How to Double Your Agency Revenue with Cold Email

All right, so we have a little treat for you. So this is a coaching call from the Agency Owners Association. This is a group that Neil and I have for agency owners to help you grow faster. So if you're in the agency space, you are a services business, this is applicable to you. It's a little preview of a call. It's probably 10, 15 minutes or so, and you get a sense for what it looks like to be in the group. If you want to learn more about the group, you can go to marketingschool.io/agency. Again, it's marketingschool.io/agency.

Hi, everyone.

Hope you enjoy the episode.

Welcome everybody to another AOA Guest Masterclass. Today we have AJ Quesada joining us. AJ is the founder of Revenue Boost. He's actually been an entrepreneur for quite a long time. I think he started when he was, gosh, 18 years old or younger even. What AJ does is he helps small business owners not only find their ICP and like become hyper-specific and targeted in their outreach, but he helps craft cold email campaigns. He also helps small business owners and agencies find their clients on LinkedIn. He's helped over 400 agencies just double their revenue with cold email outreach. And there's a process. He also has a community of over 10,000 B2B agency owners. So I'm happy that AJ is here with us today. He's gonna walk us through How to 2x your revenue using cold email outreach. Please help me welcome AJ Quesada. Nice to have you here, man.

Yeah, thanks Austin. Excited to dive into the topic today and welcome everyone who's joining in live and also anyone who's watching after the fact. Hello to you too. Anyone who's here live, we'll do some questions at the end too, so it won't be like slides the whole time. We can talk about some of your offers and get into all that too.

Awesome. Yeah, sounds good. I'll keep an eye on the chat, guys. So if you're posting questions about the content, just put them in the chat. I'll stop AJ if it's relevant to the specific content. Otherwise, we're gonna hold the questions, more general questions, until later at the end. But we'll have about an hour and a half on, on the call, and the last 45 minutes will be like open questions.

Sweet. Awesome.

Over to you, AJ.

Cool. I'm gonna share my screen. We'll go through some of the, some of the training. Let me know if you guys can see it well here. Okay, sweet. So yeah, today will be a full-on masterclass on cold outreach, meaning it'll be enough for you guys to actually get started with it and just implement right away. And then at the end, I'm gonna share a gift, like a mini course that we have that we're giving, gifting to you guys for free. So it'll give you some follow-up material as well and templates and everything you need to get started. And I have to warn you, this information is extremely potent. It can ignite your sales on fire. So make sure to Use, use with caution. So imagine this. Imagine you could get an email list of like— imagine you had a list tomorrow of 100,000 prospects in your niche. Or imagine I rented you my newsletter for 100,000 prospects, and they were prequalified. They were exactly your ideal client. They were all fresh data. And imagine you actually— normally you might take years to build up a list of 100,000 warm prospects, right? But with cold outreach, you can populate this list in less than 30 minutes, and it only costs you A few hundred bucks. So that's how cool this is. That's, that's what I'm showing you guys today. A really cold average is as close as you can be to free leads, right? Like, we've all tried organic marketing. Put a 1 in the chat if you guys do organic marketing, like if you do some like content or SEO or social media to try to get clients.

