Membership Site Revenue Growth: Outbound Sales Acceleration Formula

Discover how to get leads for your membership site through effective outbound sales with Vic Dorfman from a leading membership site hosting company called MemberHost.

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How To Grow Membership Site Revenue With Outbound Sales

Most membership site owners lean on inbound marketing and wait for members to trickle in. This webinar shows the four-step outbound sales formula Vic Dorfman of MemberHost uses to acquire membership customers on demand. Learn how to build a prospect list, enrich it with real contact data, run a value-first outreach sequence across social, email, and phone, and close the sale without being salesy.

What You’ll Learn

• The four-step prospecting, enrichment, outreach, and sales formula that works in any membership niche
• How to find and scrape prospect lists from Facebook groups, LinkedIn, industry directories, and Google searches
• The difference between the shotgun and sniper outreach approaches, and when each one fits
• How to read the temperature of a prospect and prioritize the hot ones
• Why the follow-up is where most sales actually happen, and how to sequence outreach across channels

Key Takeaways

• Lead with value on every outreach touch. Never pitch on the first message.
• The phone call belongs at the end of the sequence, after several social and email touches, so the prospect already knows you exist.
• Following up with people you have already contacted is more productive than reaching out to new prospects, even when it feels boring.
• Repackage a low-priced membership as an annual training or higher-priced bundle so outbound sales are worth your time.
• Outsource prospecting and enrichment to Upwork freelancers. Keep the sales call yourself, at least in the beginning.

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

Why Outbound Sales Matters For Membership Site Growth

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome to this webinar presentation. I’ve got Vic Dorfman here from MemberHost, and we’re here to help you generate more sales for your membership site. Vic has a signature system for doing this called the Outbound Sales Acceleration Formula. Essentially what it is, is classical sales for membership sites.

One of the number one questions we get asked here at LifterLMS and in our broader community is, how do I get more clients? How do I get more sales? It’s one thing to make the membership site. It’s a total other thing to actually get customers, and we’re here to help you with that today. I also want to encourage you to check out MemberHost, which is probably the second most popular question we get from our community. Besides how do I get clients, it’s, what do you guys recommend for hosting? MemberHost is a great option, and I’m going to hand it over to Vic for the presentation.

Vic Dorfman: Chris, thanks for that awesome intro, and thanks so much for having me. It’s really a pleasure to be here and share what I’ve learned with the LifterLMS community. Hopefully I’ll give you something valuable that will actually help you get more members. That’s the goal of today’s presentation. We’ve also got our head of technical sales from our company here with us. He’ll be manning the chat, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask them during the webinar.

The Problem With Passive Membership Site Marketing

Vic Dorfman: I want to keep this short and high level for you, because it’s easy to get into the weeds on this stuff. I just want to give you a formula, a framework. We have a fancy title for this webinar, but what it is essentially is good old-fashioned sales. Good old-fashioned outreach. Going around knocking on virtual doors. I would like to make a case for why I think that might be a really good idea for you.

What I will share is a simple outbound lead generation and sales formula. Something you can implement quickly and cheaply. That is a very key component of it. It will enable you to take proactive control of the growth of your membership site, e-learning site, or community, whatever it is that you are offering. This framework will help you sell it to more people.

A lot of folks in the membership site space tend to think of membership sites as a passive type of business model. We all know it kind of really isn’t, in a way. But maybe for that reason, people also tend to favor marketing methods that they feel are more passive. Inbound marketing strategies, basically. They spend a lot of time on their funnel, their sales copy, checkout page, SEO optimization, YouTube, social media. The underlying philosophy is, if I build it and advertise it a little bit, they will come. Of course, they will come. But they will come slowly.

These inbound methods are important. You want to be doing all this stuff. But it is a slow burn. If you don’t already have a huge Instagram audience or a huge following on LinkedIn or whatever is your channel of preference, then it is going to take some time to build those things up. In the meantime, you want to be growing your membership. You want to be making money. That is where outbound marketing comes in. Instead of waiting for them to come to you, you go to them, and you have control over your growth.

