Make Emails A High ROI Activity Using A Healthy Domain with Jesse Ouellette

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 InsideSalesExcellence 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 host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd and today we are going to talk about quite literally what I believe is the silent killer across SaaS pipelines in the entire industry right now. There is something that is affecting every team, every individual, every scr, every ae, every marketing team out there that is trying to produce revenue and pipeline. But almost nobody is talking about it and even fewer people are doing anything about it. And that my friends, is deliverability. Are your emails even getting through to the people you are sending them to? You could be writing the best email in the world. They don't see it doesn't matter. You could be using video. They don't see it doesn't matter. All of this is starting to happen where domains are in a position that are preventing us from preventing, sorry, from producing pipeline. Which is why I'm so, so so excited to have on the show today. Good friend of mine, Jesse Willette, he is the founder founder over at Lead Magic, the founder at Revenue Academy, the founder at Agency source. He's in pavilion. He's a part of winning. This dude is everywhere. But he's the only one I believe on the market right now talking about deliverability and more importantly, what to do about it. So I'm so pumped to go into this day. Jesse, my man, welcome to the show.

Hey, thank you, Katie. Really excited to be here.

All right, so we're going to dive into this, man, because you are someone that I am still learning from in this space right around, like, how big of an issue this is and what it's causing. So let's start at the highest of high levels here of like, when it comes to deliverability, what are you seeing out there that is really making things harder than it needs to be?

Yeah. So there's a couple of things going on and, you know, I think we all know where anytime that you use technology to amplify, anytime you use that technology to amplify a process, what ends up happening is it can go really bad or really good. So if you take a good process and you amplify it, it's going to. It could get a lot worse, right? So, or a good one, it could get a lot better. But what's happening with deliverability is you're starting to see that every company has invested big time into sequencing, right? Which is a pretty normal tactic by a team of SDRs. And they kind of manage that inside little micro, little silos inside there. Right. Each SDR kind of has their own thing. But what's changed over the last 12 months is really the attack surface has really widened quite a bit, obviously with COVID and kind of remote work and the way that people work now, the remote everywhere, Right. So security professionals have taken a real precaution because if you think about email, it's the number one attack surface for any company right now. Right. Every company, no matter what you do, you have to take something that says, you'll never click on a link, you'll never open an email or do any action. Like they make you go through an aggressive training. And what's happening is a lot of the sales development emails are now landing in spam based on the way that they're doing it out of one domain because the reputation carries the, the reputation is carried at the DNS at the primary domain name level. So this is why that all of these companies that are kind of heavily invested in these cold email programs are now starting to see their drop off rates, open rates, reply rates, everything is just really going down the tubes. And, and you know, I Know why it's do I like I can look at it and see but it's, it's also a really bad problem that's happening right now.

Well, let's keep going. I mean, I agree this is a huge one. Like we can. And honestly, SaaS is just doing well then more. Well, if my open rates are down, just send more emails. If response rates are down, I should just send more emails, which then only makes the domain worse and all those things. And so what are some things? Let's again, we're just going to start high level. Then we're going to get super in the weeds of this. What would be some signs, what would be some signals that maybe my domain isn't the best? Because Jesse, I'm looking in outreach, I'm looking in sales loft. Like, my open rates look pretty good. Like how do I know what would be some early tell signs that I would want to be aware of?

Yeah. So a couple. The, one of the biggest ones right now is if you. And I'm seeing this on LinkedIn a lot is if you see an SDR that says, hey, I was just put in Google jail or something like that and I had to go get bailed out by my IT team. What that means is, typically what that means is there's that user got enough complaints, meaning the people that they were emailing, you know, there's a, there's a button and it's, it's, it's a dangerous one. Right. And everybody has the right to do it. It's called the report as spam button. And when that button gets hit, and this is why you've got to take a different approach to your cold emails now. You have always got to be thinking about how do you make it so that user, right. Doesn't click that button? Because if they click that button more than they, you know, a few times on your team and it, by the way, it doesn't matter, you bring in a brand new SDR and they're training on the job, that one SDR could take down the whole domain system at the company. And it's happening. I mean, I'm dealing, I'm getting calls from CEOs, CTOs. I mean, you should see the people that are calling me and they're like, Jesse, this is the most bizarre thing. How come nobody owns this in my company? And I go, I don't know, it's your company. So you know, but really what it's happening is you're seeing these, these spam filters are becoming a have to Be more aggressive. Right. They're fighting against people switching off email and going into Slack and everything. And remember, email is a protocol. It is not a web application or a kind of a social media algorithm controlled. It is an incredibly valuable asset if you learn how to use it right and you don't spam and you learn how to kind of run the right response marketing or you know, sales motion with it. And that's really what I want to kind of drill home to people is if you keep your domain healthy, if you do the right things, you follow the rules, you can make email an incredibly high ROI activity in your organization.

No, for sure. And it's something where it's just. Why aren't people talking about this? Like why, why is this still seeming to be like just, just black magic or like ah, whatever. Like it's no one's talking about. It's like why, why do you think that is?

