FIRE Email Formula with Kristina Finseth

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions. Especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster, and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd and oh man, I'm pumped for this one today because we are going to be talking range growth experiments, cold emails and maybe even avocado. We'll see if we can get to that point today. But I am so excited to have Christina Finseth with me on the show today. She leads the growth marketing team over at Inter Seller and what is so unique about Christina is she has been on the sales side and the marketing side, which I think gives her a very unique perspective on how to actually grow. Right? Even her title, growth marketing. Right? And she actually has it in her LinkedIn. She's obsessed with all things growth and I think you can even see that in her career. She's been in the military, hr, recruiting, content marketing, sales. Who knows what's going to come next. Maybe she'll start her own podcast too. But I'm so excited to dive in because I think sales can learn a lot from marketing and marketing can learn A lot from sales. And I have someone on the show today that's done both. We're ready to do this. Christina, welcome to the show.

Wow. I mean, I don't even need to speak anymore. You just kind of laid out my whole trajectory.

I mean, I've been told that's the only reason why guests show up anymore is just to get their intro and then they bounce. So, you know, it is what it is at this point.

It is. Yeah. No, I'm excited to be here though. And I think, yeah, I've been listening to a lot of your previous guests, a lot of people I respect, and I'm excited to bring some. Some more ideas and topics and chit chat.

Let's. Well, let's. Let's do this. And one of the reasons why I think people enjoy the show is because we don't do the fluff, we don't do the background. We get very tactical here. And so, you know, let's talk about, you know, this idea of sales and marketing. Right. So right before we started recording, you said you did this experiment, right? Like a year in sales. And if you all look her up on LinkedIn, she's been an AE marketer. AE marketer. She's done this twice. So the first question I'm gonna ask here is what can marketing learn from sales and what can sales learn from marketing to better help a company grow?

Yeah, that's a deep question. Because every organization I've been a part of, there's been some level of headbutting between the two departments. And I think there's good intentions on both sides. Right. I think the tactics get very different and goal alignment gets very different. So one thing that I really wanted to do, just kind of bridging the gap between sales and marketing in my current role is I wanted to make sure that our top line goal was the same.

Love it.

So I think I was telling you right before we started hitting record, I'm all about, and I have it on my desk here. Drive revenue, not MQLs. Right. I think the moment you start grading marketers on the amount of leads they're bringing in, you're already doing it wrong. So, you know, I think when you have that top line goal, which is, let's get more conversations going with our sales team, because I only care about booked meetings, quite frankly, then it's really hard for you to headbutt. I think where some things come into play is when it comes to salespeople, marketers can learn the things that are being said on sales. Conversations so the first thing you should do as a marketer, one of the things you should do in onboarding and honestly, pretty continuously throughout your time in marketing is take time to listen to sales calls. Doesn't have to be live. Listen to a recording while you're eating your Cheerios. Like who cares? But. But you should be listening and hearing how prospects and customers are packaging the way that they communicate things. And that should kind of filtrate into your marketing speak or your marketing copy as well. To the flip side, I think sales teams, I don't know if there's as much they can learn from marketing. I'm kidding. I think they can learn, you know, some of the creative components that marketing uses as far as like offers and tactics to kind of weave in there. But keep it one to one. Sales, conversational, not marketing speak.

I love that. I love it. It's something where you know on both sides, right. Marketers going and listening to calls and what I did this actually with my own marketing team. Right. It's like go in and search for the words. Wow, amazing. Cool. I didn't know that. That's great. From the prospect side. Right. And what are they actually excited about? Same thing with talking with customers. It's still shocking to me how few marketers and salespeople actually talk to customers. We talk to prospects, we never talk to customers. And it's like we probably should because then we could do better with the prospects. Right? Now you hinted at it a little bit there towards the end. Right? Copy. Right. Because I do think a lot of sales reps can learn a lot from marketing on the premise of copy. The how to evoke emotion, how to piece it together to help their one to one conversation. So walk me through that a little bit. Right. Because there tends to be marketing copy, copy, marketing copy and sales copy. What do you see as the difference and how can salespeople maybe leverage copy a little bit better in their jobs?