Put it—

okay, Austin does, Maya, Guy. So yeah, I do it too, and it's great. And the whole appeal of organic marketing was that like it's free compared to ads, even though it's like completely draining on time to do it at scale, right? But it's free, but it just takes a while. It takes a lot of time. So this is like that, but it also can work right away. You don't need to spend like years building a list or an audience if you get everything right. We've had clients where in the first 30 days they're closing a couple new retainers. One of our clients last month, he landed $7,000 in MRR just in the first 30 days. So it's pretty cool because it's like the appeal of free leads, but you can— it's still direct response like ads, right? And the way I like to think about cold outreach is it's like your own private ad network, right? It's like having your own ad network that you control and you make the rules. So put a mark in the chat for Mark Zuckerberg if you've ever been frustrated by like Facebook ads getting disapproved or your reach going down or like just some kind of Facebook problems. Put a mark in the chat. I know there's a lot of Facebook people here, right? Probably everyone will comment, right? So yeah, we've all had problems with ad networks and things getting disapproved. So yeah, of course you still want to be compliant in your cold email, but it's something that you own and no one else is looking at. Like, that's how awesome it is, right? So it's really your own private ad network that you control and you can scale as you please. How many of you know this guy at the bottom and this, maybe you've read this book and seen this diagram, Mr. Hormozi. So yeah, I think cold out— the thing about cold outreach is it's been a tried and true method for like years and years. Like I used to work in door-to-door sales like 10 years ago and I would just do like outreach like in person to people, right? It's been popular for a while and it's some of the biggest companies in the world rely on cold outreach like Salesforce, HubSpot, They have teams of literally thousands. Salesforce has over 2,000 salespeople that do cold calls and cold email, LinkedIn, right? So it's a really popular method. But I feel like in the agency space, it didn't really get popular until Hormozi launched his book and he talked about how he used cold outreach to, you know, save Gym Launch during the pandemic and ended up selling it for $40 million, right? Combined with other companies. But yeah, in his book, he talks about this 4 ways to get leads, post free content, run paid ads, cold outreach or warm outreach. I feel like most internet marketers know content ads, but, you know, to me, the outreach side is, it's kind of like the third way, right? So I'm excited to show this to you guys because it's really, if you're not doing it, it's a new, it's really a new, a completely new revenue stream for you, right? And if you are doing it already, we'll cover some advanced things. And also, like, we can take time at the end to, like, actually look at your campaigns or your copy or whatever it is. And if you're in the group and you're watching this after the fact, you can message me on social or, like, post in the group and I can answer your specific questions after the fact. But yeah, it's really the third way, which is pretty awesome. So what we're going to focus on is how the strategy works, targeting and messaging frameworks, and a 3-step system to run effective cold email campaigns and also how to automate most of it. So what I'm not going to be telling you guys to do is like sit there for 8 hours and like type on your computer and send emails and make calls, right? That would be— nobody has an extra 8 hours a day, right? So 90% of this can be automated and then you just have human touch for just one part of it, which is really maybe an hour or 2 a week. Quick background if we haven't met yet. I actually, so like Austin said, I started entrepreneurship when I was 18, started working in door-to-door sales and I actually ended up, I was one of the top salespeople in New York. So I took a risk and dropped out of school and just worked full-time in sales, which was pretty fun. I got to end up helping to build a business for 5 years and manage a sales team of 20 people. Ended up building 3 companies. So the construction business and then 2 agencies by the time I was 27. So yeah, all this today is kind of based on all of that experience combined. And now I founded Revenue Boost, which is really more focused on just applying this to like B2B companies. So we help a lot of agencies and SaaS companies and all that. And yeah, fun fact, I'm from New York, but I live in Vietnam. So that was always like a goal for me with agency was to be able to work and live remote. So I've been here actually now, now it's actually 6 years. So it's been, it's been a trip for sure. And yeah, we've worked with over 450 clients now, mostly agencies. So like some of the examples we'll be sharing are agency specific. And we've worked in over 50 different niches. So this is all to say that, like, everything you're— I'm showing you guys today is actually based on data and campaigns that are, that are working now. And also, we worked with some pretty, pretty epic people too. So that's always, always fun. So wanna address this question for anyone who's not doing cold outreach. Have any— put a 1 in the chat, or even just share your thoughts if, if you've ever worried, like, does this even work? Like, do people even, like, respond to cold emails or DMs? If you have any kind of disbelief, Yeah. So Rebecca says one. Yeah. Maya says one. Never gotten to work. Awesome. Almost everyone says one, right? Well, I love that you guys are still here and were able to put your skepticism aside. But yeah, I receive this question a lot and I thought the same thing. Like people are— because the thing is, we receive so much garbage outreach, right? I'm always receiving some DM that's like, you know, hey bro, how's business? I can get you 20 appointments tomorrow. Like you guys probably all get that too, right? So the thing is, we get a lot of crappy outreach, so it makes us think that it doesn't work. But once in a while we've all gotten a really good email that's gotten us on a call, right? So yeah, we just really like at the end of the day, it works if you do it right. If you don't have the right targeting or the right offer or like, you know, crappy, you know, copy of some template you got off the internet, it's not going to work, right? But if you have the right strategy, the right message and offer, it works like a charm. And I know this because I've sent millions. This is just one client we sent 300,000 outreach emails for. And also a lot of our students and clients who are complete beginners, like if you guys are also worried, like I've never done this before, I'm not a copywriter, I'm not tech savvy. If you get— if you just follow what I'm showing you today, you can get results in really just 30 days. So this is one of our clients, Tizian. He has an SEO agency. So yeah, definitely works in that niche as well if you're doing SEO. And he was getting one close a month and now he's getting basically one close every day, every second day. So basically 10 to 20 new deals signed a month. And this was his calendar. So it's really cool because like, you know, imagine what you'd have to spend on ads to fill up your calendar, right? You'd have to— you'd have to be spending $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a month to fill up your calendar like that. with like B2B quality appointments, right? So it's really cool. Like it can take some testing and some tweaking to get it right, but when it works, it's really profitable growth. And also, if you deal with like a really high-end clientele, like you work with Fortune 1000 companies or something, it also still works well. A lot of executives at these big companies. So this is a client who actually got a lead from the CFO of Virgin Airlines. And to quote him, he says that this shit works, right? So if, if you're targeting higher-end B2B or larger companies, or maybe you want to, this is a really great way to get in because honestly, you're more likely to get the attention of a senior executive with an email rather than your Facebook ad or like, like a post on TikTok or something, right? So a lot of executives really prefer to do business or have a quick conversation over email or LinkedIn, and this is where sales are happening. So if you've been thinking about maybe going upmarket, I would definitely encourage you to do that. So if you're wondering, does it really work? It does work if you're good at it, and that's what we're gonna be covering today. So let's go into actually how it, how it functions. So I mentioned earlier that I did door-to-door sales. This was me. Well, that's not actually me. I didn't ungrow a beard. But this is, this is basically what I was doing 10 years ago, and I was doing it in person. So I was working for a construction company, and I was going door-to-door, like, while all my friends were partying in college. I was literally knocking on like 1,000 doors a day selling house painting services. And it was cool. Like, has anyone here done door-to-door sales? It's really— put it in the chat if you have. Austin has. Okay, cool. So Austin, how was that experience for you?

I would recommend it to anyone that wants to be in entrepreneurship or a business or anything like that. Just builds thicker skin, you know?

Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. That's exactly what it did. And Adam did Cutco and Maya says yes. What kind of sales did you do, Maya?

It was back in high school.

I helped my friends with their painting business, house painting. You'd go door to door. Oh, cool. Maybe it was the same one because that was— this business was painting. That could have been maybe a coincidence. But yeah, it was— it's hard, right, when you had to do it? Or was it like just kind of easy for you?

No, it was hard for me.

