Cold Outreach Strategy with Sawyer Paul

scrape through a list of Google Maps links or whoever it is within your ICP. You know, you've done the research on those 3 things, scrape it through. You can use tools like Browse.ai, which they have free choices to that. You plug it in, you set up the automation for the scrape, goes to the web pages. Once you've got that list, I would call every single one of those leads just to hear the nos.

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Today we're going to be exploring the world of cold outreach methods, really to help grow your business to the next level. I think all businesses need leads. Online is like a really noisy place. So the question is, how do we stand out from the crowd? And I think one of the most effective methods to really outreach and be able to do it at scale is by identifying your dream client and then reaching out to them. But the trick to make this work is to make sure that you're not just spamming. Nobody likes spam and you're delivering the right message at the right time to the right person. And that's what I wanted to explore today with my guest Sawyer Paul. He's from LaunchPal. We'll talk a little bit more about his business and journey as we get going. He's an absolute master with this stuff. He's built a business around doing this for other companies, particularly in the fast-moving consumer goods brands, helping them get their products into liquor stores and other distributors. And I think it's a really interesting story about how he started off going quite wide but really narrowing in. And there's so many lessons when I've had a chance to chat with him before around how to scale outbound marketing. Perhaps first things first, Sawyer, thank you so much for making some time.

Yeah, of course. No, it's awesome. Thank you so much, David Jenyns, for allowing me to speak to your audience and have a good chat with you as well.

Yeah, maybe first things first, can you tell us a little bit about cold outbound marketing and maybe where people often go wrong with it?

Yeah, for sure. Firstly, my experience has been doing sales and marketing the last 7, 8 years. Learn a lot of different methodologies from frameworks on how to close people to some really core things when it comes to outbound cold outreach. And hopefully today we can go over some of the 5 frameworks that we follow at my agency at Concrete, and also for the software we're building out for that FMCG group LaunchPal. And what it comes down to, first thing is ICP clarity. So you touched on it before, which is your ideal client profile. Having a really good understanding of who they are, what they do, where they eat, where they're sitting, who they're talking to. So then you can have a really good idea on how to sell to them. The second thing that you need to keep in mind, part of this 5-layer framework, is definitely data quality. So something special about what we've been building out is we've got 39 different data points. And if you don't have the right data, you're not going to reach the right person. And so that can come from getting an old lead list to also just getting bad leads coming in or bad, just bad data overall can really hurt when you're doing that cold outreach. The third thing that ties in is deliverability. I'm sure you've done cold outreach before on LinkedIn or email and you just drain your head and you're like, what, where, what's going on? Why is nothing sending? And it can come right down from the start to how your email's written. You know how everyone has a beautiful looking signature with a photo and link to the website. It all seems smart, but at the end of the day, that's just going to go into spam because it shows some red flags. And fourth, and then just before we get into the final thing is your message relevance. So it ties back into that deliverability. Is once you've got your HTML, your text records looking really good for your domain, it's making sure you're sending out a relevant email or a LinkedIn message to the people that is in your ICP. That can really help again with a maximum amount of deliverability and a high reply rate. So for us, we get about a 10 to 15% cold reply rate, which is well above industry standard, which is between 1 to 3%. And then from there, a lot of the sales are done in the follow-up. As you'll know, David, you've been in the industry a long time. The deal is done in the follow-up. And we say you follow up with them until they die, basically. You constantly follow up with that person. But it's how you do it. They don't want to be annoying. We usually do about 5 to 6 touchpoints for our cold outreach. But yeah, that's like the 5-layer framework I'd recommend.

Yeah. Yeah. What I love about that is there's a lot of smarts built into each one of those steps. I think getting the dream client, that ICP, clear upfront. And then we do the same when you're building out a business and you're thinking about developing your systems and your processes. You want to tailor everything and optimize it to that dream client. So that dream person, when you do come into contact with them, they get a magical experience because they feel like, oh, this is built just for me. So with that in mind, like, there's a few criteria that you would want to have in place before you think about cold outreach. I'd love your take on that. You need to be clear on who that person is. You probably also need a great product or service that's helpful to that person. Are there— yeah, how do you think about when the right time to be scaling your business by using cold outbound methods?