Yeah. Simply put, marketing copy is a one to many. Sales copy is a one to one. Or it should be, in my opinion. And so listen, one of the hardest, hardest changes that I needed to face when I moved from marketing to full cycle sales and started doing outbound was losing the marketing speak. If you're putting bullet points with features in your sales emails, you're doing it wrong. And just because you write really good marketing copy does not mean that you're automatically going to be able to write really good sales copy. So I think it took me probably a pretty harsh curve of learning that and learning ways to Work smarter and not harder. And a lot of testing and a lot of errors to find kind of my footing around. You know what, what should a sales outreach cadence look like versus a marketing?

So I love that. So even at, even at patient, pop went through something very similar when I showed up three years ago. The way we were describing our, in our emails was an all in one practice growth platform. I think you can imagine. How many doctors do you think actually called our product an all in one practice growth platform?

Zero.

Zero. So everyone listening. That's an example of one to many versus one to one, which is, hey, we help you get more patience. Right. Now, you said a little word that most salespeople know nothing about. So now I get to. I get to call them out because I'm a salesperson, I can do this. Said the word testing. And this is something that I wish more salespeople did learn from marketers because y' all know how to test, tweak, change a single variable. Is it working? Whereas salespeople, we love the number one. Did it work once? Yes. Let's use it forever. Oh, did it not work once? Oh, never gonna use it again. It's like, no matter what it is, it's that first one. Right. So talk to me a little bit about how salespeople could be better testers, because I do think it's an all or nothing mindset with a lot of reps versus testing and tweaking to find that formula.

Yeah. First and foremost, if you're working on a broader or a larger sales team or sales development team, where you're running outbound or responsible for running part of your own outbound, this really has to come from the top down. Right. Enabling your team. So I have a team of two SDRs. It's a small but mighty team, but I do enable them to have some creative freedom within a framework that works for us. Right. You know that that's important, being able to kind of test things and bring things to the table. But if you ask either one of them, when they approach me and say, hey, I'm thinking about testing this, what do you think? My answer is always going to be yes, but they know it's going to be followed by, I want to look at the data with you. Right. So for me, it's a big thing. You can't make a data inference on whether or not something is working or certain outreach tactic is working until you at least have 50 people in there and they've ran the entire course of that cadence. Once that's happened, Then you should be looking at that data and there's some early trends that you can kind of point out. Maybe you get a couple of booked meetings in the first 25 prospects. That's great. That's an early indicator, but let's see that through for those 50 prospects and then let's decide, all right, where were people converting? Where did this fall short? What can we tweak and iterate? And man, is this something we should be rolling out to the whole team, because let's do that, too. So I'm just big on making sure you have a good enough sample size that they are the right target. Because I think sometimes there's a targeting problem, not a copy problem. Make sure it's the right target, and then let's look at the data later and see what we should be doing or if we should be doubling down. So that's kind of how I think about it, at least at a high level.

No, and I love it. And I'll go very tactical here for my salespeople listening. How many variables should they test at a time?

Christina, honestly, I am not a big fan of. I think people think of AB testing in the wrong way. AB testing, to me means you already have an A.

Yes.

If you're just shooting darts and one's an A and one's a B and you don't know your left from your right, you're going to have a hard time really figuring out quickly what's working. You've got to kind of come up with that A framework. And that means also settling into something for that 50 prospects or a certain period of time before you make that inference. Because too many people abandon things too quickly and too many people let things run too long. There's a balance. You've got to keep an eye on it. But yeah, I'd say, honestly, you should have an A. If you don't have an A, you should still only test kind of one framework or cadence. And when I say framework or cadence, I'm talking about multiple steps across multiple days that you have intentionality on the way that the days are spaced and you're going to follow it to a T. Right. Because if you don't follow it to a T, then it's really hard at the end to say with confidence that something worked or something didn't. So I think that's how I look at it.

I'm glad you touched on that, because a lot of times what I love with marketers, good marketers, is their attention to detail, to the small things, whereas A salesperson. They'll rewrite a brand new sequence. Every email is different now. Every subject line is different. Every first sentence is different, Every call to action is different. Even the signature is different. And compare that to another one that's also all different and try to see what works. Changing a couple things at a time, right? Like, okay, this one has a good open rate.

Great.

Can we beat that? Open rate? What drives open rate? Okay, like narrowing it down versus oh, yeah, I changed everything. Well, now you don't know what worked or not in that email. So salespeople think a little bit smaller before changing everything.