Why Recurring Revenue Requires Active Acquisition

Vic Dorfman: You may be totally okay running inbound only. Or you may be in a position where your inbound marketing is doing good numbers for you, and you would like to add another channel on top of that. A channel that you have more control over. If you are not growing in business, you are dying. Members are going to churn from your membership if you have a recurring model. No matter how good of a solution you present, people will have financial difficulties. They will just forget about it and not want to pay anymore. Whatever the reasons are, they do not really matter.

Ideally, you are acquiring customers at a rate that is greater than the rate that you are losing them, and ideally at a substantially greater rate than you are losing them. Then you are growing. That is the core issue. So let’s get into a solution.

The Four-Step Outbound Sales Formula

Vic Dorfman: This is the formula we were talking about. It is a process that will be familiar to a lot of you. It is a four-step process. Prospecting. Enrichment. Outreach. Sales. I am going to share how to implement this process for your business. I reiterate that if you put enough volume through some kind of outreach process, you will get results for sure. It does not matter what your business is. You can put me in any business right now, physical or online, and I will use some variation of this process to go reach out into the marketplace and find some customers.

One really great thing about this approach is it is very outsourceable. You can basically make this an assembly line, give it to Upwork VAs, which is exactly what we do. The only real hard part to outsource or even train somebody up on is the sales component. Once you have got somebody on Zoom, once you have got them on the phone and they are interested in what you have to offer, it is probably good for you to do that yourself, at least in the beginning. That would be a good use of your time. The first three steps are more delegatable.

How To Find Prospecting Sources In Your Niche

Vic Dorfman: Prospecting is just finding the places where your potential customers gather and making lists of those people so you can contact them. Examples would be Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, various communities online and offline. Telegram groups are especially good for crypto and for Russian speakers. They all use Telegram. Live events too. When we talk about networking, what are we really talking about? We are talking about prospecting, at least in part.

Advanced Google searches are another source. You can run certain Google queries and export large lists of potential prospects. One thing that I think a lot of people don’t know about, which is really cool, is industry-specific directories. Especially if you are in a B2B space, but even if you are not. Associations too. There is actually an association of associations. Some of these you have to pay your way in. But if you anticipate that you will be able to get a list of 20,000 prospects, and your offer is a couple thousand dollars, or even if it is a standard membership offer of $30 a month, it could be worth it.

You can get pretty creative with your prospecting. You know best where your people hang out. In what we do at MemberHost, we do a lot of list exports. We also go on forums and participate. We partner with people like LifterLMS and other established businesses in our space. We try to give value. That is our whole agenda.

Extracting Prospect Lists With Upwork Scrapers

Vic Dorfman: Once you have identified a few of these sources, let’s say you have identified a Facebook group in your niche, you are going to need to extract the people in that group or community and put them into a spreadsheet. Put them into a list. This is where the Upwork part comes in. There are a lot of Upworkers who can go into any social media platform or any situation and extract all of the members, get a bunch of their details, get their phone numbers, their emails, all of that good stuff.

Go to Upwork and post a job. Say, hey, I need to scrape this Facebook group, or I need to scrape this LinkedIn community, or I need to scrape this forum. Whatever the case may be. That is how you get your first list of prospects.

Community Etiquette When You Enter A New Space

Vic Dorfman: Obviously we need to use our social awareness here and keep in mind that different communities have certain etiquette. What you don’t want to do is come like a bull into a china shop, walk into the biggest forum in your space or industry, and just start hitting people up. That is not going to go over well. You will get ignored, or worse, you will get a nasty comment.

What you want to do is spend time there. Give value. Participate. Engage. Build some kind of rapport. Then maybe you will have the blessing of the owners to do some kind of soft pitch or outreach. Maybe you will even strike a partnership up. Use your best judgment on that.