I really had to keep improving over time. Yeah, it's definitely hard. I mean, because most people don't— most people, you're interrupting them, right? So, or like they're having dinner or something and yeah, not everyone wants to talk to a door-to-door person. So this was really like the beginning of cold outreach, right? Before we had, you know, social media DM people and all this stuff, this was how a lot of people would sell. And, you know, what it taught me was how to make a pitch in like 10 seconds, which is such a valuable skill as an entrepreneur, like you said, Austin. But by doing this, you know, I ended up doing this for like 5 years and really learned like what words and what psychology and like if I move this word here or I change my tone, how much of a difference it makes. And the cool thing is when you do in-person sales, you get to see people's like reaction, right? So the thing is, if you like run an ad or send an email, you don't really know how they're responding. But the cool thing is if you call someone or talk to someone in person, you get to actually see like how they respond to your pitch. So this taught me a lot. First, it taught me that outbound works because as like a broke 18-year-old, I was able to actually generate like over almost $100,000 in revenue the first year just by like knocking on doors. So I was like, this is cool, this works. And you know, of course most people would slam the door in my face, but If 5 out of 100 people were interested, then that's 5 leads, right? So I kind of learned that it's really just a numbers game, which is the same way that cold outreach works. Also, I learned that it can be done for free because again, I was just a broke 18-year-old. So all I had to do was just spend the time. And also I learned that I can get infinite leads. Like you can reach so many people. In this case, you can reach so many people through email, right? Because not everyone's going to be on social media, but everyone has an email. Like I don't know anyone that doesn't have an email unless they're like over 95 years old, right? So that's really cool because no matter what niche you're in, you can target them through email. Also, it's delegatable. Eventually, I didn't want to be going around knocking on doors, especially in New York. It's freezing cold in the winter and the company still made us work. So I was like, I remember once I was in a blizzard knocking on doors and I gave the pitch to this guy in like January and he was just, he just looked at me puzzled and he was like, what the hell are you doing, kid? Like, go home. Why is the company making you work? So yeah, I didn't want to be doing door-to-door forever. So I delegated it and I hired a team and I think once you have the script down, you could delegate it. So same thing with cold email or cold calling or whatever. once you have it down, you can just delegate it, right? But it's good to do it yourself first. And the biggest thing I learned is you're not selling the product, you're selling the next step. So this is really how all of sales works, right? Like when I was, if I was to go up to the homeowner and say, hey, I want to paint your house, it's going to cost $10,000. No one would say yes, right? But when I change the script to like, hey, can I, you know, hey, I'm going to be in the area because we're painting Mr. Jones's house. Can I come by next weekend and just give you an estimate? I'll just give you an analysis. of if your house needs painting and what it costs. And that script worked 1,000 times better, right? Because I wasn't trying to like open someone's door and then 5 seconds later ask them for 10 grand. I was just saying, hey, can I have half an hour of your time next week, right? So this is the same way that all lead gen works, but especially cold outreach. Instead of trying to sell the offer, sell the product, you're really actually just selling the next step, right? So that's, that's how sales works, right? You're just selling the next step. And when you have the first call, you sell them on the second call. And, you know, when, if they're not sure, you maybe have a 3rd follow-up call, right? Or you sell them on getting their business partner involved. So you're always just selling the next step and the next step and the next step. It's always just kind of about that next call. So this makes it easier. And we're gonna cover some actual examples of cold email copy. But how this applies is like most cold emails or LinkedIn DMs I get, it's usually like, hey, I, my name is this and I work at this company and here's the benefits of our offer. And it's very much like they're trying to sell you on the whole thing. And it's just like way too much too fast, right? It's like, again, they only met you 5 seconds ago when they read your email and you're asking them for too much. It'll be the same as if you're like dating and you go up to a girl or guy at a bar and then ask them to go on a vacation with you, right? It's just like you're skipping the whole first part, right? So basically when you make the ask smaller, it's a lower risk decision and it's easier for people to get yes, to say yes, right? So instead of asking in your cold email, hey, do you want this offer, this product? Just say, a smaller thing. It could be, hey, like, you know, do you like, do you want more information? Do you want to chat? Can I send you this resource? Just try to make the ask really small because the smaller the decision, the higher the likelihood you get a yes, right? But we'll show, we'll cover how this works in scripting later. So again, just to define the term in case you're like new to outbound or haven't heard this before, this is how I define the different channels. Inbound is when the prospect initiates the conversation. Outbound is when you initiate it. So inbound is an ad or social media. Or like a masterclass like this, you put content out there and you wait for people to come back. But outbound, you kind of like force the start of the conversation, right? So inbound is these things. And today we're focusing mostly on cold email because I think it's just the most universal. But if you guys, if your target clients on Instagram or LinkedIn, or even if it's better to call them, like if they're old school, then the same principles apply. But that's pretty much what outbound is. It's like all of these things on the right. It's, and it's really more sales than it is marketing. I would say think more like a salesperson than a marketer, because it really is just sales at scale. So we covered these already, but the biggest benefit is it's really low cost. I'll cover the tech stack at the end. But first of all, you can do this for free. There is software I recommend that makes it easier, but you literally could just send emails today for like $0 and get appointments, which is pretty cool. But software, like you're looking at maybe $100 to $400 a month depending on how aggressive you wanna be with scaling it. But that's really it. Like our biggest clients maybe will spend $500 a month on their tools. So it's quite low cost. So there's 3 different ways you can use this. Obviously we're talking about getting leads and sales, but 2 of the things I wanna show you guys is you can use this for any kind of business development. 'Cause when you learn how to write a good cold email or outreach message, you're really just learning how to make an effective pitch, which you can use for anything. You can use to get investment into your business, to hire someone for recruiting, whatever it is, right? So of course everything today is gonna be focused around sales, but just know that you can use this for anything, which is, it's pretty awesome, right? If you wanna get affiliates, if you wanna get a partnership, right? Like you could easily run a cold email campaign, target other service providers who serve your niche, but in non-competitive ways and say, hey, let's hop on a call. We can share referrals with each other and that'll crush it for sure. So use this for other things too. And also like, this is my favorite way, my favorite creative way is Use cold outreach to get yourself booked on speaking engagements and podcasts. Who here would like to actually get on more like, like podcasts or speak on YouTube channels or anything? Just put a 1 in the chat.

All right. So I wanted to take a second to tell you about my ad agency, Single Grain. We're a performance digital marketing agency and we focus primarily on working with B2B companies and e-commerce. So performance marketing, that's SEO, that's paid media, that's CRO, that's ad creative. And there are a whole host of other things that we're doing with AI that's really cool. Cool. You can go to singlegrain.com to learn more. Again, that's singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you on the other side.

Yeah, a few people said yes. Pat raised his hand. So this is a video below from some guy named the— well, his name is Chris Do, but the channel's The Futur. Maybe some of you guys have seen that before. Long story short, they have 2 million subscribers. And before I had a personal brand, before I did like any social media stuff, I cold emailed this guy just when I started this business and I was like, hey, can I come to give a presentation on your channel? Much like this one, right? And little old me with like zero followers other than, I mean, one or two, like my mom and my dad, right? No followers, no presence or anything, but I was able to access 2 million subscribers and basically like sell for like no money, like for free, right? Because I was giving value to his audience and it all started with one cold email. Now here's how this played out. It got 40,000 views, 1,000 people joined a new Facebook group. So the Facebook group just started and had 1,000 members. And over time, I don't know the exact, but it was somewhere between like $300,000 to $400,000 of sales from our outreach coaching program. One email, $300,000 to $400,000 of revenue. And again, basically like, this is such a cool thing to do because you guys can basically hack audience growth, right? You don't always need to create traffic and build your own audience. Other people already have traffic, right? Traffic's already flowing around in your industry. So of course, like, post your own content, build your audience, but this This is a really cool way to supercharge it. It's just find, just find a way to inject yourself into a flow of traffic. And it's not that hard. Like cold email someone. Most people are usually looking for, like they usually hire people to find them podcast guests. So people are pretty receptive. Again, this was someone that had 2 million subscribers and he answered my email. So absolutely love— oh, Pat says he's in the pro group and he was on their call an hour ago. So yeah, you know the future.

