In this video we're going to talk about how you can find the right people to contact,
how to cold email, and the number one sales tip from Alex Berman. My name is
Eric Siu I'm the cohost of the Marketing School podcast and the host of
the Growth Everywhere podcast where we nerd out on marketing and
entrepreneurship. So Alex Berman, the guy that you're going to see, is a very smart guy,
has a great YouTube channel on sales training, and you're gonna learn from him.
And you're gonna get better, so enjoy! The first thing I like to
do is think about cold emails as the recipient. All of us have received cold
emails in the past, and it's pretty obvious when you receive a bad cold
email. Why it's bad -- a couple things hit you right away one. When you look into
your Gmail inbox, you'll see the subject line and you'll see a little bit of the
first line of the email, and those two things will make you decide whether to
delete that email or open it. So the first thing to do is to make sure
the subject line is at least neutral. That's why I like generic subject lines.
I'm a big fan of 'Hi from Alex.' I'm a big fan of 'Quick question.' The one that
performs the best for us at Experiment 27 is 'Question about... and then their
company name' so 'Question about Tide' or 'Question about General Electric.' The
reason why those generic subject lines work is because they don't turn somebody
off. If you pitched your product in that subject line, there's a much higher
chance you're gonna get deleted, which means they're not even gonna read the
body of the email. The second thing is that the first line of the email needs to be
very specific towards their business. I like to use a compliment so I might say
something like 'Hey Mark, Came across [agency name]
Congrats on working with Power Rangers!' Or if you're targeting local restaurants
'Hey, just looked at your website and love the food photography.' Something specific.
Then what that'll do is get them to open the email, which means you've already
beat out most of the bad cold emails because you're not in spam, and you're
actually getting open. But we're talking about responses here and the main way
that I've found to get somebody to respond to an email is to tell them
something they already think is true, and speak it as an expert. And then tell them
the solution. So for instance, 'Hey you know do that normal compliment, found
your website really like the work you're doing with Power Rangers. My name is Alex and
I do marketing for or digital agencies...' Or if I'm talking to a
digital agency, and I say I do marketing for a digital agency that's instantly
gonna make them spark up. If you're targeting SaaS companies you could say
'Hey, I do marketing for SaaS companies...' or you could say something like 'Hey I just
got off the phone with the CMO of a major telecom company, and they had these
two main issues. Here are the solutions. I'm wondering if you're dealing with
anything similar, and then two specific ideas. I like to use the exact same ideas
per industry, so for instance when I'm reaching out to CEOs of an agency with
between 1 million and 20 million in revenue they're most likely gonna be
dealing with the same issues, where if I was reaching out to the CMO of that same
type of company they might have different issues. And those two issues
only come from talking to your customers. A good example of this is I just got off
a coaching call with somebody who sells Facebook ads in the ecommerce space and
in his idea email the main things he was pointing out was that
Facebook ads with videos sell worse sometimes than Facebook ads with still
images, so he recommended testing both. And that is a very niche, very specific
idea. Coming up with those is how you get responses, then finally ending each email
with a call-to-action: 'Let me know if you find this interesting. We'd love to hop
on a call with you and discuss further. Would you mind if I sent over a few
times?' The call-to-action doesn't really matter as long as it is a question they
can understand, that ends with an actual question mark. You'd be surprised how
many emails go out that ends in period.
It goes back to putting yourself in the shoes of your customer and who would you
rather buy from, so for instance if you're the CEO of a major company let's
say you're T-Mobile, huge enterprise company, would you buy Facebook ads from
somebody, or would you delegate that decision to a CMO? Would that CMO
delegate that decision to another like Director of Marketing. Maybe Director of
Marketing - Paid Acquisition. Something like that... so thinking about that
decision-making tree at the target company is the main way that I find
titles to go after and then from there it's using LinkedIn to identify the
target customer. Typing in Director of Marketing, T-Mobile, for instance, will
bring up a list of people, and then it's going back to those assumptions to find
which of these targets is the one that's gonna buy from you. So for
instance there's a Director of Media and Marketing at T-Mobile is probably a better
fit than Director of Field Sales at T-Mobile, but if you're selling a product
that benefits the field sales team that would be better.
So for each specific company, especially if you're targeting someone like the
Fortune 500, it's worth doing this deep dive specifically; otherwise if you don't
want to do all of this research the quickest way is to start with the CEO.
Email them; if they don't get back within two weeks then go down one level. Email
the Director of Marketing. If they don't get back within two weeks then go to the
next level. I do not recommend sending multiple emails to the same company at
the same time because that is a quick way to get written off by that entire
company. My number one sales tip is to approach every client call not like you
are a sales guy trying to pitch a product, but instead like you're a doctor
trying to diagnose a disease. What does that mean? So for instance when I am on a
sales call and we sell marketing services for agencies at Experiment 27,
I'm talking to an agency owner. I know because of our research and because of
our cold emailing process that they're between one and twenty million dollars
in revenue, and based on our past conversations not with them but with
other agency owners in the same spot, I have a very good idea of how they think
and problems that they might be dealing with. But I'm not going to come right out
and say it. instead I'm going to give a two-sentence
on what Experiment 27 does, and then ask them about their marketing. Have you
hired a marketing vendor in the past who runs marketing for you right now?
Do you have key performance indicators? Set up questions that don't lead them
towards a specific answer, but give me a better idea of what they need to know.
Your sales managers might have given you scripts or key points to hit, but the
easiest way that I found to sell anything is to listen to a question.
Think of a case study that you might have in your head that relates to it, and
then answer the question based on your past experience. So if they say as an
example, 'Oh we've run all of our marketing
internally this entire time, and it's just me who runs the marketing, I could
say something like 'That happens in a lot of agencies. The one founder tries to
take on marketing and also sales and also do production and it slows
everything down. I know a ton of marketing agencies and based on their
client results you'd think they were crushing it, but then you look at their
own website, and their inbound leads are way lower than where they should be and
that's the exact type of thing that we help with.' What I did there is I heard
his answer, I internalized what he said, I listened to him, and then I took it back
to the Experiment 27 pitch and brought up one of our case studies. This is Alex
Berman from Experiment 27. If you want free sales training check out B2Bsales
training.org. It's a playlist of our most helpful videos on scaling a company,
sales, and negotiation. If you need marketing support for your digital
agency, check out Experiment 27.com. And obviously subscribe to Eric Siu.
Congrats. You just got a power-up, now go do something with it. To go level
up, don't forget to subscribe. And we'll see you tomorrow!