Enriching Your List With Contact Info

Vic Dorfman: Once you have got your list, you want to enrich it. Enrichment just means getting additional data points for the prospects on your list. For example, you might scrape a directory of businesses in your target niche, but all you have are the URLs. You cannot really reach out to a bunch of URLs. You are going to need contact info, phone numbers, and the contact person. Who is the person you need to reach out to? Is it the founder? Is there another decision maker?

Key information you are going to want to grab: the name of the owner or decision maker. If it is a larger organization, the owner might not be the best person to reach out to. It might be the head of marketing or whatever. If you are doing B2C, it is generally going to be the owner. You want their name and their time zone, which is critical. If you are emailing people or if you have somebody emailing or calling on your behalf, you want to reach them at a time when they are actually likely to be at their desk.

You want their phone number, which is the most critical piece of information. Get the phone number if it is possible. There are a lot of services and apps that will enable you to do that. And of course you want the email, which is probably the least effective channel, believe it or not, because everybody gets so much cold outreach in their email that we get banner blindness.

If somebody does cold outreach to you on LinkedIn, you kind of expect it because that is what LinkedIn is for. But if somebody hits you up on Facebook or on Instagram, and they are slick about it, if they are leading with value and not trying to pitch you anything, you might be a lot more open to it. You might click through to their Instagram page and be like, oh, this person plays basketball and they are a real person. Different channels light up different parts of the brain. You want to take an omni-channel approach. Grab the social media handles too. You do not need all of them. You just need the ones where people in your space hang out. B2B is all about LinkedIn. B2C might be Instagram if you are a fitness coach or yoga instructor. It might be TikTok. It could be Twitter if you are in a political niche.

Segmenting Prospects Into Cohorts By Fit

Vic Dorfman: The last step before we begin the outreach process is to determine if there are any parts of the list, any groups of people from your list of prospects, that are particularly good prospects. If you export a list and you are in B2B, you might look at something like revenue of the company, because that is usually available. Or headcount. That will give you an indication of whether this is a company you can help, whether it fits within the parameters where you usually operate, and whether they have the money to afford your thing.

Start with those prospects. Direct your energy in the direction where it is more likely to pay off. If you are offering coaching and education for social media marketing agencies, it would be best to target the agencies that have a certain minimum revenue but maybe don’t go beyond another ceiling of revenue. It would not make sense to reach out to agencies who are just getting started, because they are not really going to have the money to pay you and they are not in the place where they are investing in education. There are exceptions, but you want to be fishing in the right pond. Create a few cohorts if that is applicable. It may not be. You may just have one undifferentiated list.

Shotgun Versus Sniper Outreach

Vic Dorfman: Now we get to the outreach component. Outreach is literally reaching out to people and sending them some kind of message. There are two broad ways to do outreach. There is a shotgun approach and a sniper approach.

A shotgun approach is when you outreach to a large list of prospects, basically with the same message. You are probably not doing it manually. You are probably using some kind of tool, or you have VAs reaching out on your behalf. You are doing it at scale. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of messages over some span of time.

A sniper approach is when you manually reach out to specific prospects that you have targeted, that you have sniped. You are usually targeting them with a custom message appropriate to their situation, and maybe a custom lead magnet. Maybe you are making them a Loom video. That is a big favorite of mine. We will talk about that in a second. This is a much more time-consuming approach, and it is consuming your time, which is the downside. The upside is that they are much more likely to respond, especially if their need is urgent. If they are in a desperate situation right now and you are the person who can help them solve their problem, that is a really hot prospect and they are much more likely to reply if you do it right.

How To Read The Temperature Of A Prospect

Vic Dorfman: We need to take a quick detour on temperature, which is a fairly intuitive concept. If somebody is ignoring you and they are not looking at you and they do not care about you, they are cold. If somebody is kind of smiling at you, they are warm. If they are beaming, “Hey, what’s up John, how you doing?” that is hot. That is the unofficial scoring system.