That's pretty cool.

His stuff's awesome, right? Chris is a cool guy. So yeah, use it in these creative ways and we're going to continue focusing on sales, but just know that you can use this for some other cool stuff too. Now, when you're, when you're building a sales campaign, there's 2 different approaches. There's volume and then there's hyper-personalized. Volume is like, I want to email 10,000 people and I'm going to use a template. Hyper-personalized is like, I'm going to email 100 really, really high-quality prospects and I'm going to customize each email. so that it's personalized and I research something about the business and it's going to get a really high response rate, right? So there's 2 different ways you can use it. Essentially, the benefits are mass blast. You can test a lot of copy faster and really you just kind of— you're playing the numbers game. You're hoping that like one out of every few hundred just really is struggling with the problem and you're kind of putting out a wide net, right? Hyper-personalized is going to have a higher response rate because you're customizing and taking the time to do research. This is really good if you have really high-value prospects like that, that Future guy, the podcast I did. I didn't just send him an automated email. I like spent 30 minutes researching his YouTube and I was like, hey, I see that you don't have any videos about this. This is exactly what I teach and I think it'd be valuable to your audience because of this, right? So it takes more time. You can't reach as many people, but if you have really, really high-value prospects and you're really picky on who you reach out to, then it's gonna work better. Yeah, Austin said he's gotten better results with hyper-personalized. So there's also a whole world in the middle. This is a graphic from Colin Stewart who wrote The Field Guide for Predictable Revenue. It's a book that he made with the founder or the guy that worked at Salesforce and basically built their whole like 2,000-person sales team and kind of pioneered this cold email thing. But yeah, there's a whole middle ground as well. So you can either have high volume, one template, you could have hyper-personalized small list, or you could be somewhere in the middle. You could have like segmented lists and different messages for each that are still templated. which is called personalization at scale. So a good way to look at it is if you're wondering which strategy is right, I mean, you can do both overall, but if you're trying to pick one, it's, you can think about it in terms of the client value. So ACV at the bottom means average contract value. If your deals could be worth $100,000 for you, then yeah, like personalize your message, even pay someone just to spend all day like writing these tailored emails or LinkedIn messages, right? Let's say that a client's only worth $5,000 to you total. It's not going to be economical to sit there and, you know, customize this research or to pay someone to do it. Right. So you can also just look at it based on the numbers. So here's what we know so far. We cover the advantages of outbound, the different channels, the use cases, and then the 2 different ways to approach it. So now we'll get into more of the actual scripting. So first, getting into our process before you launch a campaign, be clear on who's my niche, what's my offer, and what's my message. Put a 1 in the chat if you guys work with like multiple niches or multiple offers. Like, I don't know if you guys are all kind of niche agencies or if you maybe have a kind of a couple different focuses. Or you can even just say what your agency does. That would be cool too, because maybe we can go over a couple of examples. Okay, cool. So most of you guys are commenting that you have a couple different focuses. So if you have different services or different niches, pick one per campaign, right? So let's say you help doctors and you help dentists, even though those are similar, they should be different campaigns because marketing works the best when it's specific, right? So, you know, the language a dentist would use would be different than a doctor. You could share a case study to a doctor that's different than a case study for a dentist, right? So like, and they even, they might even call, like they would refer to a lead differently, right? So always make sure that the different verticals are their own campaign and be really clear on the niche offer messaging. You don't want to just like say, send one email out to business owners, right? Because then the more generic and broad you make your list and your targeting, the more that you're gonna have to kind of like dilute and water down your message to cater to everyone, right? So this is really important. A lot of times when I'm looking at a cold email campaign or I'm doing a consult, it's not even the actual campaign itself, but I could just— the problem is that they're not really clear on who they're speaking to. A good way to look at it is if you're giving a gift to your nephew at Christmas, the niche is the person, the nephew. The offer is the actual gift and the message is the wrapping paper. It's like how you're presenting that offer, right? So when you're trying to make your campaigns work better or optimize them, these are just really the 3 main things you need to look at. Like if a campaign is not working, it's either who you're selling it to, what you're selling, or how you're presenting that. So there's only 3 steps now in the process. There is identify, which is build your list message, which is send messages, and then 3, convert, which is book calls. So identify— this is also a good— I mean, we'll get you guys the slide anyway, but I was going to say you could Take a screenshot of this. Identify— you define your ideal customer profile, you go to LinkedIn or Apollo. There's other databases too, but just for today's purposes, those are the 2 biggest ones. And then you basically build your list of prospects, which we'll cover how to do that in a minute. You download that and then you basically put it in your automation tool, right? So step 2 is message. I recommend writing 3 to 5 email templates to test and then having follow-up messages too, right? You don't wanna just send one email. By 3 to 5, I mean 3 different variations of the first email. So if you're gonna launch a campaign, write 3 to 5 different versions of the first email and A/B test them against each other the same way you would with an ad, right? If you're running Facebook ads, you would usually have a couple different ads and you test them. So the same thing applies here. And then convert. Basically, this is the one part about cold email that's not automated. So you do need some human touch for the leads, right? So when you do this right, People are gonna be emailing you saying, hey, I'm interested, let's talk. You don't wanna try to automate that or use like AI there. I mean, unless you're like really an AI expert and you can get it working really well. But we found it best just to be a manual touch. So have someone, either you or a team member, that just checks the inbox every day and just responds to people and has that personal touch with them so you can answer their questions. Because those are like really high-value, hot, warm leads. There's no reason to try to— I know as marketers we wanna be as efficient as possible, but sometimes it's just worth a little bit of elbow grease if it's 1 minute to reply to a hot lead and say something personal to them. So really those are the only 3 steps, right? The only 3 tasks you have to do is build a list, write the copy, and then follow up with the leads that come in. The tools I'm gonna share later do everything else for you, which is pretty cool. And when you do, you can get some pretty epic results. So the title of today's talk I think was How to 2x Your Revenue with Email. And this person did exactly that. They were a full-service marketing agency targeting medical practices. And they went from $29K to over $50K just from email. And this was about 4 months. So like it doesn't always take that long to get it working. Sometimes you could have a couple tests and they don't work, but it could also get some traction really quick. So yeah, really cool. So getting into the weeds now, identify, you need to figure out what types of companies you're reaching out to. People put some niches in the chat. So Guy says he works with home service. Do you work with all home service or just one? Because you can even drill down further. You could say I want plumbers or I want HVAC, or I even want commercial HVAC versus residential HVAC, right? All 3. Okay, cool. So yeah, you can get as specific as you want to be. So you want to— what types of companies am I reaching out to? What location am I in? And also what's their job title? Because when you're selling to a business that's less than like $1 million in revenue, it's always the owner. But when you get to like $3 million, $5 million, $10 million above, it's usually not the owner making the decision to hire you. It's usually marketing director, VP of marketing, something like that. So make sure you know this job title. If you don't, just think about like who's been the person to sign the checks for your previous deals, right? Or at least who's the person to take the call with you, even if there was someone else involved. Like who was the person that first hopped on the call with you and whatever the most common role is, just use that. Find a balance between being hyper-specific and too broad. A good list starting out could be between 1,000 and 20,000. If it's way bigger, it might be too broad. If it's way small, you might be overthinking it unless you're going for that like you know, personalized approach. But here's what happens when you open up LinkedIn or Apollo. And by the way, guys, any tools I mentioned, I'm gonna have a slide at the end with like all the tools. And also we're gonna give you a giveaway for that too. So don't worry if you're like forgetting the tools. But anyways, who here has hopped into LinkedIn and actually like built a list before in Sales Navigator? If any of you guys have done outreach before, just put a 1 in the chat. Okay, cool. Austin has. So this is what you see inside. It's gonna look like Mandarin Chinese at first 'cause there's more than this. There's like 100 different filters. But these 6 are the most important ones: keywords, geography, industry, job titles, company headcount, and then intent-based filters, which are also called spotlights in LinkedIn. Basically, if you have your— if you have an idea of like the type of client you want, you kind of reverse engineer that using these