Week #1 Project Update — Picking a Good Idea and Planning it out

4 min readMay 28, 2021

Hey guys, thanks for stopping by! I set a goal to learn everything that I could about succeeding in sales in one month. I read books, listened to podcasts, did a ton of research, and then put what I learned into practice. And I documented my process for it. This is my project update for week 1.

Making a decision

Everything about business is fascinating to me, especially startups. I decided to dedicate the month of May 2021 to learn about a specific skill that could help me be an asset to a growing start-up. But there are so many skills I want to learn; how could I pick just one? There are so many different things that I am interested in mastering. Some of those things include social media ads, influencer marketing, SEO, behind-the-scenes operations, sales, and so much more.

I went through around 10–15 different ideas — anything from starting and marketing a clothing line to creating a podcast. But after several days of introspection, I finally concluded what I wanted to learn. Famous clothing lines and other types of B2C businesses have built up their brands to sell their products, but I wanted to learn how tech startups successfully grow and acquire customers.

I know the basics; a substantial amount of the growth of a start-up comes from their sales team hunting down leads, prospecting them, and ultimately getting the sale. So, after I did a little research, I learned that a business development representative is a person that is actively hunting down and prospecting new leads. It seems like an excellent opportunity and something I might want to pursue. So I decided to center my project around learning how to be a successful BDR. I will learn everything I can learn about the strategies, tactics, and software BDRs use to hunt down leads and get them through the sales pipeline.

The psychology that goes into sales is very intriguing to me. I have loved all aspects of business from an early age, but learning about this is super exciting to me and something I couldn’t wait to dive headfirst into. It took me longer than I expected to make this decision, but I am happy with the decision I chose.

Doing my research

Before planning for what I would produce, I needed to learn about sales psychology, cold calls, cadences, software worth learning, and everything else that I didn’t yet know about BDR’s. I used my trusty friend google and reached out to people in a BDR role to figure out what I needed to learn and learn it. With their advice and my trusty friend, google, I started finding incredible podcasts, newsletters, and books about prospecting. All of my time has been reading/ listening to something sales-related since deciding on this project.

I read blog posts, listened to sales podcasts, and found a book to immerse myself fully.

Some of the stuff I have been reading/ listening to:

Finding companies to find leads for

I came up with multiple exciting companies to find leads and solve problems for. Those companies include:

Drift: Helps sales teams books more meetings, helps with customer support, and greets customers on the site as if they were talking to a real person.

Postscript: Plays a pivotal role in helping Shopify stores get their marketing messages seen, recover abandoned carts, and quickly buy from them without friction and a few clicks.

Piper Creative: Piper Creative is a marketing agency that specializes in video creation and podcasting. Piper Creative isn’t a tech startup up, but I wanted to challenge myself to see how I could develop an outreach strategy for them.

Setting up a plan

In my research, I have seen that BDRs focus on hunting down leads, researching the prospect/ company, coming up with sales cadences, strategizing how they will approach their cold calls, scheduling qualifying calls, and more.

I needed to decide the best way to learn this information and display that I thoroughly understand it. So I thought about it and asked myself, “What is the best way to learn something”? And I decided that doing it is.

So in each of the next three weeks, I will pick a different company and go through my sales strategy from A to Z to win sales for that company.

Create a leads list.
Come up with an outbound sales cadence.
Go over my cold call strategy.
My voicemail approach.
Getting them to agree to the next steps.

To plan out how I will accomplish this project, I decided to use notion as a project management tool. It’s an easy-to-use tool that makes it easier for me to know exactly what I need to focus on at each part of the process. I work best when I know exactly what task I need to complete, so simply having what I need to do, what I am working on, and what I have accomplished is what I expect to work best for my organization. I also will use Google Calendar to block out time to work on my project.

Time to get started

It’s still early in the month, so things will probably change, but I cannot wait to soak up as much information about sales as I can.

Thanks for making it to the end! If you wanted to continue following my journey, check out my entire project here.