In outbound, temperature is an unofficial measure of the urgency of somebody’s problem. Let’s say you have a membership about weight loss. Somebody in a Facebook group in that niche posts, “Hey guys, I’ve reached the bottom. I am super overweight. My wife is no longer attracted to me. I have no self-confidence. My kids don’t respect me. My life is not going good. Please help.” That is an emotional example, but if you are in that industry and you have a solution that works, that gets results, and you are confident in that and can help this person, what could be a more moral thing than to reach out and offer them some value?

We are not pitching them. We are trying to help this person. This person is raising their hand and saying, guys, I am desperate, I need help. That is a hot prospect. Now, if a different guy posts and says, “Hey guys, I am a few pounds overweight, I would like to get it solved, but it is not dire,” that is a warm prospect. They are not hot. They are not in urgent need, but they would like to solve the problem eventually. And then maybe a third guy posts and he is like, “Yeah, I am a few pounds overweight but I am cool with it, I am not worried about it.” You are not going to convince that person they have a problem they do not think they have. They are not going to buy your thing. Think about it in those terms. Who is most likely to actually need your thing, be open to it, and be open to having a conversation?

When A Prospect Becomes A Lead

Vic Dorfman: One thing I will mention here is my own nomenclature. I define a prospect as somebody who has never engaged with you. You might have sent them messages, you might have called them, maybe they did not reply, but they have never replied to you. As soon as you get some kind of reply, as long as it is not a negative “buzz off” type reply, if it is neutral or positive, then they become a lead in my book. That is a huge jump in the relationship.

In the outreach world, they have gone from a neutral stranger to somebody who now knows you exist. You are on the periphery of their attention and consciousness. That is a huge leap. It is basically an invitation to continue giving them value. These people are the most likely to become customers, because what we do not want is to be ignored. That is what we are trying to solve. We are trying to get attention in a not-super-annoying way. The way we do that is through value, and some copywriting.

Why The Lead Magnet Has To Deliver Real Value

Vic Dorfman: Let’s talk about your lead magnet. When I say lead magnet, I mean the thing, the value, that you are giving to the person, packaged up in some kind of way. A classic example: you come on a website and they say, “Hey, we have this mini course.” Let’s say you do a Google search and you type in, “How to overcome social anxiety.” You click through to a homepage and there is a title that says, “How to overcome your social anxiety in 24 hours, free mini course.” You go, hot damn, that is exactly what I wanted. I am a little skeptical about 24 hours, but let me give my email address to these guys and let me give my attention to them. If the thing is good, if it really provides value, you go, well, that was good. What else you guys got?

That is the psychology. We are compounding goodwill. We are building reciprocity, to use persuasion terminology. When you reach out, do not say, “Hey John, what’s up, I have this great membership site that teaches you how to do XYZ. It’s really awesome and you should join it.” That is spam. Do not do that. That does not work. You will be ignored, or worse, you will get a nasty comment.

The whole approach we are taking is you give value, and then you keep giving value, and then you never stop giving value ever after that. At no point do you ask for anything in return or pitch your thing without an invitation from them. We are being of service. This was a very hard concept for me to wrap my head around until I got further in business, because I thought, “Yeah, right, who wants to be of service? I just want to make money.” That is a scarcity mindset a lot of people have when they are starting out. Once you are doing okay, you realize the fun part is actually helping people, and making money is a consequence of that. It is a Jedi mind trick, but it is a real thing.

A Real Lead Magnet Example That Made A Customer

Vic Dorfman: You are trying to come up with something valuable. It could be a PDF. It could be a video. It could be a Loom video that you made personal just for them. It could be a lesson from your course that you give away for free. It could be a trial to your membership. Anything can be a lead magnet if it is of value and appropriate to the situation.