things, right? Geography, keywords on their company, industry, job titles, whatever it is, right? These are the 6 you need every time because I wouldn't not have one of these, like all of these 6, right? Because Again, you wouldn't email one industry the same way you'd email another industry. So you always need to have these really tightly defined, and the rest are kind of optional. So that's kind of the 80/20. If you get overwhelmed looking at all the options, just make sure you figured out what are the keywords, what are the industry job titles, and also company headcount. Because if I email a company like— let's see if the niche is in the chat. Someone said they're working in medical, multiple niches with B2B. Okay, medical. So let's say that I'm emailing a clinic that has 5 employees. Versus a clinic that has 100 employees, totally different ballgame, right? And the email should be different because, you know, the message to the 5 clinics could be like, hey, you're probably too swamped to do the marketing, right? The message to the 100-person clinic could be like, hey, we can help you optimize your current campaigns and get a better ROAS or whatever it is, right? So basically the way that the value proposition changes with different company sizes. So if you work with companies from all different ends of the spectrum, try to define them into groups because again, like a small company just thinks differently than a big company, right? It comes down to that. When you're done with list building and you're happy with the filters, you just export emails. Also, you can do, if you're doing any like social outreach, you can scrape Facebook groups, you can scrape Twitter profiles. So you can also like build lists around like interests too, which is pretty cool. So that's list building. Any questions, you can pop 'em in the chat. And I mean, if there's a question about this specific slide, you can pop it in now. But also know that we'll get to questions at the end. So next is message. And the question we wanna answer is, how do I get people to read and reply to my message? How do I stand out when I actually saw this? This is a real stat. The average executive at a, like a larger company gets 200 emails a day. So how do you stand out when you're obviously a lower priority being a, like a salesperson, right? The biggest thing is just understanding that tightly defined ICP and getting really good at copywriting. And also you don't even have to be amazing at copywriting. It's like if you get really, can nail down the target and the list, and have a good offer, like you don't have to have amazing copy, right? But I will share templates with you guys at the end. So how many of you guys know this framework, the stages of awareness for marketing? And this is my award-winning design skills that I made on Canva. So obviously you can tell that's not professionally made. But how many of you guys have seen this, like this model before? The problem-aware, solution-aware. Okay, a few people have. So basically the whole idea is, I don't wanna spend too much time with it because you guys As soon as you understand it. And yeah, we're all marketers here, right? But the nutshell is everyone in your target market is at different stages of their buying journey. Some don't even know they have a problem. Some know they have a problem and they're looking for solutions. Now, most people, they, when they write their outreach copy, they're targeting product aware or solution aware. Remember before I mentioned like, and if you look in your email inbox, you'll see the same thing. Most people's outreach message is like, hey, I offer this service and here's why we're the best, or here's why we're different. And Let's book a call. And the thing is, that's solution-aware messaging. That's only gonna speak to the 3% of people who know they have a problem, know what the solution is, and are trying to evaluate the best agency, right? So basically, fundamentally, the way that most people do their outreach messaging is just flawed because they're only speaking to that solution-aware. So you actually wanna focus on problem-aware, right? So for the guy that said he's doing the guy who said he was doing home service SEO, problem aware could be like, hey, did you notice that your competitors are ranking higher than you in Google and getting all of their, you know, all of the business you could be getting? That would be better than saying, hey, we offer SEO and we have these 5 benefits to our service, right? So problem aware is the problem you solve, and you can basically turn someone into solution aware by talking about the problem. So a good way to remember this is Instead of talking about your product, talk about their problem, because people can always resonate with a problem more than your product, because unless they're looking to hire someone like you, they're gonna tune it out the second you start spinning off like why you're the best, right? So now when you're actually writing the message, you're keeping problem awareness in mind, and you have to answer these 3 questions, right? How can you help me? Who are you? And what are you asking me for? So like, this is kind of what happens in all of your brains too. If you read a DM on Facebook or an email, This is kind of like how, like, first you're thinking, can you even help me? And if you can help me, then you're wondering, okay, but who are you? Are you credible? You might check out their signature or their profile. And then if you're kind of sold on how they can help you and who they are, then the next thing is the CTA. Like, what are you asking for? Are you asking me for a meeting? Are you asking me for, to like read something? Like, what is it, right? So you need to really quickly answer how you can help them, who you are, show that you've helped people like them, and have a clear call to action. So beyond that, before we get into examples, I wanna cover the tone. This is really important. There's a really different way that you write outreach copy versus like most marketing copy. Like the way you'd write an email newsletter or an ad or a social post is totally different because it's one-to-many. It's you as a company speaking to the whole market. But outreach copy has to be one-to-one, meaning it should feel like it's actually you, a person, emailing them manually, not like, like, like talking to them, addressing them by name rather than like they're part of some marketing list, right? Because nobody signs up for cold outreach marketing. So it's gotta feel like one-to-one. Really, the vibe is like, it should be more like conversational, like a friend in a coffee shop. So for example, don't say we as a company, right? Say you is even better, or if anything, I, but like you and I, not we, right? So yeah, ultimately, There's 4 parts to the actual email. So now we'll get into the actual scripting, right? So the intro, which is why I'm reaching out, the value proposition, which could be a problem or it could be like the outcome you provide, credibility, which is, credibility can be a specific case study. It can be aggregated case studies. Aggregated meaning like we've helped 40 gyms achieve X, Y, and Z, right? It could be social proof, other social proof. Like I was featured on Forbes, Or even like your experience, right? Hey, even if you're like, even if you have a new agency, you don't have a lot of social proof. Hey, I've been doing this 10 years. I worked in corporate. I did this 10 years, right? Something credible. Because here's the thing, like when people read your email, even if they sound good, like how many of you have ever read an outreach email or like an outreach DM on Facebook and just been like, hmm, this sounds like, this sounds good, but it kind of sounds like bullshit. How many of you have ever had that thought before reading an outreach message, right? All of us, right? Because we get promised these huge claims by marketers like every single day, right? So even if your message is really good, the credibility, I mean, obviously like you don't need me to tell you this, right? We're all marketers here. Social proof is always important in marketing. It's especially important in cold outreach because you're literally just like a faceless email, right? Like they just got an email from you and, you know, like if you do outreach on LinkedIn or Facebook, it's a little bit better because they can see your profile. But on email, like they literally just know you as a block of text, right? So you need to have that quick credibility and then the call to action. So those are the 4 parts and just tips on that, kind of reiterating what we said so far. Focus on the problem, not the product. Your message should look like a casual email from a coworker. It shouldn't scream sales pitch. And also again, your goal is to get a reply. So you're not advertising, you're not selling, you're not educating, which I know sounds weird, but really like the goal of your email is to get a reply. So if you're doing emails or DMs and it's not working, maybe you're trying to sell. Just how can I get them to reply? Because once you reply, then you can— you just have to get conversation started, right? Once they reply, then you can talk to them, then you can give them more information, you can ask them questions. But if you're trying to just get a meeting right away, it's not always going to work so well. So just try to get them to reply and one step at a time. Now also, this is a good one to screenshot. You want to follow these guidelines: 6th grade reading level or less. So simple wording, Unless you're selling to like NASA scientists, like really, really dumb it down. And even if you are selling to a very like academic type of person or like someone very sophisticated, smart people still like to understand things quickly and read quickly, right? So yeah, just dumb down your messaging. I saw it in Alex Hormozi's book. He said that he rewrote his outreach scripts and he made it a, he made it a 3rd grade reading level and it doubled or tripled the response rate, which is insane. Like 3rd grade reading level is like extremely simple language, right? But at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you're selling to smart people or not. It's just about comprehension, right? The simpler the language, the faster people can read it and understand what you're talking about. Keep it under 100 words. So like 3 to 5 sentences. Another good tip is to read it out loud. So what I'll do sometimes is if I have copy, I'll read it to myself in my office. And if it sounds weird, if it sounds robotic when I say it, that means it's gonna sound that way when I read it. So that's a really, really good copywriting hack is just—

