four campaigns for each pain point. Write out the pain points you know from your demos, in your customer’s language.
| Campaign | Pain points |
|---|---|
| Transportation | Cost per load creeping up. Empty miles and half-full trailers. Carriers accepting loads, then falling off. Each site booking its own freight. |
| Warehousing | Overtime every peak week. Agency labor bought at short notice. Throughput capped by layout. Two sites doing the same volume at different costs. |
| Planning | Safety stock everywhere because the forecast is trusted nowhere. Excess on slow items and stockouts on fast ones. Planners rebuilding spreadsheets. |
| Visibility | Hearing about disruption from the customer first. Three systems giving three answers to “Where’s my order?” Suppliers going late without warning. |
Build the total addressable market
Build the total addressable market around the pain. Analyze your current customers and find the criteria they have in common.
In this case, we have roughly 23,000 companies. Deduplicate them and enrich the data. The list has to last, so recycle it with different angles and different scripts.
- Companies
- 23,000
- Contacts per account
- 4
- Contacts
- 92,000
| Sending plan | Example |
|---|---|
| Sending days | 21 |
| Emails per inbox per day | 20 |
| Emails per inbox per 30 days | 420 |
| Inboxes | 219 |
| Domains | 73 |
Use relevant triggers
Use something that happened recently that made the pain worse. Everything after that first line is the same for the whole segment.
If you don’t have a fact for an account, send the plain version without the personalization. Relevance does 99% of the heavy lifting.
| Trigger | Where to find it |
|---|---|
| A new distribution center | The site coming online |
| Hiring a Director of Transportation | LinkedIn jobs or Indeed |
| Import volume jumped | U.S. customs and bill of lading data |
| Inventory came up on the earnings call | Earnings reports or quarterly reports |
| An ERP migration | Job posts, integrator announcements or conference talks |
Hey, first name.
Saw the city distribution center came online in August. Most networks add a node and keep booking freight site by site.
Is transportation planning centralized across the network yet?
Hey, first name.
Your container volume out of Vietnam looks up about a third this year. Planning usually breaks somewhere around that kind of jump.
Is your team keeping up, or is it still a spreadsheet rebuild every week?
Reach multiple decision makers
Nobody buys a supply chain platform on their own. Send each person an angle that’s relevant to what they own and what bothers them.
Email directors first, VPs second, and C-level last with an actual number. If two or more people in one account reply, take the more senior one and tell the others who you’re talking to. Invite multiple stakeholders to the first call.
| Decision maker | Relevant campaign |
|---|---|
| Chief Supply Chain Officer | Planning: inventory is up and service is down |
| VP of Supply Chain | Visibility: three teams optimizing things that fight each other |
| VP or Director of Transportation | Transportation: freight spend, carriers, routing and tendering |
| VP of Distribution | Warehousing: overtime and agency labor every peak |
| Head of Procurement | Visibility: suppliers going late with no warning |
A shared savings pilot
An offer is there to get people interested enough to book a call. On the call, run a diagnostic and find the solution that’s best for them.
Pick one site. Our team runs it for 90 days. You pay a quarter of what it saves, measured against that site’s last 12 months. If it saves nothing, there’s no invoice.
| The offer | What they get |
|---|---|
| Outcome | A lower cost on a real site, with a number their own finance team can see in the ledger |
| Effort | One site, one data feed, one owner on their side |
| Risk | No license fee or implementation fee until the savings are on the books |
| Payment | A quarter of verified savings from the first 12 months, billed quarterly |
- Week 1Baseline
- 3 weeksLive
- 90 daysMeasure the savings
Frame the offer around the pain
It’s the same offer, framed around the campaign. Some people want the number but won’t hand a site to a stranger yet. They can get an asset instead.
| Campaign | Pilot |
|---|---|
| Transportation | One DC’s outbound freight. Run routing, mode mix and carrier tendering. Measure cost per load. |
| Warehousing | One site’s labor hours. Forecast volume and build the roster from it. Measure hours per unit shipped. |
| Planning | One category’s inventory. Run forecasting and replenishment. Measure inventory held at the same service level. |
| Visibility | One lane’s expedite spend. Watch suppliers and carriers. Measure air freight and premium charges. |
| Campaign | Asset |
|---|---|
| Transportation | Freight cost teardown: 11 line items to check against your invoices |
| Warehousing | Peak staffing model: volume in, hours out by site |
| Planning | Forecast error benchmark by SKU class |
| Visibility | Disruption checklist: 14 places a network goes late |
| ERP migration | A one-page decision map on what stays in the ERP |
Transportation scripts
The reply is the conversion. Book the demo in the conversation that follows.
One-line cold emails have the best performance from the millions of emails we send. Test which shape works for your market.
Hey, first name.
Are your carriers still accepting loads and then falling off the week of?
Hey, first name.
If we cut one DC’s freight bill and only took a share of the savings, would that be worth a look?
No fee if we save you nothing. DHL cut about 7% on the same models.
Warehousing scripts
Social proof makes this more believable. If you have none, leave it out, or explain the specific mechanism to prove competence.
Hey, first name.
Do your DCs still plan next week’s labor off last year’s volume?
Hey, first name.
Are you still buying agency labor for peak weeks you only see coming a few days out?
We forecast the volume first and build the roster off it. Can I send you the staffing model? It’s a spreadsheet, not a deck.
Hey, first name.
We want to rerun one of your sites for 90 days and take a quarter of the labor cost you pull out. If we pull out nothing, there’s no invoice.
Want the one-pager on how the pilot works?
Planning and visibility scripts
Change the angle of the same offer for each person you message in the company. The market is small, so reach multiple decision makers.
Hey, first name.
Are you carrying safety stock everywhere because the forecast isn’t trusted anywhere?
Hey, first name.
Do you have excess sitting on the slow items and stockouts on the fast ones in the same week?
That’s one problem. It’s the forecast error showing up at both ends of the book. Can I send you the benchmark so you can see where you sit?
Hey, first name.
Do you usually find out a supplier is late from the dock, not from a system?
Hey, first name.
If three people in your business answer “Where’s the order?” three different ways, that’s three systems that never agreed on the same record.
We wrote up the 14 places a network goes late before anyone gets an alert, and which system should have caught each one. Can I send it over?