Yes. Yeah. And I'm a big fan of. Honestly, you know, what I've kind of created for my team. I have one SDR that's been here since November and just got promoted to a senior SDR role. I have one that's still a month into ramp right now. And like I said, frameworks are super important and giving people kind of the process to follow is really important. But honestly, I could care less about opens. I honestly care about working backwards with metrics. So I'm first looking, are we getting booked meetings? If that's not happening, are we getting replies? And by replies, I mean not unsubs. Are we getting at least 10% or greater insightful no's? Because those can give you a lot of information or yeses. If we're getting a lot of insightful no's, then great. All right, that's. That's okay. That's still a win in my book. But if you're not getting any replies, then I start thinking about opens. And if openings are high and none of the rest is happening, I'm going to say that your body is leaving people hanging. So it's just a matter of really understanding what those indicators and those metrics really mean that you need to go and diagnose and fix whatever that is.

And that's a perfect segue. Kind of the next topic here. So let's talk cold email. Right? Because more and more that's where a lot of energy is going. But it's being done very poorly, I believe, across the industry. Like, very, very poorly. And I talk about this on my own team. You go ask any prospect how they would prefer to be contacted. Cold call or email. What will the majority of them say? Email. They prefer to be contacted via email. Yet there's like, no company seems to teach it very well to their reps. It's all automated. I've also said this multiple times. If prospecting was as easy as sending A templated email, I wouldn't need salespeople. I just load it all up into Marketo and sit back and just count the cash. Right, so let's talk about how to craft good cold emails to drive kind of what you said, meetings to responses to insightfuls to the opens. Like, do you have a framework of some sort of how to write good emails to drive the responses we're looking for?

Yeah, so I actually did. After all of these years of testing and trying to figure out what really moves the needle, I did build a framework that's repeatable and it's called the Outbound FHIR framework. And what's really interesting about it and very nuanced about it is that there is no mention of a product, a problem, a solution or anything in any of the touch points. In fact, there's literally nothing indicating that. And so what it really relies on is you as the rep. Yes, there's some of it that can be automated, there's some building block types of templates, but it requires the rep to have to do really key research and change out. I'm not talking like company name, first name variables. I'm talking about whole sentence structures to make it work. And so it does still require that human element. But what happens is instead of kind of honing in on the product problem or solution, you're basically feeding ego or painting yourself as like a subject matter expert. Like, hey, Katie, I'm talking to other sales leaders that are in your shoes and these are two problems they're telling me that they're having on the daily with the reps. Right, Whatever those might be. We're helping other companies do this. But a lot of times what I like to do is use your own content, like your content powerhouse. I could use your content, but then I like to use phrasing at the end of the email that says, you know, hey, with that said, and I prompt for the call, I do, I prompt for the call and all of my touch points. But I'll say something like, hey, would love to earn the right to talk through how Interseller might fit in. That's the only place that I mention it. And what happens is, and I've kind of studied this on the data side, is if you have a message that's interesting and compelling and it's all about your prospect and nothing about you, nothing about a problem or solution. Arguably it could be about Subarus and tornadoes. It doesn't have to be about anything relevant to your job. But I know that you're a Target and that if the timing's right, my product is relevant to you, you're going to do your own research. So I'm putting the onus to research on the prospect, right? So if I write you a message and it's really clever and really nice and it cuts through the noise, you'll click the website in my signature block, go and figure out. And this also banks on the fact that you have a really good website that right when a prospect lands on it, it's very clear what you do. So let me just preface that. But you're then going to connect the dots, you're going to control the way that you respond. And so what I found is it's almost apples to apples. The amount of people who are replying off of that first kind of personalized touch where it's very vague about what we do and how we fit in is almost like I said, apples to apples with the amount of people who clicked and did their own research. So it's like turning an outbound lead into an inbound lead is the way I like to flip it because we're consumers, love it, we like to do our own research.

I'm so fired up now because you're literally the first person on this podcast and like a lot of marketers or salespeople that I talk to that talks about that because that's exactly what we preach for our team as well. In fact, the first two to three emails of our outbound sequences are not in any way designed for a response. They're designed for a click. I want them clicking. I want who's. Who's curious enough, who's curious enough to want to look a little bit more into this or to engage just a little bit and come through and then that sets up additional touch points and calls and things of that nature. So I love that mentality because it's true, right? People want to go self guided. But I love the call out too. Like the website needs to help them though, because if you're doing great, curiosity driving copy out, then they land on the website and it says all in one practice growth platform. They go, wait, what, I don't need this. And they move right along. Now I want to take one step back though, because you said it and I was like, wait. And then you gave the example, the email and I was like, okay, wait, when you say no mention of the problem.