Personally, when we walk through it, it's when you first come up with the idea of a business, you've got to, you've got to get data around it, right? So the best way to do that is doing cold outbound. So you, let's say you set up 3 to 4 different ICPs within different industries or business types that you want to target and you run a campaign. You might run a campaign of 100, 200, 300. In each one of those categories. And then at the end of that cold outreach cycle, whether it's a month or 2 months, you're able to get the right data on who you want to attack after that. Now, so you might be, if you're, uh, within the businesses that we work with, they're like a canned beverage company. And so we break it down. Okay. You got hotel groups, which fit under more of hospitality. Then you've got health and wellness. So it might be like a yoga company or you got retail, which might be like a liquor store or a supermarket. You can break those down into that and then you might target that hospitality group with a different offer and an ICP. And after they've run that campaign for the different business types, you can have an understanding and go, okay, I should never talk to hotel groups or I should only be talking to retail stores. And that can really help with your deliverability as well. Yeah. Have you had any issues with deliverability or when you're running campaigns or?

In the past, we've primarily focused on people that we've got existing relationships with and where maybe we haven't communicated with them in ages, and past clients or prospects, and we're reactivating them. I've always been quite cautious about not coming across as spam, and so that's one of the reasons we've done that. The coldest channel that we'll go for is through LinkedIn, because at least with LinkedIn We're first sending an invitation to connect and okay, now that you've connected, we can have a discussion. So that's historically how I've approached things. My thinking is changing on it depending on how clear you are on that ICP, because really it's about the right message to the right person at the right time. And I've had some extraordinary— I've been on the receiving end of some extraordinary cold outreach, like people are getting so good at it now and the messages are so tailored and unique in the way that they try and break the noise that my thinking on that is changing.

Why do you think people like LinkedIn, people having more of an open mindset to, but a lot of the time even cold email gets pushed to the side. Do you think maybe people in your, who listen to your channel or even you, like why they think maybe cold email doesn't work?

Not necessarily that it doesn't work. I know it can. I know, like, spam gets a bad rap, and maybe justifiably. Maybe it's bad spam gets a bad rap. And there's a lot of laws in certain countries around, especially in Europe, around how you have to outreach. There's also a lot that needs to go on behind the scenes, at least if you're doing it via email. To make sure that it's actually effective. I don't know if it's at least initially something that a company should take on. They need to really engage a specialist because you don't want to harm your domain name. You've got to warm up a bunch of domain names. You've got to— there's just so many things that you need to understand for cold email to work that you can end up just going, oh, this doesn't work. And it doesn't work because you didn't do it right.

Oh, 100%. I feel like a lot of the time, especially either medium, even medium to large size businesses that haven't gone about it and they just want to do it, they skip a lot of the infrastructure that I mentioned before. You touched on it there, using one domain when in reality you're wanting to send 500 clean emails, 500 to 500 prospects with multiple touchpoints. So let's say you're doing 2,500 emails. In that first month, you're gonna probably need 10 domains to send that. And that all takes a process if you wanted to warm that up within a month. And it's totally possible to learn how to do that, but you can really screw it up. And like you said, you can put yourself on a blacklist, you can be breaching GDPR rules, and it all comes down to the things I mentioned before on that 5-step framework is warming your domain, making sure your data's really high, not just blasting 1,000 people with one generic message. You said it before, making it really meaningful and, and touch what your ICP actually wants. That's interesting.

I think an easier way to start, at least if you're going completely cold, that's generally why I'll go, you can start with LinkedIn because at least then you don't need to worry about as much. There's a couple of little tricks you can do to break through the noise. I know you do some really great stuff with personalized voice messaging via LinkedIn, which I mean, that just breaks through the noise. So I think that's great. And I think it's a good way to first test your message and make sure that you get your ICP right, get your first couple of messages clear and working. And what is the flow and making sure that you go from inquiry and discussion, handing it over to appropriate sales team member or whatever to make the offer to close. I think doing all of that first via LinkedIn makes sense because then you can perfect it and then go to cold where like email where there's some more moving parts. And even before you go to completely cold email, I think a good stepping stone and probably for a lot of businesses if they're established and been around for a little while is first to go to past clients, past prospects, any sort of past leads, anyone where there's already a little bit of a relationship. You already know they're interested in your products and services. Start there because if you can't make it convert and work with them, then you're not going to make it work and convert with a cold audience.

