A short YouTube video in which the creator contrasts two approaches to cold outreach: building rapport (opening with human niceties) versus being direct (leading with the offer). The speaker favors a direct approach because it makes it easier to interpret replies (questions or interest signal genuine engagement), but emphasizes testing both methods since results vary by niche and client.
Hey, hope you're doing well. In today's video, I wanted to quickly record something on a topic that was something that I have always wondered, and it's something that a lot of people always ask me. And that topic is, should you be building rapport during your cold outreach? Now, this is a topic again, right, that I've been debating for a while myself, right? So this is something that is not completely objective. You ask different people, you will get a bunch of different answers to what works best. So this is obviously something like anything in cold outreach. You need to test this yourself. You need to create something where, you know, create some outreach copy, where the first copy is you having a lot of rapport, building a lot of rapport, and the second one being a lot more direct and figuring out which works best. But let's just jump right into it, right into my own opinion on what I have found to work best for myself. So. So there's really two school of thoughts on this on whether you should build rapport when doing cold outreach. The first school of thought is, yes, you should build rapport. So whenever you are sending any form of cold outreach, whether that be through cold emails, Cold Facebook, DMs, Cold Instagram, DMs, Cold LinkedIn, DMs, whatever Cold outreach channels you use, you want to start by being very human, asking questions like, hey, how are you doing? Happy Monday, how's the weather? Different things like this to really, these different formalities that you would use when you're talking to someone, you're building rapport with them. You're not just jumping right into it and being super direct. Now that's the first school of thought. The second school of thought when doing cold outreach is just being extremely direct. So instead of saying, hey, how's your day going? Your first message would be, hey, I can help your business run Facebook ads. Do you need help right now? Obviously, you might not want to use that exact wording for your quote, message, but my point being is you would just be very, very direct to the point with what you're trying to say, what you're trying to pitch, and to really start with explaining how you can help them right away. Now, I've tested both of these school of thoughts whenever I'm using the more direct way, which is what I have personally found to work best for myself. Sometimes you do get emails of replies of prospects being like, hey, have you even thought about saying, hi, why are you so direct? Maybe you should start with researching my company. Maybe you should even go onto my website and all of these points are completely valid. But I think the main reason why I personally have found the most success with using the direct strategy as opposed to building more rapport, is it's really challenging to differentiate what is a good versus a bad reply. When you're using the building rapport strategy, let's say, for example, you're doing some cold emails. You start off by saying, hey, how's your day going? And then you follow that up by going into detail with what you're doing. Well, what if the prospect replies back with my day is going well? And they end it like that. Is that a good reply or is that a bad reply? Well, the answer is, you obviously wouldn't even know because they replied back to, how's your day going? Right? They didn't reply back to your offer, they didn't reply back to your actual core message, just saying that their day is going well. Right? So my point being, and I hope my point is getting across, is that when you're sending messages, cold outreach messages, where you are initially building or trying to build rapport, it becomes extremely challenging to see what is a good versus a bad reply. Right? So that's mainly the reason why I go with the direct message approach, right? When you're jumping right into pitching your services, it's very easy, right? Either the prospect is going to reply back with, yes, I'm interested in chatting, or they're going to reply back with some sort of question. But remember, when they're replying back with a question, they're showing some form of interest, right? Think about it like this. When you go inside a store, let's say you're going inside a sneaker store, a shoe store, and you see a really nice pair of shoes on the wall, something catches your eye. And the employee, one of the salespeople, they come up to you and they're like, hey, how's your day going? Do you need any help? If you reply back, if you have no form of interest in that shoe, you're going to be like, no, I'm good, I do not need help. But if you do have any remote form of interest, you're going to be like, hey, do you have this shoe in size 9 US? Do you have this in size 41 EU, or what other colors do you have? Well, by asking those questions, it's basically the same as when your prospects reply back to your initial cold outreach with some form of question. They're only doing that if they're interested in any shape, way or form. If they're not interested. They're just going to reply back with no. They're going to reply back with unsubscribe or stop or they might not even reply back at all. When you even drive any form of interest, you can count that as a positive reply. And that only works when you use the direct strategy of just going straight into your pitch with what you're selling, what you're offering, and how you can help your clients. Well, just to wrap up the video, those are pretty much the two school of thoughts, the two different strategies on whether that should be building rapport on your cold outreach or being much more direct with your actual cold outreach messaging. I hope that you learned a lot from this video. Again, these are my own thoughts and opinions. And like anything, like I mentioned, when you're sending any form of code outreach, you just need to test to test, test, test, test, test. Right? You need to test a form of copy where you're building report and then you need to test a form of copy where you're just being direct. Right? Everything works differently for a niche, for different industries, different niches, different clients. And what works for me might not work for you. So you just need to make sure you test right. But yeah, I hope you really enjoyed this video. Hope you learned a lot. And if you've learned something that you did not previously know, please leave a like comment and subscribe on. And yeah, talk soon. Cheers. Bye.
