It's time for Q&A Wednesdays.
I'm just going to pretend this is a normal thing that I do.
But I did do two Q&As recently: one for 'Digital Olympus' on Twitter,
the second one we did is part of a webinar about 'How to sell to dentists'.
And we will release the full webinar in a week or two
but today I wanted to go through that Q&A.
So I'll play that in full in a few minutes.
And I want to go through the 'Digital Olympus' questions
from Twitter, and expand on them, show you what was being talked about, things
like that.
This is all cold email and sales related content so stick around.
- We'll start with Digital Olympus.
There were six questions: - Question one is:
what's wrong with the majority of cold outreach emails?
A: And I said there's three things wrong, Number one is, lack of a specific target.
So you are sending emails out to anybody in a company
or you're selling to everyone.
And you might not even know you're selling to everyone.
You might think you are niched.
For instance, if you are selling to tech startups, that's a dozen niches in one.
That's enterprise, B2B SAAS, dashboards, consumer mobile apps.
All of those have a different way to be sold to.
Those are not one niche called "tech startups" and they all should be sold to differently.
Number two is, no customization.
It's pretty easy to tell when an email is being sent to a huge list.
Usually, there's bullet points or there are very
generic compliments that could be used anywhere.
So customizing emails, you can get a much higher response rate there.
The number three and final issue that's wrong with most cold email campaigns is, bad
data.
Meaning there's misspelled company names or the company name has LLC attached to the
end of it or it's all in caps
or you are talking to the wrong person.
Clean your data, spell check your emails and you should be good to go there.
- Question two: what's the biggest factor for a successful cold email outreach campaign?
A: Being open to change.
Everything about your campaign might be completely wrong
when you send your first 40 emails.
But the market will tell you that.
If you send 40 emails and your open rate is 10%,
and you know you're sending to the right people, then your subject line is broken.
Go back fix your subject line.
If you get a 90% open rate but a bunch of people
are telling you that they want to unsubscribe, then your email sounds too robotic,
and you have to redo it.
If you get a bunch of people that say that they
already have somebody to do your service internally, then maybe they don't find value in your service
or you're not positioning it the correct way or they don't hire agents.
All of that is learned by sending emails.
We can come up with theories all day but if you are not willing to change
once you're in the field or you blast out to a list of a thousand
with a draft email script, you are going to fail.
That's why I always recommend: send to 40 at a time,
try everything: different subject lines every 10 emails,
rewrite the body if you are getting unsubscribes, and just work the campaign until it's a success.
I have said this a few times, a lot of cold email is just bashing your head
against the wall until it works.
- Question three: what's a good open rate in your opinion?
And here are the baseline stats that I tell people in consulting calls
and we actually have this in use for the team atx27 as well.
Stats to aim for: an 80% open rate, 20% response rate,
and a 4-6% meeting book rate.
You might see differences in these numbers over time.
For instance, some emails might have 100% meeting book rate,
if you send 8 emails and you customize every single one.
But at scale, let's say you are sending 100 to 200 emails a week,
a 4-6% meeting book rate is right in line with where you need to be.
And in order to get that 80% open rate, which is possible,
test subject lines until you get there.
And in the description down below, we will put a link to our '50 subject lines
to test' doc, where it's 50 cold email subject lines
you can just copy paste and try to use with your emails and see how you do
because every niche has different open rates for different subject lines.
Also if your open rate is low, verify that your people still work at the
companies using something like LinkedIn.
Some data providers, actually most data providers, have outdated lists and data and we
found that building lists manually is actually the best way to make sure
people still work at companies.
But if your open rates are super low, the people might not even work there anymore.
So just make sure you check.
- Question four: where do you look for information about
your prospect to personalize the message?
A: One, I look at LinkedIn, and I look for things like:
what are they proud of?
Did they go to your school?
Did they write any good content recently?
Things like that.
And the second thing is, if they are not on LinkedIn or there's not
a good amount of information on LinkedIn for them,
I look at the company's website.
What is the company proud of?
Did they have any big wins recently?
Did they work with any impressive clients?
Things like that, that can be called out in first line.
With compliments, it is best to compliment the person
rather than the company.
And ideally, it's something that the person did for the company.
For instance, if it's a marketing person that you're emailing,
and the marketing team just launched an amazing campaign;
call-out that campaign.
If it's a tech person that you are emailing and the tech team just made a great hire
or the tech person talks about optimizing server load
or whatever; call that out.
Because they are going to find more value in
things that they or their team did rather than,
for instance, talking about a marketing win to the Director of IT.
- Number five: how do you build a list of prospects ?
A: Uh, basic.
Basic question here and I'll give you a basic four step answer.
Step one: identify who you're selling to.
For instance, marketers at hotels; there's an example
Step two: find a lead pool, easily by googling, "what are the largest hotels in the world?",
add that to a Google Doc.
Number three: find the director of marketing for each,
if that's who you're selling to, or director of tech, whoever.
Use LinkedIn, "director of marketing Weston Hotel".
And then number four: use a tool like, 'Voila Norbert' to guess the email.
You can also use email hunter, 'hunter.io'.
Either one of those works.
Identify who you are selling to, find a lead pool, find the director of marketing,
use a tool like 'Voila Norbert' to guess the email address.
A lot of bing bada boom.
- All right, question six: in this age of numerous mediums of communication,
why do you think email is the best form of business communication?
A: I like email because it's where most of our clients live for X27.
So at 'Experiment 27', we sell to billion dollar brands
and we mostly work with agencies, so people that are running social media
or building websites or building mobile apps, and they are doing it for these large enterprise
companies.
The people that we want to talk to at these large
enterprise companies do not really use Twitter, they do not really use Twitter or Facebook
to sell; they are not even really on LinkedIn.
