How to find mentors

Whenever I’m starting a new business, I would break my business plan down into product, hiring, marketing, sales,

and I would try to find people that have done each of those areas before.

For product mentors, I’ll find people at companies in my industry with a similar or adjacent product. Email and contact data tools, email outreach tools.

For hiring, I’ll look for people that have hired a similar size product team in Asia,

and run a remote sales team in Europe and USA.

Marketing, I’ll find experts In channels that I want to use.

We do a lot of SEO. So I’ll find ex-employees of companies that do SEO targeting recruiters and salespeople.

Sales process: I spoke to Doug Hall, who was the first sales hire at GlassDoor

and was the VP of Sales at one of my competitors Entelo.

Beyond business, reach out to any expert that you want to learn from.

E.g the author of an interesting book you just read,

or a podcast guest that you just listened to.

Whatever you’re trying to learn. Somebody has probably done it before.

Ask them, don’t start from zero.

Build on all the knowledge that humanity has already accomplished before you start inventing your own thing.

Before you start the mentorship session:

read their blog, go through all the content, watch their podcasts, so you can ask intelligent questions.

What would you ask in a mentorship session?

I try to ask mentors about their experience, what they did. I’ll get really specific.

I try not to ask them to solve my problems or to provide opinions on my business because they don’t have the context.

Whereas it’s really easy for them to share stories about things that they have done in the past.

From their experiences, I’m able to extrapolate our lessons that I can selectively apply to my business.

For Santosh, who had helped build the product at Apollo and ZoomInfo.

I was asking things like, how do you source phone number data for the USA?

Did you source data from companies like PIPL, PDL, Spokeo, People Finders, consumer data companies?

How accurate was this? What are some other sources? Can we get data off of LinkedIn? Is there intent data?

One method that ZoomInfo got data from was community contribution.

When you sign up as a salesperson, you share your inbox you share your contacts.

On average every sales rep has about 20, 000 email signatures with phone numbers and emails in their inbox

Zoominfo would crowdsource and combine all these contacts to create their contacts platform.