Yeah.

What do you mean by that? Because the example you gave had a little bit of a problem in there. But I get the not using the product. I Get the not using like, you know, oh, we've 3x'd your results and da da, da, da da. But like talking about that problem based language and what you meant by that.

Yeah. So I apologize. That is a totally separate strategy that I use to fall back on when there's not something to personalize on.

Okay.

So the template that usually is followed or kind of the building block, it would be more something like this. Hey, Katie, I came across an article that you just pushed out about sales leadership and thought I'd reach out. You said, and then I'll quote something, sales reps are the best people in the world. I couldn't agree more. That was right on the money. And then I transition into the. With that said, would love to connect with you, understand more about you, your company and your priorities for the rest of this year. Would love to earn the right to talk through how Interseller might fit in. What do you think? That's all I do. And that usually generates a really good response. My reps right now, they only run this one set framework. And that's just one step in the framework. Right? That's just the first step. But they run this one set framework through their entire duration of ramp, focusing on personalizing and getting to know prospects and getting to know the territory and the industry. And I'm looking at Miguel's numbers now. I mean, he's booked almost 7% of his outreach and we don't do cold calling, really. We're talking just email and social selling touch points and he's booking 7% of his outreach. So that's the kind of baseline I'm looking for. At the low end, we're about a 4% conversion to booked meetings off of cold outreach. And I think teams set the bar too low for themselves, to be really honest with you. If you're booking Even like just 0.5 or 1%, we can do better than that collectively as an industry, you know, and I'm talking about sales folks, we can do better than that.

Absolutely. Well, and that's what frustrates me a lot of where the industry is right now with cold outreach. Because to your earlier point, I am easy to find. I have a lot of content out there, a lot of content. And the emails that come to me from sales reps aren't personalized. And so if they're not personalizing, to me, someone who it's easy to find something to personalize on, I know what all the other leaders are getting. Right. Because not everyone puts content out there. Not everyone has like easy things to find there. But if you're not even personalizing to the easy. Right. It doesn't matter. But I want to go for clarification because I think you said something that I'm a big fan of. But I want to make sure you're also talking about personalizing consistently through the sequence. Correct?

Yes. Personalizing consistency through consistently through the sequence and using value added follow ups. Not a. Hey, thoughts, Katie? Did you get my last message or I'm just bumping this back up. It's like, no, let's do better than that. You don't even have to. Let's eliminate that language. Let's say something like, hey, by the way, do you follow and don't share marketing content or company content? Share third party content that I know Katie already probably trusts. Right. As a source of knowledge. Like, hey, do you follow Sales Hacker? They put out this recent blog about blah blah blah that you might find it relevant. Use that as a preface to follow up, give, then ask for the deposit or the withdrawal. Right. So I think that's the piece that people miss on and trying to cater that that you can still have kind of the same flow framework for each step, but what you fit into that that's tailored to that person should be fresh.

I love it. I love that because it's so true. For the ones that are personalized, it's always the first email.

Yeah.

And then everything after that is templated still. And it's like people seem to forget, you know, like, you know, we talk about open rates, whatever. I may not have opened your first email.

Correct.

When I open your fourth email and it's just that templated BS that you sent over that is now my impression of you as a salesperson because it didn't carry through and it didn't follow through. So I love that you're bringing up like, and especially when it's short and sweet so it doesn't have to write a novel about me. Short and sweet throughout. And I think it's just a much better way to go about it. And so then I'm going to flip the question around here real quick. So say I'm a sales rep, sales leader, marketer. And I'm like, like I'm not seeing that type of response rate. Right. Or book rate. What are some things that I should look for in my emails that would like, where would you go? Right. I hire you as a consultant. I say, yo, like we're booking nothing from our emails. Kind of. What's the checklist you would go through to kind of figure out what's going on or going wrong.

