3 - The Complete Guide to Cold Outreach

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the complete guide to cold outreach. This is a video that teaches you how to pick your dream prospects, companies or people that you would absolutely love to work with, how to get their email addresses or get the email addresses of the key decision makers in the company, how to craft devastatingly effective code email campaigns, and how to follow up consistently so that you

get your message across and are able to predictably turn cold leads into customers. So this is a bit of a long video, we've got a lot of meat in here and some really valuable, very actionable tactical worksheets and examples as well. So let's dive in. Okay, cold outreach works, but most people do it extremely poorly, you'll hear a lot of people say cold outreach is dead, cold

outreach didn't work for me, cold outreach is not an effective marketing strategy, and it actually is when you do it right. It is an effective marketing strategy, but most people do it extremely, extremely poorly. Here's the problem, here's what most people do. Most people pitch right off the bat, they'll send an email that says, in the first email, I'd love to talk to you about my product

or service essentially. And those almost never work. They can work on a blue moon, you know, once in a blue moon, but they're not an effective predictable way to generate leads, and more importantly, from a legacy standpoint, they're not a good way to build relationships and craft a positive impact, because a lot of people will just ignore them. In fact, most people won't even register them as

legitimately valuable. They won't even register as legitimately valuable in the prospect's minds. They'll just be like, oh, this is just in their market or somebody looking to get something from me. They won't even give it any of their time. In fact, they might just delete it the second they glance at it. So that's the first problem. The vast majority of people just send one pitch, and it's

really needy, and they just essentially say, I think my product service could be a great fit for you. Let's talk or something like that. The second problem is that most people write emails that are too long, and or don't contain secret treasure. They'll write emails that are like paragraphs, and they just don't get read, because people are extremely busy, especially the best prospects, the best customers. They'll

be extremely busy, in most cases, or they just don't contain secret treasure. They talk about leads or sales funnels or graphic design or web development or something that the person doesn't care about at all, instead of the secret treasure, the things that they land bed thinking about at night. Their family, their happiness, their wellbeing, all of these things that people actually care about, their legacy. And finally,

most people don't follow a consistent system for cold outreach. They don't track results. They don't show up consistently, and then they say it didn't work. When in reality, they didn't work. They didn't put in the work. They didn't execute properly. So those are the problems. Those are the reasons that most people will tell you cold outreach didn't work for them. Here's the solution. When you do cold

outreach, you focus on building relationships and providing genuine value to the other person. Your emails are short and to the point, and offer their secret treasure, and you have a simple, effective system that you know works, and that you implement consistently in order to generate leads. That is what we're going to achieve by the end of this video, or by the end of completing the worksheets, I

should say. So here are some rules for cold outreach. You can in some cases break these rules, but to start, just follow them religiously. So first of all, you want to make your emails two to five sentences, and 150 words or less. Longer than this, and in most cases, they just won't get read. Second, you want to talk like an actual, relatable human. Read all your emails

out loud before you send them. Do not skip this. Read them out loud. If you don't sound like you're talking to a friend at a bar, rewrite it from scratch, or tweak your wording so that you do. The quickest way to get ignored and get filtered into the category of unuseful email into that box is to talk like a robot or a marker. Just talk like a

human being, talk like it's your grandma, talk like it's your best friend. Third, you want to have a crystal clear specific action you ask them to take. It's funny. A lot of people send cold outreach emails, and they're just sort of like, are you interested for, they'll just have a really vague call to action, or they'll have multiple calls to action. Can you book a call with

me and send me these pieces of information or something like that? That's just never going to get a response. You don't see that that often. Most people notice and want call to action, but it's surprising. People make very basic mistakes in cold outreach. You have a crystal clear action that you ask them to take. The next one is big, and it's something that was a game changer

for me when I realized it, and very likely will be a game changer for most of you watching this right now. You want to follow up politely and persistently. In this system, we email each prospect at least eight times, at least eight. That's very, very different. In fact, that might sort of shock you when you first read it. It's very different from most cold outreach. Most people

email once, and that's it. Some people email twice. Neither of those are likely to predictably generate leads. Eight times, yeah, that can predictably generate leads, because if you keep emailing somebody in a way that's polite yet persistent, they get to know you, and they'll at least give you a chance to talk to them. In most cases, now, finally, above all, always, you want to focus on building