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And also picture you're writing it to a friend in a coffee shop, not like, not like an ad or brochure. Um, so yeah, at the end of the day, um, don't have tons of links and attachments. We'll cover deliverability later. Don't make it an essay, don't pitch so much, don't talk about yourself so much, and don't be talking about features so much. So examples, this is an example of a good email. You guys can take a minute and just type in the chat, what do you like about this email? Like what stands out to you about this one? This was a good one. And keep in mind like the principles I shared earlier. It's so personal, right? Exactly. So it, it would feel like someone actually emailed this to me, right? And this could be fully automated, right? There's AI tools that can check if a company's hiring for a job role and then insert that into the email, right? So like, that's super cool, right? So it feels personal. It feels like— and here's the thing, like when someone— when I get an email that's personal, like someone researched my business or they say something about my, my product or my website. Even if I'm like, like, I'll usually read it just because I feel like, okay, this person put in effort, like it must be something legitimate, right? So people appreciate the research. It doesn't feel salesy and it's just super quick, right? Like in just 3 sentences, this guy had personalization, problem, industry insights, and a call to action, which is pretty cool, right? And a solution. So like you don't need to have this really long copy. It's just around, it just The funny thing is, it's harder to write short copy. Do you guys ever feel like that? It's like it's harder to write short copy than it is to write long one, because anyone could just keep typing stuff out. But it's hard to actually really pack a lot into, you know, just a few sentences. But this is what— this is what you want to have. And Guy brought a good point. He said, use we in the last line, not I. Any reason? Yeah, I mean, maybe this email isn't perfect. Maybe the I would have been better. But there's also reasons too, like If I was selling to really big companies, I would then say we, not I, because you wanna seem like a more legitimate, like, so like the personal element goes far. But if you feel like the people you're selling to are like, like when you're selling to a really big company, when you're selling to an employee of a company versus the owner, their concern is not the company's growth. Their concern is I don't wanna get fired or look like an idiot if I hire you and you suck, right? So it's their status, right? So, for example, credibility is more important when you're selling to bigger companies, because, you know, they have to feel like they're bringing in a really legitimate, established company, right? Otherwise they look like a fool. So maybe that could be why. But yeah, that's just kind of a small little nuance there is there could be cases where we is better than I. And Pat says, yeah, I want to avoid using I because I don't want to come off as a freelancer. So yeah, definitely, definitely cases for both for sure. Here's another one. This is from a client of ours who is an e-commerce agency. So take a minute and just say like what you, what you like about this email, because this one did really well. And e-commerce is a really hard niche too, but this one works well. So what do you guys like about this one? Flattering. That's a good one. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. There's always a lot to be said for stroking their ego, right? And it's not like some like generic bullshit, like, oh, I love your company. This is actually like something specific, right? So that's, That's a good one. Anything else about this one that you guys like? The softer CTA? Yeah. So we see a lot better results with the soft CTAs. Are you open to help? It's much easier for someone to be like, yeah, I'm open to help versus being like, do you have 60 minutes tomorrow? Right? So yeah, soft CTAs are great. The proof seems believable, right? Definitely. And that's like undeniable proof. I've helped 65 eyewear e-commerce brands. That's pretty awesome. So yeah, same elements, right? And the personalization actually ties into the value proposition, which is, which is pretty cool. So yeah, this is, this is, and again, this is personalized. At the time, this was a while ago, the client was just doing it manually, or they had a VA. They had a VA writing the first line for each lead. But now AI can do that. AI can visit the person's website, check something like if they have reviews, call out a product, and just plug it in as a variable, which is Which is pretty epic. So we'll, we'll save some, some time for some cool AI conversation at the end when we get to the Q&A. So let's look at some bad ones. This is a bad one, and this is what most of the ones I get look like. What, what's, what is not so good about this one based on what you guys have learned?