Yeah, I'm actually working with a large global team right now to kind of fine tune their outbound process. Just on the side, side hustle. And I'm going through the same motion. The first thing that I always inquire about and look at is are you set up for the right kind of email deliverability? Like who cares? We could have the best copy in the world. But if you don't have foundational components of your email engine set up, so I'm talking about spf, dkim, dmarc, all of the things that are going to prevent you from potentially landing in spam without even trying, then that could already be hurting you. Right. The second thing I'm going to look at is the volume of sending that you're doing. If you're playing a quantity game and honestly if your reps are sending more than arguably if you're following a very personalized intentional process, if they're sending more than 25 to 50 brand new fresh emails per day, I'm not talking about ongoing. Right. We're talking about getting new people in the funnel. Then I'm going to question that. The other piece is once you've hit 500 prospects through one cadence or one kind of set of copy, if you are going more of that automated route, I'm also going to question whether or not you've refreshed that copy. Because if you've hit 500 prospects that's relatively gotten the same copy from you over time, you're already starting to hurt your deliverability potentially. Which is why I tell people not to Google high performing sales templates online and just pull them off with little to zero, you know, changes and hope that they work for them. Because guess what, Gmail, Outlook, they're not stupid. They can already sense this across all of their user base. Doesn't matter who you are. So I go there first, I go technical first. Right. If all of that's in place, then we start looking at the content of those emails and seeing what, what are you doing. Right. I'm also going to be looking at who you're prospecting in. Right. If you've got targeting wrong or it's all over the place. I've seen some cadences where the copy is very sales Persona focused, but they're dropping in like VP of finance, VP of Operations. Like I'm just gonna tell you right now, they don't care about the same thing that a sales leader cares about, things like that. Right. So I think high level. I'm gonna go technical first, then I'm gonna start really digging into that copy. And are you being intentional about the things that are happening between your email steps to lead people back to email? So you know, if you're leaving LinkedIn voice messages, which is I think really, really good play, depending on who your target audience is, are you saying things like, hey, Katie, just wanted to reach out and thank you for connecting with me. By the way, if you didn't connect the dots yet, I've also sent a couple of emails your way and I'm curious to understand and go on. Right. That's already kind of, oh, what did she send me? Right. You've got to kind of push people back to that. But that's. I'm going on tangents here, Katie, but these are.

So it's not tangent because again, you're just dropping little one liners that I get to pull you back on. Or you said lead them back to email and you were starting to go explain that to people. Because again, everyone seems to treat the channels as though they're separate. Right. Like I call and I say call me back. I email and I say call me back. I social touch and I say call me back versus driving them to either one or the other going through. So talk about this leading them back to email. Something that's subtle but it's very important.

Yeah, it's about using little tidbits of language that tie everything together. So really, essentially all of your steps should progress and compound on one another. Doing separate subject lines every single email is going to hurt you because guess what, to your earlier point, Katie, if I take a lot of time to really hyper personalize the first touch and let's just say my subsequent steps are not quite as heavily personalized as that, and I'm starting a new thread, I've now lost that. You can't go back and feel the story that I'm telling you. And so each email should kind of progressively get more into that. To me, that subject matter expertise realm that I was giving you in the beginning, which is like, hey, in talking with other leaders, here's what I'm hearing. If I can just be a sounding board even for you, or share some insights of what other sales leaders are experiencing, would that be worth a chat? You know, basically I'm trying to say and channel to you that I want to take the personalized route. I want to get your attention that way, generate your curiosity, turn you into an inbound lead. But if that doesn't happen, then I'm going to focus on the fact that, guess what, I know this industry. I know people like you, and I'm someone you should talk to. Right? So that's kind of the play that starts to progress through it. But everything funnels back to your strongest channel that you feel the most confident in. Right? I know there's cold calling shops that are really strong at cold calling. Guess what? They still need the triple threat. And the triple threat is calling emailing social. We're a really strong cold emailing shop. But both of my reps do make some cold calls. It's not our strongest thing, which is why we channel people back to email. Right. And we do social selling, too. Everything should be played to your strengths. But if you're not working all three channels, you're losing. You're losing. You're leaving opportunity on the table, hands down.

Just preach right now. You could say that for the next 30 minutes and it would still be valuable. Like, the solo channel mindset is just awful. Doesn't matter. There's a theme here, though, actually. This is one thing where I've preached it before, and it sounds like it's embedded in what you're saying. Messaging, Trump's channel. Right? If you're making bad cold calls, they're bad cold calls. If you're sending bad cold emails, they're bad cold emails. Bad social. Because people say like, oh, social doesn't work for me, or email doesn't work for me. Well, it's like, well, maybe they're just bad right now. There's kind of been a theme, though, right, of like, you know, getting to know that prospect and be able to speak to them, be a subject matter expert. Right? How do you go about that? Right? Because also it's very cool about your career is you have a lot of range. There's not a lot of like, oh, I only sell to this Persona. I only market to this Persona. You have range across industries. So, like, how do you get into the mindset of your new market? Right? Like, if I hired you tomorrow to come into patient pop, right now you're going after doctors. What would you do to get into the mindset of that prospect? Learn their language, learn the problems, their needs, the Personas. Walk me through how you do that, because then that's the foundation for everything else that's to come.