A quick story on this. I remember I hired an agency to help us with some operations stuff about six months ago. The reason I hired these guys, they were expensive, they were really expensive, is their lead magnet was so freaking good. It was an ebook, a PDF, about 100 pages of pure value. I was blown away. It was the best ebook I ever read that I did not pay for. I said, man, if this ebook is that good, how good must their service be? And they had all these good reviews. The service was actually really disappointing, which is the sucky part. That is a danger to be aware of. If you make a really good lead magnet but then your core thing is not really that good, people are going to be extra disappointed.

Regardless of the format, it has to give value. It cannot just be a veiled pitch. It cannot be a veiled form of self-promotion. It has got to not be about you. Here is an example from my industry. I might come on to your membership site, and because you are basically my target prospect, I will say, “Hey John, I did a speed test.” I make a Loom video with all the graphs and everything up on the screen. I say, “There are five images on your homepage that are five megabytes each and they are taking forever to load. Here is a service that will compress your images at 85 percent quality. Quality will not suffer at all. It will help speed up your performance. Just takes you a few minutes, and that’s it.” I just send that value. I do not ask for anything. I am just being useful and helpful.

I am not pitching anything. It is implied, actually. People know you are not reaching out just out of the goodness of your heart. There is an agenda. But we are not drawing attention to that fact. We are being genuinely helpful. They may or may not ever become a customer or member, but that is not relevant. It is a numbers game.

The Outreach Channel Sequence: Social, Email, Then Phone

Vic Dorfman: Now you have got your list, you have got your approach, and you have got some kind of lead magnet. Maybe you will make it on the fly. What channels do you reach out on, when, and in what order? Here is a very simple way to do this. First, reach out on social media. If you are in B2B, that means LinkedIn. Reach out on LinkedIn. Reach out on LinkedIn again a few days later. Then reach out on email. Reach out on email again a few days later. Then call.

The reason for that particular format: ideally you have already engaged with their page a little bit, especially if you are doing a sniper approach. Maybe you have commented on their post or in their group. You have liked some stuff. You have interacted with other members. You are not a complete persona non grata. They have seen you at least subconsciously. When you finally reach out, you are not a complete stranger.

The reason I save the phone call for last is that you want the maximum amount of exposures, even if they never replied to your stuff, even if they never consumed your lead magnet. Just the fact that you touched base on a few different places means they might have checked out your profile. They might have built a little bit of authority for you, a little bit of social proof, if you have some social proof elements on your profile.

A quick story. I did this exact sequence. I reached out twice on LinkedIn, got no reply. Reached out twice on email, got no reply. But I saw that they saw the email, and I saw that they watched my Loom video. It was one of those Loom videos I made on the fly. Then I called them up. I said, “Hey, this is Vic from MemberFix. I am just checking to see if you guys got the thing that I sent. I think it might be really helpful to you.” They said, “Vic, yes, we watched your video, our whole office loves it. Our owner is on vacation. She will be back next week and she will be in touch with you.” That company became one of our great customers. Those situations happen. Obviously that was an easy one. Most of them are not that easy. It is going to take a little more persistence. But that is the reason I sequence it that way.

Writing The First Outreach Message And The Follow-Up

Vic Dorfman: The first message is always going to be something quick, concise, to the point. Something like, “Hi John, I saw that you are having issues with your website. I made you a Loom video breaking down some easy fixes that are quick to implement that you might find valuable. Thanks John, let me know your thoughts.” Notice that at the end, I gave some kind of call to action. I said, “Let me know your thoughts.” “I would love to hear your feedback.” “Please let me know what you think.” We want to try to solicit a reply.

When we follow up later on email, we might say something like, “Hey John, I connected with you on LinkedIn and wanted to make sure you saw the Loom video that I personally shot for you. I think it might really be of value to you. Let me know your thoughts.”