a relationship with the person and making the risk of responding to you seem worth it, because it is a risk. When somebody gets an email in their inbox asking for something from them, even if you do provide value upfront, it's a risk. They might waste their time. They might get pissed off. They might hire you, and then not get what they want. It's a risk. You always

want to build a relationship, provide enough value, so that the risk is worth it. I want to touch on this again, because it's a huge crux of the system. Most people don't follow up at all, they'll just send one email, or maybe two, but most people just send one. They don't follow up really at all, let alone eight or more times. This is strange to me, because

it's kind of like the equivalent of walking down the street and just like saying to every girl or every guy, like, will you go on a date with me? No? Okay. Do you go on a date with me? No? Okay. What about you? Will you go on a date with me? Will you? What about you? Okay. Will you go on a date with me? You're just asking

one person, the next person, the next person, the next person. making a lot of calls to action, but none of them are going to actually come through. You know, maybe one in a thousand. That's what most people do when it comes to cold email. But if the request was really that important, why would you give up after one try? And why would you make that one try

such low quality, like a shot in the dark? You wouldn't. If your request was really that important, if you really wanted to work with this company and you knew that you could completely change their outcome and their situation and deliver their secret treasure, why would you give up after one try? You wouldn't. Focus on quality prospects over quantity and pursue them relentlessly, like a suitor pursuing a

bride. That is the philosophy of, well, in a sense, this program with regards to your goals and what you want, but specifically cold outreach, focus on quality prospects over quantity. You don't need that many. You need enough volume. You need to hit statistical significance so that you can generate predictable leads. But you don't need that many. You don't need thousands. You might not even need hundreds, depending

on your niche. And then you want to pursue them relentlessly, like a suitor pursuing a bride. These are your dream clients and you are not going to let them slip out of your fingers without a good, solid approach. Okay, so here's the cold outreach system. And the worksheet will walk you through all of this in depth with very specific standard operating procedures. So first you're going to

identify your 20 dream prospects, 20 companies or 20 people that you would absolutely love to work with. Next you're going to get their email addresses and contact information. I'll show you how to do that. Then you're going to craft an eight touch point email campaign to them using cold outreach methods and scripts provided and you're going to cycle through different channels. So you're not just going to

use one channel in most cases unless that's the only channel you have access to. In most cases you're going to cycle through different methods. One week you'll send them an email, one week you'll send them a lumpy mail package, one week you'll reach out to them on social media and you'll come from a bunch of different angles because this can create the illusion of omnipresence of you

just being a PR powerhouse and just looking like you're everywhere and you hired some million dollar PR firm when in reality you're just really good at multi-channel, multi-week marketing. Then you're going to start reaching out to your prospects once per week each. So that's going to be four emails per day for your 20 prospects and you're going to do that for the duration of two months and

that'll be the completion of your first campaign. Now you can do more than 20, you can do more than four but these are low enough numbers that you can stick to them easily. So I recommend at least starting with four emails per day then you can ramp it up once you get used to it or if you still aren't getting enough leads or you just want to

get more leads. And finally you want to log all your outreach on the provided campaign tracking sheet and you want to use the software yes where to track your email opens as well as your response rates etc. So that is the system identify your dream prospects, get their contact info, craft your campaign and then over the next two months win over your 20 dream prospects like a

suitor pursuing their dream bride. Be relentless but be polite, be persistent but be valuable and they will in most cases give you a chance to talk to them and present your message to warp their reality and to break their world. Okay I'm going to go through methods for building a prospect list. So these are all different sources, different methods that you can use to build a prospect

list and these are also listed in the worksheet. So you could go through the top 50, 100 or 500 lists for your industry, what is your industry and what are the top ranked companies or businesses or people in it. That is not very hard to find and can easily generate a list of high quality prospects. You can look at LinkedIn, LinkedIn has a lot of advanced search

features that you can use to find people in specific industries. You could look at business directories, for example, Chamber of Commerce or Crunchbase. You can buy a list, they are not very expensive, you can get thousands of email addresses for not very much money at all, a couple hundred bucks I believe, maybe less. That's nice and simple, that works really well for B2B. You could look into

a commercial database provider, for example WinMo, Jigsaw or Net Prospects or all examples. You could look into companies using a specific technology and you can use sites built with or nerdy data or a similar tool to use this. For example, companies using active campaign or companies using marketing automation. Companies using QuickBooks, that's probably too many but just to give you an example. Companies using any software and