100%. And a lot of the time, if you've had previous clients and past clients, you can be quite upfront and honest about if you're wanting to get into a new market. So for me, learning sales, the biggest thing is setting an authority frame, right? So if you talk to a previous client and you might say, hey, I'm entering this new market, do you know anyone that's looking to do this XYZ service that you've seen a benefit in? A lot of the time people are just going to refer their network of people to you, which a lot of the time, if you're just starting a business or you haven't started a business, your biggest asset is right here. It's your phone. It's your network is your net worth. And people can forget that or feel worried about approaching someone when they can tap into financial freedom potentially.

Yeah. The other thing I'd love your take on, I feel like there's a big opportunity. You said it earlier, the money's in the follow-up. And have you seen successful campaigns where they're running multiple-channel follow-up? Because once you actually connect and then you think— I mean, there's direct mail, there's email, there's LinkedIn, there's SMS, there's WhatsApp, so many. Even just remarketing, once you get someone into your world, then running remarketing ads to them. What are your thoughts on how this might all come together to really maximize those leads?

Yeah, that's a really good question. And lead, a lead is money, especially if it comes in through your marketing efforts. It could be $10, $20, $30, $40, $50. So you want to make sure that you're getting the most out of that. So for us at Concrete, especially on the agency level, we were doing automations, websites, and marketing. We don't just do the one outreach or the one message or the two messages that a lot of people do. It all starts down with a phone call. So what I've taught the team is within the first 150 to 200, 240 seconds that we get a lead come in, they need to be contacted within that time. The reason why is it's speed to lead firstly, and speed to lead basically breaks down to that person is thinking of you right then and there. So you want to be able to be fresh in their mind and speak to them because that authority and trust is built straight away. So that's the first thing. Let's say you didn't get a lead that came in from that and you had to do like we were talking before, a cold outbound where you're outreaching to do that message. What I usually do is if I've gotten a reply, maybe after the second or third follow-up that I've sent, because for us we see about a 60% increase in replies after a follow-up is made. You want to be calling that lead straight away and it goes back to quality. For us, we have most of the time their personal phone number, but all of the time we have their work phone number. So that gives us a really good advantage of going, hey David, it's Soy from Concrete, I just got your email. And that's a really special moment when you talk to a prospect because it just sets the tone for the whole business relationship, and that can really strengthen you getting that sale. And I think it's not taught enough, but relationships, especially in like B2B for me is super powerful. You need to be establishing a relationship with someone, need to be really caring about who they are, what they're doing, and showing that you care because they're going to look at that as the service output that you're going to be providing them. Yeah, that's my thoughts behind it.

What I— what, like, my brain can't help but go, oh, how do we turn this into a little bit of an SOP? What's the order in which you would tackle this? And I think someone listening along Firstly, getting very clear on the ICP. You made that very clear. Then I think doing some form of testing. And I think if you haven't had experience doing email and some of that cold outbound stuff, maybe starting with LinkedIn or engaging an expert, someone like Sawyer who knows how to do some of that testing without burning your domain name, I think that's really key. So you start off doing some of the testing and getting the messaging right to see what people are going to nibble at. Once the leads start flowing in and you're getting responses and people getting back, the speed to reply to that lead is obviously really key. And making sure that you get back to someone straight away, preferably hopping on a phone, and then finishing up with building out a multi-channel follow-up system. And really everything that we've talked about will end up being a system, because the thing about cold outreach is it's scalable. Like, you think about trying to network with someone or get referrals or even content marketing, there's only so much of that you can do. Whereas what I love about a cold approach is you've got a huge universe of potential people that you can contact. And if you crack that code and you make that work and you're ready to scale, it can be a real game changer for the business. And then obviously once you've done that testing, got those first few pieces, then you transition from LinkedIn maybe over to email, or you're running both campaigns, or you first connect via email and then you follow them up in LinkedIn. So the, you obviously do a little bit of a mix there, but from what we said there, is there any obvious holes that you see or bits that people get wrong in, in that kind of chain that I just went through?