Delete long.

Yeah, like you wouldn't even read it, right? Because, you know, so it's a good point about it being long, Rebecca, because Here's the thing. When you, when you advertise on Facebook, people are— when people are on Facebook, they're kind of wasting time. They're, they're like, they can spend time reading something long, right? When people are reading their email inbox, it's different because I don't know about you guys, but when I'm in my email inbox, I'm trying to get the hell out of there, right? I'm trying to just like get my stuff cleared out so I can start my real work for the day. So that's why short copy is so important with email, because people are in their inbox like prioritizing. It's— email's like a to-do list, right? It's not like on social media where they'll, they'll, they'll get sucked into your long copy and read it for 10 minutes. Like, they, they actually are just doing it quickly at the start of their day, right? Focus is on I, hard to skim, impersonal. Yeah, the speech is complicated, right? Tobias says he's an innovative, innovative, transparent, independent advisory firm engaging clients. I'm like, hurts my head just to even, just to even read that, right? So yeah, here's the thing. Like, you would never say that in a conversation, so you wouldn't say it in email. So Yeah, great points as well. This guy lost me at the subject line with let's collaboration. But yeah, same thing. What do you guys not like about this email? Vague, right? And he's— she's just getting a touch base, right? No one wants their base touched, right? And especially Over over an email. But yeah, it's it's just kind of yeah, kind of sell don't touch my base exactly. Hashtag don't touch my base. I didn't give you permission for that. But yeah, and then also the technical stuff, right? Like I don't know what like obviously I know kind of this is like software development language, but this has no benefit to me. He's just speaking in his own like nerd software development language. If he was selling to software developers, then that would be good. Or if he was selling to SaaS companies, then that could be. Better. But, you know, I'm a CEO of a small business, right? So here's what we know. Short email, simple language, conversational, 1-to-1, casual, not salesy. Pain points, results, social proof. So if you can include a pain point in one sentence, a result in the next sentence, social proof in the next one, and that's it. And soft call to actions are great. And when you do, you can get— just get— just getting that right. Slava followed this framework and within the first week he booked one call, had the demo, and got his first sale on Tuesday. So again, if you just focus on getting the right list, Copy like we showed you, it can just work pretty quick, which is awesome. So I'm gonna breeze through the last part, convert, and then we'll leave some time for Q&A. So once you have leads coming in, this is the workflow. Check for new leads every day and then look for old leads. So you might have had it, you might have had someone be interested last week, you send them a calendar link and they didn't book, follow up with them, right? Because people just lose emails, right? So every day you or a team member should Check for new leads, respond, follow up with old leads, and then log all this in a CRM. Speed to lead is really important. I have a person on my team that's just like staring at the inbox all day, or I mean, now they have— we have like a Zapier notification, so it alerts them. But we found that when we reply to a lead within 15 minutes, they're just way more likely to respond. Any of you guys doing lead gen here? Have you found the same for your clients as well, or your business, like the speed to lead being important? Yeah, you guys are saying yes. Yeah, yeah, for sure. So, because here's the thing, if someone— if I respond to your email 10 minutes later, like, you're still in your inbox, you would still see it and then you would book in, right? But if you respond to the next day and they read it the next day, 2 days later, they already forgot who the hell you are because you— again, it was just a quick email. They probably didn't even register it, right? Still in the headspace. Exactly like Austin said. Then you want to set up a winnable sales call. So We like having a survey on the Calendly because it's cold traffic to prequalify. Also show value in the call. This increases show rate. Of course, there's a lot of tricks for show rates and I'm also always down to hear like what you guys find works well for your show rates because I know a few of you mentioned you're doing lead gen here. If you are, put your best tip for show rates in the chat or even just like pre-call processes. I'd love to even source some like ideas from the group here on what's, what's helped you to get like set up better calls. But anyways, what we found is showing value in the call. So if people feel, if people feel like they're going to learn something, from having a call with you, they're more likely to show up, right? So tactics aside, reminders, yes, do all that stuff. But at the end of the day, like, the biggest thing is, do they feel like this call is gonna be worth their time? That's why they choose to show up or not, right? So that comes to the initial messaging, and also like email, SMS resources, do all the reminders and all the tech stuff too. So now lastly, automation. So how do you automate it? How can you apply laziness to this and do less work? So there's 4 tasks, right? There's build the list, send the messages, follow up, and then reply and convert these leads, right? Um, you can— here's how you can automate it, right? So you can use a bulk database, or you can even outsource the list building. Bulk databases meaning Apollo or LinkedIn. Once a month you build a list for the next month, and you don't have to be doing this every day or every week, right? Send messages, automate completely. Follow up, automate completely, reply and convert. Again, I have a person on my team that does it, and if you're really tech savvy, you could probably get AI to do that for you too. And if you have a solution for that, I would be curious how you could help me with that because we manage all of our replies inside of the email marketing tool instantly. So we don't, we haven't really found a way to actually connect AI to that. But anyways, that's not my forte. If you're doing any cool AI stuff, definitely let me know if you can help. But there it is possible nonetheless. Or if not, just at least outsource it or do it yourself for the beginning. But everything except the last step can be automated. So here's the text app. Here's one to take a picture of. I'm never gonna go through it, but just, yeah, take a picture of this because these are all the tools you'll use to do the stuff that I just shared earlier and also for LinkedIn as well. Austin said, hey Austin, could you share that about the Eric posted something from X?