Following Up Is Where The Sales Actually Happen

Vic Dorfman: The most important point is you have got to follow up. You have got to follow up systematically. All of the magic happens in the follow-ups. The problem is following up is nowhere near as interesting as reaching out to new prospects. It is boring. You are not getting any reply. You are getting nothing. You think it is a waste of time. Our brains love new. Our dopamine system loves new stuff. But actually, following up with the people you have already reached out to is a more productive use of your time than reaching out to new people. Much more productive.

We have followed up with people for weeks, months, and years before they replied, and then for another period of weeks, months, or years before they became customers. That may seem excessive, but what we sell is a little bit more high ticket, so it is worth it. And it only takes a minute. Usually after the first three or four messages, if people do not reply and they do not take our call, you can move to a follow-up frequency of every month. Check in once per month. “Hey John, just checking in, I saw this great thing, here is a link to it.” You are not just checking in. You are giving value. You are not saying, “Just checking in to see if you got my last message,” because that is very easy to ignore. It is not contributing any new value. Clearly they either saw your message and do not care, or they did not see it at all. Your CRM tool should tell you if they actually opened it.

Lead with new value. Switch up your outreach channel. If you just keep hammering email, people are going to flag your email as spam or archive and ignore you. Reach out on Instagram. Hit them up on Facebook. You have got to be organized, because if you are juggling a bunch of outreach and a bunch of prospects, it is very easy to get confused. Follow up, always follow up.

How To Handle The Sales Call Without Being Salesy

Vic Dorfman: Sales is actually the easiest part of this whole process. You have got somebody on the call. You have got them on Zoom or on the phone. What do you say? You handle it the same way you have handled every step of the process so far. You give them more value. “Hey, by the way, this other thing you may not have thought of. Is there anything else I can help you with? How are you doing with this?” You give more value. You give more resources. You give away everything you have for free. Yeah. It is not a new concept, but it works. What is effective is giving away as much value as humanly possible.

By this time, this is where the sequencing is important. If you have got somebody on the phone, they are probably going to be pretty receptive to speaking with you. At least they are not going to be hostile. They have seen your messages. Maybe they consumed your lead magnets. They will think, okay, this guy is not a total jerk. He is trying to help me. He is not pitching me on anything. They are not going to be as reticent. They are going to be more open to what you have to say.

What you are really trying to do here is solicit an invitation. Usually by this point, this is why it is the easiest part, they are going to just come out and say, “Hey, what are you selling? What is your thing? What is your offer?” Now you have permission to tell them. “Oh, well, actually, we have a membership where we help people like you. In fact, we helped a guy in your same exact situation a month ago, he is doing great, he lost 20 pounds,” or whatever is your situation.

Some sales techniques factor in here, but you do not need to be a salesperson or even salesy. By this point, you have built the goodwill. This is a warm lead. You are looking for that invitation. Most people will do it for you. They will say, “Hey, what is your thing? What are you selling?” Some people will not. Some people are going to be coy about it. That is when you need to solicit it a little. Say something like, “Okay, just to be super clear, you have got problem X, and it is impacting you in such and such a way. You would like to solve this problem in a quick and easy way if possible. Is that fair to say? Yes? Great. Can I tell you how I have helped somebody who was in your exact situation get this handled?” You very tangentially touch on the fact that you have a membership or what the product is. It is very secondary to the fact that you are focusing on the person’s problem and the solution you gave to somebody just like them in that same situation.

Repackaging Low-Priced Memberships Into Higher-Ticket Offers

Vic Dorfman: With regards to your offer, we talked about what if you have a standard 30, 40, or 50 dollar a month membership, or even a 100 dollar a month membership. Maybe you are thinking, “This is not worth my time to sell like a 50 dollar a month membership.” At this point, you have to remember that the person you are talking to may not even know that you have a membership. They do not know how your solution is packaged. They might think you are a coach, or that you sell a workshop, or whatever. They really do not know. To a certain degree, they do not care. They just want the solution to their problem.