Yeah. There's three things I'll tell you. One is become friends with marketing because they will give you some really great industry information. Consume content, both company and outside of the company. What's going on. Look up physician news. You know, what's going on in the world of physicians. What, what are hot topic items? Like, if I'm just to throw an example here, if I'm reaching out to, let's just say, home building firms, right? I'm going to talk about the fact that material costs have skyrocketed recently because of the housing boom and all that stuff. But there's also an element, and the third piece is really important. Fake it till you make it. I mean, listen, you're going to have conversations with people, and let's just say that you take that subject matter expert play like, hey, I'm talking to other people in your shoes and I want to share insights with you. And you say, all right, Christine, cool, let's get on a call. And I don't know what the heck I'm doing. I. First of all, I'm going to research and prep the crap for that meeting, right? But I'm also going to be honest in saying, like, I'm going to have some key insights to share because I can get that from my marketing team. I can go and get that from consuming some outside content real fast. But I'm going to say, you know what, Kitty, tell me about, like, I've told you what I'm hearing from other people, but what are you experiencing? Flip it around and make it an informational interview without them knowing it's an informational interview. And you better be documenting or recording on chorus or gong or something so that you can go back and take that all in. But listen, you gotta fake it sometimes, but consume, consume, consume. Listen, read what's going on and don't be afraid to ask questions that you think are stupid.

That flip at the end there was beautiful, right? I mean, yeah, I'm talking to a lot of VPs right now. But, like, tell me what you're seeing it. It's beautiful, right? Like, and then you get to learn in that moment what matters to them. And the consume part. So my salespeople, I'm just gonna throw this out here. When she's saying consume, right? Like, it's not just consuming sales content, it's consuming what your prospect consumes. And that's where if I look at what's happening on LinkedIn right now in a big way, it's like salespeople are consuming a ton of sales content.

Yes.

They're sitting in on sales webinars, sales podcasts, sales posts, everything else, versus, you know, if you're targeting doctors or you're targeting Dentists, you're targeting VPs of finance. CIOs consume their content. What do they follow, what do they listen to? And that will help you level up so fast as well, Right? Like that doesn't happen enough. Doesn't. People don't dive into their prospects world.

No. And it's going to hit different when you follow up with that prospect who's a CIO and you say, hey, I was reading this finance, or I'm not, not finance, but I was reading this technology publication. I'm just throwing that out there. I don't even know the name of one off the top of my head, but that's what I'm reading. And you know, they put this article out and I think it's really relevant because of xyz. You're showing your opinion on it and you're sharing it with them in case it's relevant. That's going to hit much different than if you go, here's a case study which by the way, we shouldn't be.

Sharing.

But here's a case study that might be relevant. Like, no, that's your own content. It's going to be biased to them from the get go. You know, you've got to use something that they, they already have trust in.

I love that. It's so, it's so true. It's so true. They don't care about your case studies. Like, duh, right? I put case studies almost up with references for employment because like, hey, so Christina, could you give me some references? Yeah, let me give you three people that hated me. No, you're only going to give three people that loved you. It's just such a backwards process to me. And it is same with case studies. Like here, look at this person who's saying lots of good things about us. Yeah, don't you want to talk? Don't you want to talk now? So, okay, so we've. Geez, we've already been riffing for like 40 minutes already. Holy cow. Okay, so we're going to wrap, we're going to wrap this up. This is. So I have two final questions for you here. So the first one, right, we just call it the big three, right? We've kind of covered a lot here. If you wanted people to take three main takeaways from our conversation today around your growth marketing copy Personas, what would those three key takeaways be? You'd want people to have.

Ooh, personalize more. There's not really too much personalization.

I got to do a pause there real quick because there's going to be some haters that hear this right. And they said, personalization won't scale. You can't scale personalization that doesn't scale. Speak to them real quick about personalization not scaling.

