If you email the wrong people, they won’t respond.

So finding the right people is not just critical—it’s 90% of the art of cold emailing.

Follow the steps below with a goal of creating a target persona for your email efforts. The target persona is simply the type of person that you get emails for. Over time, you can test different target personas against each other and see which perform best. For example, say you sell HR services. You might start off by emailing CEOs of construction companies. If that doesn’t work well, you might try another target persona of founders at brand-new startups.

Here’s how you can identify a target persona that will most likely buy from you.

Speak to existing customers

Start by understanding your current customers and the problems they face.

Interview your current customers. Ask:

• What value prop resonates with them most?
• What’s the biggest improvement they’ve implemented thanks to your solution?
• What got them to purchase from you?
• What other options did they turn down to do business with you?
• How did they hear about you?
• What are their job titles?

Let’s walk through an example. Say you sell email marketing software to small brick and mortar business owners. Let’s walk through the questions we proposed above:

• What value prop resonates with them most?
  • They’re not technical, so they like how easy your product’s UX is.
• What got them to purchase from you?
  • Simplicity of use, and your inexpensive small business pricing tier.
• What other options did they turn down to do business with you?
  • They didn’t like MailChimp’s lack of features, and Drip was too expensive.
• How did they hear about you?
  • Their friend and local small business owner raved about your product over coffee.

Use their responses to:

1. Deeply understand their desires.
2. Create a strategy to locate more people like them and craft messaging to them accordingly. We’ll cover this below.

Now it’s one thing to go back and interview customers retrospectively. Great.

But you can also build a system to continuously interview your customers right after they choose to buy your product. That’s when they’re going to be most helpful to you, since they just hired you to be the solution to a pain point that they were experiencing.

Use the Jobs To Be Done framework for ongoing interviews: Interview people at the time that they switched to you so you can:

1. Understand the exact reason they switched to your solution.
2. Figure out the "job" they are hiring your company's product to do.

The Jobs To Be Done perspective is product agnostic—it simply focuses on the problem that the customer is solving, which allows you to reverse engineer great cold emails (we’ll cover this shortly).

Find customers higher up the ladder of product awareness

Once you understand your ideal customer, the next step is to find the names and job titles of people who are as far along the customer journey as possible.

As a refresher, here’s a picture of the ladder of product awareness, which is a proxy for a customer journey:

Higher up on the ladder, prospects will fit into one of these categories:

• They’re choosing between competitors.
• They’re using a competitor.
• They’re using a competitor and are dissatisfied with them.

People that fit into the last category are prime targets because:

1. You already know they’re motivated to solve the problem that your business solves—they’ve already paid for a solution to that problem.
2. You know they’re looking for a reason to move away from their current solution.

Most of the startups we work with don’t put much thought into how their competitors acquire customers. Even more problematic, they rarely track what happens to their customers after they purchase. What problems do customers face?

Let’s look at an example using Salesforce.

If you use Salesforce, you’ll end up on Trailhead, their tutorial site, at some point. And if you ever have problems with their product, you’ll start posting in their forums. Or maybe you’ll seek solutions in a shared slack group.

As a competitor, you can monitor activity of unhappy users. Often you’ll be able to find their contact information through the forums or in Slack groups (which we’ll show you how to do below).

Here are some more places where you can find targets that are already working with your competitors:

• Competitor community slack channels and Facebook groups.
• Identify customer logos from their landing pages.
• Poach names from sales webinars the competitor runs.
• Look at commenters on their YouTube channels.
• Find users in their support forum posts, e.g., Zendesk.
• Track down everyone who tweet-mentions them.
• Grab case study customers and testimonials from their website.
• Track down the people who leave Chrome Store reviews.
• Find third-party review sites like GetApp, TrustRadius, Capterra and find the names of reviewers. Then use Clearbit to get their contact information.
• Use BuiltWith to profile prospects by the technologies present on their websites—you can set up alerts when tech is added/removed so that you know when to reach out.

Finding urgent customers

Sometimes you can’t find enough of your competitors’ dissatisfied customers. That’s fine. If you know things like your target customer’s job title and company size, you can look them up directly using Clearbit or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

When you take this approach, think about what would make them urgently want to purchase your product: Who’s feeling the most pain?

Look for targets that have just experienced a critical event—a problem that came up that, if not solved by a certain date, something bad will happen.

Was there a huge fire they had to put out? Is there a meeting where people just left the company? Did they just get put in charge of a massive budget?

You can find people/companies that have recently experienced a critical event. Start by looking at the trail these targets leave online. Do they:

• Join specific Facebook groups?
• Have a LinkedIn profile?
• Tweet specific keywords?
• Go on Product Hunt?
• Follow certain GitHub projects?
• Have certain HTML in their website?
• Go to certain conferences/attend webinars? There is often an attendee list that you can get if you email the organizer.
• Have negative Glassdoor reviews? Have their (former) employees recently changed job titles on LinkedIn?
• Are they running ads on specific platforms?
• Or hiring for certain positions on Angelist?

Search their online trail and compile a list of names and domains for each prospect. You’ll create messaging that helps them solve their pain point while writing your emails.