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Cold emailing is simple when done properly. The issue is that 99% of businesses and salespeople are unable to turn their results from 0-1 without devoting hours to training and testing or getting frustrated and giving up. And when they finally succeed, they struggle to turn it into a systematic process that scales without burning time or hiring more manpower.
While the key to getting good results is typically thought to be 1-to-1 personalization, my tests concluded that personalization really doesn’t make a difference and is actually one of the biggest wastes of time.
Now there’s nothing wrong with personalization and building a large team, but efficiency will always be king. The whole point of relying on cold outbound is to maximize your $/hr by generating clients as quickly as possible.
Here are the three cold-email frameworks that I use to book 1000+ appointments in 10 months without spamming — and it’s done in less than an hour per week:
Related: 3 Cold Email Strategies With High Response Rates
1. Offer creation
Creating offers for cold outbound is vastly different than crafting offers for the rest of your business. The way you want to start is to find the biggest problem for a specific market and figure out how you are able to solve it. During the pandemic, for example, hundreds of course creators made millions as people had the issue of boredom and wanting to accomplish something while in lockdown.
Next, you want a unique mechanism. Selling web design to local businesses has been around for decades. You need to show why your way is better or that you have a special system that works well or even that you cater to a super specific area.
The other thing to keep in mind before you start claiming that you can generate 10x the results that your competitors can is to realize that market sophistication, and if your market is skeptical, a unique offer will resonate more.
Nailing the offer and positioning of your services was the biggest reason why some of our campaigns generated a 2% reply rate and others generated a 25% reply rate.
2. List segmentation
The way most people build their list of prospects to contact is by scraping one huge list of people in their industry.
The issue with this is you aren’t able to build an ideal client persona that resonates. Sure, you can scrape all the founders of marketing agencies in the United States, but all they have in common is the fact that they’re in the USA and run marketing agencies.
What we want to do is narrow down as much as possible. Saying that you help Tampa Bay CEOs who are hiring SDRS build SDR onboarding systems is exponentially more efficient than saying you help CEOs onboard employees.
Some common things we use to narrow down our search include:
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Linkedin keywords
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Position
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Location
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Keyword on website
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Services provided
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Technologies used
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Awards won
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Press announced
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Directories
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Revenue
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Job title/job level
Ones that help with timing:
By filtering heavily and scraping smaller segments of lists, we’re able to “personalize” our emails just by using variables.
Finding something relevant to compliment them on saves 10 minutes of your time, and it also helps you be seen as an equal or superior, as you’re an expert in solving their exact problem.
Related: 7 Cold-Email Marketing Strategies That Will Heat Up Your Sales
3. Email script creation
Now, there are two ways of looking at how you make your scripts: 1) Do you want to take calls with everyone who’s interested? or 2) do you want to take calls with only the top 5% of buyers who are the most in pain and are most likely to close?
Some view this as a question that should be decided on the discovery call and not for the team who generate appointments to consider, but if you can generate dozens of sales calls a day, this question is worth considering.
If you belong to the first camp, you want to keep your emails short, show relevancy, your offer, your unique mechanism and a soft call to action.
An example of this would be:
Hi NAME — saw you guys on G2, congrats on the 5-star reviews. Are you looking to hire commission-only SDRs?
Now, on paper, this script seems amazing — 4% of people emailed turned into meetings. The core issue is a majority of the leads had a misconception that the SDRs would be generating them the appointments, not converting existing leads into booked calls.
The company in question was able to book 10+ daily appointments with a 1-person sales team. This wasn’t sustainable as they disqualified 70% of clients before call 2.
What we’ve seen work for a fix is something that qualifies the prospect more and gives more explanation of the situation so they can disqualify themselves if applicable:
Hi NAME – saw COMPANY on G2, congrats on the 5-star reviews.
We’ve been partnering with various Fintech leaders like X & Y to solve PROBLEM when onboarding SDRs.
Mind if I send more info?
One extra line is all it takes to turn an unqualified campaign into one that performs and has a high-interest rate from clients. In extreme cases, going in-depth on case studies to capture prospects who are in the highest state of pain at any given time is ideal.
These systems are designed so that you can plug and play various variables, pain points and benefits into your script creation. The one key thing to remember is that everything here is an amplifier. If you don’t send enough volume, it won’t matter what you do. If your goal is five meetings a day, you likely won’t get there by sending 10 emails a day.
Related: How to Write Cold Emails That Quickly Convert Sales