One thing you can do for these scenarios is just sell annual packages. Do not even go down the monthly route, because then it will not be worth your time. Say, “Look, we sell a year of training.” You could position it as a training. If they are not going for that, say, “We could do a quarterly, or we could do a dollar trial for 14 days. If you like it, cool, it will rebill your card. If not, no problem, email me and I will cancel.”

Even if you are at a low-priced offer, you can repackage it in a way where it is higher price and more worth your time. You can include your own time. Say, “Hey, you get personal access to me once a month.” You can add 500 bucks on just for that. Maybe you do not want to do that, but there are ways to increase the price of your offer without detracting from the value, and without creating new content. Just repackage your existing content, maybe add bonuses. When they are ready to sign up, take the credit card details, put them into your payment processor, charge them, and send them the logins.

Why MemberHost Is Built For Membership Sites

Chris Badgett: Vic, that was awesome. Before we get into the audience questions, can you tell us real quickly what makes MemberHost awesome as a web host for membership sites?

Vic Dorfman: We built MemberHost, myself and our co-founder Kave, as a response to the fact that we work with membership sites and have been doing that for over 10 years, and none of the conventional hosting providers really understand membership sites. They cache the crap out of everything, which you cannot do with membership sites. It causes issues. They give you really small amounts of not-super-powerful resources. The main hosting provider’s whole thing is profit maximization. There is nothing wrong with that, but what it means practically for you is that you are grossly overpaying for way too few resources, and for a company whose focus is on the general market as opposed to the membership market.

Our whole thing is just for these heavy WordPress sites. We understand the technical underpinnings, how to do caching in a way that does not mess it up. We geek out over this stuff. We outperform virtually any conventional host, and we can objectively prove that with load tests and page load tests. Every customer, I don’t think we’ve lost even one customer, I think one customer left, and that is just because their membership was not doing so hot and they could not really justify it. They left gently and plan to come back this year.

The best testimonial we ever got was, “OMG, it’s so fast.” You will notice it tangibly on the wp-admin side, and then members will notice it. One thing I want to touch on: the thing with membership sites, especially larger ones, is that they start to crash or slow down precisely when it counts the most. When lots of users are joining. When lots of users are participating. That is an issue called concurrency, and that is something we specialize in. There are technical reasons the conventional hosts just do not handle it well. Things slow down. Your site crashes. That is what happens.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. If you get good at sales and prospecting and you start getting that concurrency, the last thing you want to worry about is your membership site going down.

Start With One Prospect And Build Muscle Memory

Chris Badgett: An audience question came in. How big should our first prospecting list be for a sniper approach? That can be a little overwhelming, like, oh, I have got to build this giant list.

Vic Dorfman: It could be even a few people. It depends on what you sell, how expensive your offer is, or what your lifetime value on a customer is. Those are all considerations in your calculus of what is worth your time. But if you have even one person on the list, reach out to them, see how it goes. There is no specific size. It is more based on the urgency of their need. That is what makes somebody a good candidate for a sniper approach. Oh, this person really needs some help now. If I reach out, they are going to be super receptive. That is the rule of thumb.

Chris Badgett: I love that idea of starting with one. Just by getting the gear turning, it gets easier, especially if you are fearful about reaching out to people. Just do one, and then do another one, and then it becomes muscle memory.

How To Search Google For A Prospect List

Chris Badgett: You mentioned that you can build a prospecting list from a Google query. How can you use Google to start building your prospecting list?

Vic Dorfman: This is kind of giving away our secret sauce. One of the things we do at MemberHost is, all of our customers are membership site owners, or all of our prospective customers are. If you have a membership plugin like MemberPress, which we work with, or LifterLMS, or any of these plugins, they usually spit out automatic system pages that have some boilerplate text on them. You can literally search that boilerplate text in quotes. It is going to pop up a list of pages, of websites that have that page, and therefore have that plugin installed. Then you can do a scrape. There are scrapers that will pull thousands of results. They may or may not be good prospects, but that is where enrichment comes in.