Let me flip that around and let me ask you, would you rather send 350 emails today that are. They're pretty good copy, but it's more of a one to many approach. And maybe book just say, for the sake of this, we'll make it apples to apples. Seven meetings over the next two weeks off of that cadence. That's pretty good. That's a really. That's really good. That's all right. Or would you rather send 40 truly personalized, not personalization tokens, truly personalized emails and book seven meetings within the first 24 to 48 hours? Katie's shaking his head yes.

It's just.

You're gonna go with the personalized will. The biggest switch on this, and this was hard for me too, is going from sending a higher quantity of emails and being okay with like, oh, my gosh, I only sent 25 emails today. Oh, my goodness. You get past that. And as with anything, the more you do it, the faster you get. It used to take me 15, 20 minutes to personalize one email doing research on someone that I wanted to reach out to. Guess what? I created an order of prioritization for how to research. That's what most people are following, at least on my team, and it keeps you out of the rabbit hole. And now when I go in and personalize Katie, I could probably write you an email in less than five minutes because practice makes perfect. It's stupid to say that, but the quicker you do it, I mean, sorry, the more you do it, the quicker it becomes because you figure out what to abandon, where to cut corners, how to make something out of nothing, et cetera.

I just had to. I had to ask it because that's always a comeback. And I'm always like, y', all, okay, we seem to have forgotten this magical word called results. You're right. You can't scale to 300 personalized emails a day. You don't need to. It doesn't have to. The whole reason why we're talking about scaling things is because it's not working at the volume that you're sending. So you have to do more. Whereas getting that personalized 30 to 40 good touches a day, every day, week after. Oh, man, that scales way better than sending bad templated emails at 100 at a time. So anyway, back to your big three. I'm sorry, I just. Just had to jump on it because it's near and dear to my heart. So we got personalize more. What would your last two key takeaways be?

All right, so the second one is use value ads as bumps, not actually saying bump, which goes back to consuming your industry's content and what's relevant to your prospects and using that as a preface to bump. Let's see the third one. We didn't talk about this, but it's a big one for me. Please, for the love of God, do not think that it is going to produce good results if you reach out to every decision maker at the company at the same time. I've heard this before, Katie. People come back to me and say, well, but you know, that might create some internal buzz. Yeah, you think for the wrong reasons. People are going to be like, did you just get the same email from Christina? And guess what happens? You then get an unsubscribe at domain level and if that is one of your tier one accounts, try countering that to then build an opportunity to gain some trust and get a conversation going. Quality versus quantity. We have a less than 1% unsub rate across the entire team. Once you get that unsub, you then have to try to work past that. And that's the hardest objection of all when it comes to email. So quality versus quantity. Don't mass blast. We intentionally reach out to one prospect at a time from the account. Maybe it takes three months and five contacts from Walmart for you to land the meeting. Who cares? That's a big account. It's your tier one.

Right. It seems like everyone forgot like account based everything to be tailored and high touch, but it just turned into no, we're just going to mass blast the account based. No, research the account and do things right. So. Okay, last question I have for you here. Right. So the name of the podcast is Live better sell better. Right. I have this weird idea that, you know, if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more energy, if we had more joy in our lives, more fulfillment, that the sales, the marketing, the leadership also improves. Right. So what would your live better advice be to people to get more out of this thing that we call life.

Life. Ooh, that is deep. Because listen, I am a mom of three. I am hustling. I am out here hustling. Take breaks, drink lots of coffee. No, I am kidding. That is my own advice. No take breaks. You got to take breaks to refresh yourself. And especially now with the lines blurred. I have been working remotely for a few years now. I like to get out and take a midday walk. I like to clear my mind. I like to take walking one to ones versus let's be on zoom like every other call, I think just making sure you take your breaks. Take breaks, man. Honestly.

It'S important. It's so important, though. It's just being intentional with your breaks and stepping away, so. Holy cow, Christina, this was some fire. And I'm not just trying to play off of your fire outbound template style. I'm just saying this was really, really good. Where can people get more of you? Where can they follow you? Where can companies maybe reach out to you for some help? Like, where can they get more Christina in their lives?

Listen, LinkedIn's my hub. I've got everything on there. I have a course on the outbound fire framework. I have everything on there. I'm an open book. Just DM me.

I'm gonna have to go scoop up that course. I'm gonna do that in a heartbeat. So, Christina, thank you so much for your time, your energy, your insights, everything. So good, so valuable. Appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Thank you.