Where they are is email.
If we were contacting somebody else like, for instance, we wanted to sell beats to rappers,
you know, like my little brother is selling beats right now,
he would most likely use 'Instagram' because that's where these people are or even 'Snapchat',
whatever.
You go where your customers are.
The best way to sell to local businesses is to walk in or to cold-call.
You've got to think about who you are selling to and then pick the marketing channel
that makes it easy to contact them.
For us, selling to enterprise companies, email is the way to go and that's why I love
email.
Speaking of local businesses, I want to show you now,
the second part of this video, which is the Q&A that I did before the
"how to sell to dentists webinar", which is all about agency marketing
and some stuff about how to sell to local businesses.
So, check that out.
Here we go.
- We are starting the webinar "how to sell and not sell to dentists with
Dr. Corey Corpodian".
He'll be on in a few minutes, so in the meantime, feel free to ask me anything
and I will answer it as honestly as I can.
- We got a question' is a one-man agency at a disadvantage when
approaching enterprise clients versus a larger agency?
A: The large company has no idea if you are a small agency or your one-man shop,
a lot of it has to do with branding.
So, if you go and you create a website where it talks about your past experience
working for other enterprise companies, and that past experience can come from your
job.
It's all about however you present yourself.
No, it doesn't matter.
If you are going to frame yourself as an agency though,
I would recommend not doing all the work yourself.
Try to focus on either sales or production but not both.
I would recommend sales if you're going to focus on one of those two because you really
need revenue to hire the right quality of people.
- Ben Laurel: How's the art marketing going?
A: It's still in the creation process.
The hardest part about art so far is that you can't sell garbage.
I spent maybe 80 bucks on this painting, It's worth probably 25, you know, $25 like
it's not worth anything This emperor painting I'd probably sell for
like $150.
But the problem is, I don't want to be in that kind of world.
I need to be selling like $25,000 Basquiat prints and stuff like that.
I think you could sell them over cold email by just reaching out to people that are-
that have really nice offices and like saying, "hey, I got this Basquiat for $25000, you
want to buy it?"
I think that would work.
- Journey Social Media: do you just cold call to book an appointment
to them later in person or on zoom?
A: My cold calling process, usually, is asking people if they have seen the email.
So I'll call them and I'll say something like, you know, "big fan of your business.
I sent you an email a couple of days ago about social media marketing.
Just wanted make sure you got it."
And then they will say, "Oh.
No, I don't think I got that.
What was the email about?"
And then I'll say,"social media marketing.
You just search 'Alex Berman' in your inbox.
Are you at a computer right now?"
And then, it's a cold call and they're at an office, usually,
so they are picking up near a computer.
And then we can start the pitching process but that cold call is usually just to get
meeting number one on the calendar.
You are catching people off-guard, you don't want to pitch when people are off-guard,
you want them to know you are going to pitch them .
It's not a 20 minute cold call, it's not even like an 8 minute call,
usually this lasts like maybe 2 minutes.
- Okay Mario McCann says: what are the best practices to keep clients
longer than one or two months?
A: Best practice number one is, lock them into a longer-term contract.
We sell a-year-long contracts at Experiment 27, mostly.
We'd rather build a sustainable system.
And you might not see results or you'll see very very few results in first 3-4 months
but then, it's exponential growth.
That's actually one of the hardest things about
running a marketing agency, it's keeping these clients long enough to
see like real sustainable results.
Ideally, you are contacting the people that are cornerstone clients for your agency
so when you do land one, you can use that one case study to gain, you know, dozens of
other clients.
Two is, say something similar to what I just said
explaining this, which is: you got to frame it for
them that it's going to take a really long time to get results.
That's only if that's true.
The third thing is, actually be good at your work.
- Alexander Kist says: cold emails in 2019: trends and future?
A: So, I have been trending towards shorter emails even with two sentences.
Like for 'Lorelia', for our video production company,
our email looks like, "Hey Aaron, really love 'Predictable Revenue',
we use it all the time in our business.
We spun up a cold email campaign and it works wonders.
I would love to make a documentary about you.
Mind if I sent over a few times to talk further?"
I think the more customization you can put in it, the better.
I think people in general are getting smarter and I think they are getting smarter in different
industries.
If an industry has received a lot of cold emails.
you are going to have to customize and be more different than everyone else.
- Alright.
Ben says: yes please, talk about your presentation process
after you've lined up your meeting, do you do slides over video chat?
A: Almost never.
So, the presentation process after the meeting, we'll send the cold email, we'll get call
number one.
This is very different than what an inbound call number one would be.
For a cold call, usually this discovery call number one is,
you pitching them . So if you are selling to
mobile apps, for instance, you got to have an app idea, at least,
or a very specific idea of what they can improve.
And you have to drive that entire conversation.
It's almost completely flipped on its head from what an inbound is:
where they are driving you, you are presenting everything to them
and you are just going from there.
Call two is proposal presentation: where you go through a proposal call.
Three is contract: where after they have questions on the proposal,
you make it into a legitimate contract.
Call three, you go through that contract,
and they either sign or they don't.
And then you just keep going with that process.
The big thing there is, make sure you have the next call
booked at the end of every call.
So end of discovery call, say something like, "hey, you know, I'd love to go through the
proposal with you, that's the next step.
How does Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. sound?"
And then make sure you drag that calendar invite to the next time while
you are on that first call.
That way, you keep it going.
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If you want to work with me one-on-one in a consulting type setting, that's over
at experiment27.com/consulting
If you want to book more meetings for your agency,
ideally with enterprise companies or billion dollar brands,
that is over at experiment27.com I am Alex Berman, and I will talk to you later