Chris Badgett: That is awesome. If you were in a hobby market, going after people that use Etsy or something, there is probably some kind of page that Etsy has that you could search for. That is a great example.

Why AI Is Not The Right Tool For Outbound Copy

Chris Badgett: Can artificial intelligence help with the whole outbound sales or prospecting?

Vic Dorfman: I am not a fan of AI for what you don’t want to do for outreach. First of all, pretty much everybody knows when something is an AI message at this point. It is not that good yet. It shows that you did not think enough of the person to write them personally. Of course, you are not writing personal messages to thousands of people, but it is better for you to write a template message by hand and send thousands of those out than to use AI. We don’t use AI at all. I don’t even really see where it would be applicable.

If you are needing to take information from the person’s website and rephrase it, mix it with something, then maybe AI will be good for that. We don’t really use it. We just write our own copy.

Recognizing The Invitation To Pitch

Chris Badgett: What does an invitation to pitch sound like? If somebody kind of raises their hand and does not necessarily directly say it, how do you know you have the invitation to pitch?

Vic Dorfman: Say somebody does not outright ask what you are selling, and you are giving value, having a conversation, and then there is a lull in the conversation where it kind of gets a bit awkward. Like, hey, maybe we should end the call. They are not giving you an invitation. That is where you would say what I mentioned earlier: restate their problem, restate how they would like it solved, and then present them with a case study that mirrors their situation.

Your question is really, how do I know that somebody is giving me an invitation without being direct about it? That is a social awareness thing. It comes with practice. Your mojo in the sales department, or in any department where you need to think on your feet, comes with volume. You buy mojo at the volume store.

Tips To Avoid Getting Marked As Spam

Chris Badgett: Any tips to avoid getting marked as spam or getting blocked from DMs on social media? That is a fear a lot of people have when doing outbound.

Vic Dorfman: Not pitching directly is a big one. Have a legitimate profile. Not just being some random dude from India or Bangladesh or something. Even if you are outsourcing it, which is totally fine, it should still go through your profile. The mechanics are different depending on the platform. For Facebook, my understanding, and we do not do a whole lot of outreach on Facebook, is that they block you so quickly now that you basically have to purchase accounts and reach out through those accounts.

There are some tools that help mitigate that. The big one we were looking at is called Flowchat. It looks like a super cool tool. We really want to check it out. It is kind of like a CRM but it also allows you to reach out on different channels. I think there is a situation where it combats some of that throttling. I think you can send about 10 cold messages on Facebook before they block you for an hour. It depends on the platform. Lead with value. If you are not spammy or salesy, that is the first thing. The second thing is, figure out what the rules of the platform are. And do not blow up your main account. Do not use your main Instagram account, because then you will lose all those followers if it gets flagged. Same with your email. Do not use your email domain. Buy the .net variant, create an email for that .net, and use that for your outreach. There are a lot of little tips and tricks, but that is what you want to do.

Closing Thoughts On Outbound Sales For Membership Sites

Chris Badgett: You can tell that Vic is just giving, giving, giving value right here, helping you get clients. He cares deeply about the membership site industry, and he has built an awesome hosting solution that if you are a serious player and you are looking to scale and have a solid tech stack, I want to encourage you to check out MemberHost. Any last thoughts, Vic?

Vic Dorfman: Funny enough, I feel like maybe I did not give enough value, because there is so much to cover and we just did not have time to get into all of the details and nuance. If you have any questions, hit me up on Instagram, LinkedIn, email, whatever is your channel of choice. Ask me any questions if you want. I am happy to help all of the participants of this webinar. No strings attached. I am happy to help you grow the outbound side of your business if I can.

Chris Badgett: Vic, Risto, thank you for coming. We appreciate the presentation you put together here. This is a great resource.