Yeah, I think if we were to break it down as an SOP and you're starting with a business owner that has got an awesome idea, maybe really good branding, maybe spent too much time on the branding. And they want to finally sell it, it's like you said, you need to build these systems out. And the best thing I would recommend before even looking at getting an automation set up is generally getting used to rejection so you're not getting too emotionally attached to what's happening. So I would, I, the first thing I would do, like the very, very first thing I would do as a business owner if I was starting with a new business is scrape a list of, this is what we first did in the early stages, scrape through a list of Google Maps links or whoever it is within your ICP. You've done the research on those 3 things, scrape it through. You can use tools like Browse AI, which they have free choices to that. You plug it in, you set up the automation for the scrape, goes through the web pages. Once you've got that list, I would call every single one of those leads just to hear the nos. Yeah. And that's going to help a lot with understanding your customer. Understanding your offer and understanding the messaging of what you need to do when you build up the automations. That's 100% the first thing. The next thing is, yes, you can come to an expert or you can create it yourself, set up, look on Appify or make a Make.com automation and create some sort of workflow where you automatically connect with a prospect from the list that you've created, then send out a personalized message based on the content that you got from your research. And then you can create something that can work while you sleep, but The gist of it is, I would say, before even making that SOP is understanding why you're making it and who you're making it for too. Yeah, I hope that helps someone.

Yeah, no, that's great. And it aligns with the way that we teach. You, before you even get to any sort of automation or AI, you've got to first understand what works. And really, you're saying you got to roll up your sleeves and do the work to figure out what works before you codify that, turn it into an SOP, and then give it to AI to execute on.

Otherwise you just— oh, 100%. Yeah, you're just creating an automation for a failed outreach, right? Yes, scaling failing. Yeah, like you've gotta, you've gotta do the legit human element of it first before you can accelerate that. You essentially— the reason why we created the tools that we created, so APOS, Automated Personalized Outreach, which has now turned into Launch Pal is we created it so it could 10x what you would normally do. Now, I wouldn't want to 10x something that I'm bad at. I'm sure you wouldn't want to do that. You want to 10x something that you know works, so then you can continue to work on other elements of your business, like your marketing, like your branding, like networking or looking for investors. But yeah, I hope whoever's listening to this, yeah, do a lot of the hard work and the hard mahi, as we say here in New Zealand, before you just want to automate everything.

Yes.

Because people can just want to automate everything and they don't know why they're automating it.

I think that's one of the biggest lessons we've learned looking at some of our best clients that are getting the best results with AI is the ones that have all documented their SOPs and already understand what parts of their business are working and how it works. They're the ones crushing it because they're able to then start to translate those SOPs and just go, okay, now how does AI help us do what we're already doing? But faster, cheaper, and better.

100%.

So yeah, love it. Love the work that your team and you guys are doing over there at LaunchPal and the agency as well. If I was to point people to keep an eye on your work, where is the best place for me to send them?

Yeah, for sure. The first thing I'll say is if you're creating a new product, so we've got a brand that's working with us now called Visionary. They do Basically neurotropic, what would you call it, neurotropic sachet that helps screen-heavy entrepreneurs or business owners get through their day. So if you have a brand like this, you got an idea, you want to validate the idea, you can come to launchpal.io. So L-A-U-N-C-H-P-A-L.io. You can sign up for a free trial, get your first 25 prospects, reach out to those 25 prospects, get that ICP down, get that messaging down, and be able to make your first sale straight away. If you're wanting to see us and what we're doing for automation, you can look up cncrete.co. So that's our agency and we do marketing, design, and automation there. A lot of cool creative projects again for a lot of businesses like this or even more service-based businesses. But that would be the easiest way to reach out to us is just through our website.

Yeah, rock and roll. All right. Thank you, Sawyer, for your time and looking forward to watching as you continue to grow the brand.

No worries. I appreciate it, David, and I hope you have a great rest of your week, my man.

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