Yeah, and Maya probably saw it too. It's in the AI working channel, but you were talking about automating the emails. Someone had created an email for ChatGPT-01, the advanced reasoning software. So I'm not sure if, you know, when they receive an email, chat can either summarize it and send you a summary, or they would just write a response and then send it to you for, like, approval.

Oh, yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I'm sure it's probably not too hard. Probably just need to connect ChatGPT to the email tool and train it well. But yeah, that's awesome, man. Thanks for sharing that. So that's the last piece of the process I'm trying to figure out how to automate. But these are all the tools and clay.com. If you guys have heard of Clay, let me know. That tool is a beast. All the cool, like, stuff I was mentioning before around how you can send customized personalized emails completely with AI. That's what Clay does for you. It's really using GPT, but it's connecting GPT to visit the web and like do it for your whole lead list, which is pretty epic. Rebecca says it scares me. So yeah, so you've tried Clay. It is, it is scary, right? It is like overwhelming at first. But I found once you actually like get the hang of it, it's— I'm not like super tech savvy. I don't know how to code or anything. Once you kind of get over that barrier, it's actually pretty, pretty doable. But it is scary at first because there's like a billion things you can, you can do inside. So I, I hear you. Pat says it's way too complicated too. So yeah, what I'd recommend, guys, is if you're trying Clay, just use it for AI. It's really simple. Upload your list, connect your ChatGPT to it, and just say, hey AI, go to each lead on this list and tell me if they're running Facebook ads or call out a product from their site, right? So like just that part is pretty simple to do. A lot of the other stuff is pretty, pretty hectic. Anyways, these are the tools and Also, like, okay, so Instantly is the tool that we, what I'll do as well actually, if it's cool, Austin, I'll share in a chat. I have a list of these tools and other tools and also the list of like recommended plans. So I can drop that in the chat too, if that's cool.

Yeah, like absolutely. We'll also put it under the recording in the community.

Okay, sweet. So I'm not gonna cover like how to use these tools 'cause we only have so much time. And, but really most of these are very user, except for Clay. Most of these are very user-friendly, and like, they're— they become so simple just to like, you upload the list, you upload your copy, and you're good to go. But we can also do some Q&A. Clay, I know it's great, but it's like saying to a 3-year-old who just learned riding a bike, here's a truck, drive it. Yeah, exactly. But the good thing is, with Clay becoming more popular, you can now find like Clay experts on Upwork, so you could find someone for pretty cheap to do stuff for you. So yeah, that's it. But wait, there's more. Quick bonuses. I mean, kind of COVID this, but we use AI for 3 things: build better lists, research each lead, personalize the copy. So I launched an outbound campaign where I had AI analyze their website, analyze my offer, and then suggest targeted outbound campaigns we could run for their business. So every single email, every single person on the list was getting an email saying, hey, based on your product and your target market, here's 3 ideas of how I could promote it for you. How cool is that, that AI can do that completely, right? Job role personalization. If they're hiring for a certain job, you can personalize on that. And investment campaign, we were targeting like promoting an investment fund. We targeted people who are— we use AI to check if they're finance savvy or if they're not finance savvy, like on LinkedIn. Did they ever work in finance? If they did, they got copy version A, which is more finance technical. If they didn't, they got the other one. So cool things you can do. Email deliverability. I'll just screenshot this because this is just more technical, but these are 6 things you need to do to make sure you're getting good deliverability. I'll open it up for questions now, and we can also answer deliverability questions. I think that'd be more valuable than like walking through each one. But yeah, you guys let me know. And then last thing, last bonus is warm outreach. So definitely do cold outreach, but also like you guys all have a list, right? You have people that have opted into your stuff. You have people that followed you on social media, even if it's only 500. You have website visitors. There's a tool called RB2B where it can actually take someone who's visited your website and give you their email. And I think their phone number too, which is like scary, right? It's only in the US, but actually people who visit your website, you can get an email from them. Don't— if you're gonna do that, don't email them and say, hey, I saw you visit my website because that would be extremely creepy, right? But at least you can use it to get the leads. And also people in your CRM, right? Like, I think, I know we all are, we're all guilty of this, right? Sometimes we fail to follow up. We're so focused on the next lead, we forget to email someone from like a year ago. I've gotten clients that had a call with me 2, 3, 4 years ago because we follow up, right? So warm outreach, like think about all the warm sources, right? Opt-ins, social followers, people you've had calls with a while ago. If you guys want an action item, just go do that this weekend, right? Or next week. Just go make a list of your warm lead sources and start there. I guarantee you'll make some sales from that if you have enough data, and then you can do the cold stuff after. Okay, cool. Well, that is it. So Q&A time. I see there's a couple questions in the chat. Maybe if we want to go from the top, if you want to point any out, Austin.

Actually, no, I think—

Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks. That's a lot of information, AJ, but thank you for sharing. I know this is super helpful even for me. And I'm not running a super successful agency like a lot of these guys. So I want to rewind it back to Pat. He had a couple questions early on. Google Workspace— well, actually, Pat, do you want to jump in and talk about maybe number 1, 2, and 4?

Yeah, sure, sure. So we implemented the outreach strategy in Somewhere in November. I was shocked to hear like 10,000 emails per day, actually.