they are a bunch more. You could also look at a words list for your industry, you could look at trade show lists who sponsored them, who attended them. You can look at competitor client lists, these are often available. You can look at the referral list from your competitors, from your prospects, from your loss leads, from your friends, etc. This means a referral list is like a list

that you're going to actively build. This is touched on in the previous video but that also counts as a list. What you're doing is building a list of people by reaching out to them and generating referrals. You could get lists from non-competitors in your market, people that serve the same market but offer complimentary or varying services. Finally, you could use non-ask events or point event events like

a no-pitch webinar, a podcast, a guest post or an event you host that just get people into your funnel, into your pool of leads but don't sell them right off the bat. All of these methods work. These are actually way too many methods. There is an overabundance of methods. There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of companies you can work with but you can only work with

so many at a time so you want to just find 20 dream ones to start. This is more than enough to do that. You want to also ask qualifying questions. You want to make sure that your prospects are your dream prospects. You're going to start with more than 20 and narrow them down. Questions you can use to narrow them down are questions like what trigger indicates qualified

lead? What certain aspect am I looking for? Maybe they had a low earnings report in the past quarter. They're a large company. Maybe they don't have a sales funnel. Maybe they're just over the seven figure mark. Maybe they're about to expand into a new market or they're about to expand their distribution nationwide. What trigger indicates a qualified lead? What qualifying criteria can I use to screen my

list? This is a meta question. In other words, this is just asking you what qualifying criteria are you looking for? You can just list them and the questions below are examples. You could ask, are they using a specific technology, for example, Active Campaign, QuickBooks, to Pulse, Asana, any commonly used technology? Are they demonstrating a specific market need? For example, maybe they have a non-mobile website and they're

using an old version of Rails, which is a software or a language specifically for building sites. You could also ask, has a change recently happened in their business or industry? Maybe new legislation. Have you reached a specific period in their business that triggers a need, for example, tax season? These are all examples. They might not apply to your industry, but they give you an example of the

right sort of questions to ask. You want to list out the questions that you ask of your leads. What tests do your leads need to pass in order to make your dream 20 list? That is the purpose of qualifying questions. You also want to clean your list. This means making sure that the emails, the contact info, etc. You have are valid, that you're actually emailing a person

and that they won't just bounce. You can use clear bit enrichment, which will add in details like the name and position behind an email address. You can screen out emails that will bounce using the sites, never bounce or data validation. You can also check the online presence of an individual or company, so you can use LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or something like that. You can pretty

quickly tell if somebody isn't a good fit using their online presence as a gauge. You can do this with all of your leads before allowing them into your dream 20. How do you actually get somebody's contact information? This is, for most people, a non-trivial problem. Most people don't really know how to do this that well, but it's actually not that hard. You just need a broad spectrum

approach, you need a couple different tools. First of all, the easiest is obviously, you can just Google their name, but that is what we'll touch on last and I'll give you a more sophisticated version of it because that doesn't always work. The first method I have listed here is hunter.io. This is a site that you can use to find a whole lot of email addresses for companies.

Then you want to qualify them to see if they're actually decision makers. Another site that basically does the same thing that uses a domain to hunt email addresses is any mail finder. These work really well. You can just plug in a domain of a company and they'll give you email addresses and you can refine your sophistication as well by entering in different, for example, parameters in your

search. They're very useful tools. Hunter.io also has a LinkedIn integration. You can add it as an add-on to your browser and then when you're going through LinkedIn, you can just on the side get one click email as well browsing. You can come across the CMO of the company you're targeting and just immediately click and get their email. You can also use the magic Twitter search. This is

used to a tool called all my tweets and you search through somebody's entire Twitter feed for any time they mention their email address. You can also use the magic email search which is a custom Google search that searches for somebody's name or their company or their position along with their email address. This is just like a quick high-level overview. These are covered in depth in the included

worksheet. I just wanted to give you a high-level overview but these are ways that you can get anybody's contact info. There are some cases where you just can't find good contact info and you're going to need to cross a name off your list and that's okay. That will happen. In most cases, you will actually be able to find a good email address to contact them. Go build

a list, identify your dream prospects, customize the provided email templates, and start relentlessly winning over your dream clients. I think you're going to find it's going to be a whole lot of fun, it's going to break some of your notions of what's possible in marketing, it's going to be a little bit of work but it's going to be utterly worth it when the clients and the cash

start pouring in and as your business, your agency, steadily grows. See you in the next video.