Yeah. So I look at it from a few different angles. So there are some people that are very, that are very strong on this on the marketing side for E commerce marketing. Now that group kind of talks about it and you'll see that a lot of them will carry the title of like a mail delivery consultant and things like that. However, the tap. And I know that, I know the marketing deliverability side as well so I can kind of speak to it. But what, what B2C does is the, the, the, the marketing that they're doing is different because in B2B you have to actually use shared services, meaning you have to use Google Zoho Office. It has to look like a regular user on marketing. When you're sending broad marketing, you can send it. Your deliverability more depends on like the content, like how you script the HTML in the body of the email, things like that. And you're allowed to use those kind of. They call them ESPs, which are the enterprise mail systems like SendGrid, Amazon SES and Mailgun. Right. So those are that. But that's not the right model for B2B. B2B, you need to use these shared services.

And it's crazy because like no one owned this in B2B sales. Like I didn't have a mail delivery person on my team at my last any company. Right? Like no one owns this. There's not someone responsible for it. And especially in sales. Especially in sales. None of us were ever taught this stuff. Like most sales leaders got to where they were because they were good sales people, not great tech people, not great systems people. And the tech is changing the Landscape is changing right now. And it is, it's scary. Like, that's what's been so fun to kind of learn this stuff from you is like, I was aware of it, I didn't understand it and I didn't understand like, how big of an impact this was having.

Yeah. Let me tell you one other thing that really impacts it. It's one of those, if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to see it or hear it, like, does it make a sound? Right. So what I mean by that is when you send the email, you legitimately really have no idea if the person actually opened it. And I'm going to kind of elaborate on that because you could say, well, open rate. But even open rates now are compromised. Right. So anybody who's on an Apple device, and by the way, I just upgraded the new iOS and they're, they're pushing it on you now. Right. So they want you to install the relay server, which is the private relay that blocks the pixel. And what it does is it automatically opens your email. So your email open rates are probably going up. If they're going down, that's pretty bad because you should be going up because Apple's giving you. Every one of their users are opening your email, but it's not a real click.

Right? Okay. Yeah, because that was, that was one that you, you'd broken down for me. I was like, well, like, my open rates are fine. Yeah, they should be. If anything should be going up because they're. The email clients are opening the emails and putting them on their own server, which then would count as an open to go. To go through all this. And so let's keep coming down this path. So then what are some things that I should be doing to prevent my domain from getting dinged? And then we'll talk about what to do if you have a bad domain. But like, so what are some things I should be doing? Right? So I have a team, I got people doing emailing. What are some things I should be doing to make sure my domain isn't ending up in a bad place?

You need to put somebody in your IT department to talk through the. They need to monitor the complaints that are coming in. So what needs to happen is the sales leadership team, the revenue leadership team, if the market, if they're under marketing or sales, whatever, they need to be aware of the people that are complaining. And by the way, you get a report of people writing a complaint, it's in the post master, it's in the, you know, you can also use something called DMARC monitoring. Your IT team can, can set this up. The problem is, is I haven't found a single SaaS company where the leadership of the sales or marketing organizations actually are talking to the IT teams. So there's a huge problem with cross functional. You know, it just does not seem to be working with revenue. And then the other problem is a lot of the settings. And by the way, I was working at series C and D E companies with a built almost a billion dollars in funding and they didn't have their records set up. Right. So like I, I look at it, there's a couple of settings that when you set up Google, right, you're, you're a founder, you're excited, you register your domain and you set up G suite. There's three or four settings you have to do that really impact the deliverability. Now those are becoming more of an impact now because what they do is they look at it from a health perspective. If you're somebody who's doing all the right things, you're in a low risk category. It's sort of like a life insurance plan, right? Like, you know they're going to say like, hey, if you're this age, you're healthy, you're not smoking, you know they're going to say you're a good person to send an email from. Now it's the flip side, if you have all these settings off, you're using the basic settings that looks like any hacker or attack vector, you know, anybody who's attacking their company or sending images. But a lot of the people are just sending these sign, these big broad signatures. Now we just recommend getting things simple. We're actually, we've actually gone even more extreme. We're going now to 100% plain text. Right?

Okay.

So that's a big change. And what I mean by that is you actually have to double check because most people aren't, they think they're doing plain text, but they're not. So we're talking, there's another level where you can actually make it plain text, where you can't even put the. If you're tracking opens, you're not doing plain text right now because the open pixel itself takes, it actually has an image in it. Right. So that's why it wouldn't be, you can't use open tracking with plain text. Interesting.

So, okay, I need to dig on that one because one of the things that I really focused on with emails for a long time was helping prioritize the calls based off Email engagement. Right. Who's opening, who's clicking? So I can't track that any anymore. Are there ways to do that still?

Yeah, so there's a, there's a huge problem with. There'll be a huge cause and correlation right now if you're doing that open strategy. So I've actually found. So most of the sales engagement platforms, I think, I don't think any of them actually have this feature now. What, the feature that you would need to be able to do the real tracking. First of all, if anybody has this Apple setting on called itp, it's their privacy setting. If they've turned that on, what that means is it actually means that they're gonna fake open those emails. So you're not even going to like their private. There's going to be a relay, it's a proxy, it's a bot. It just clicks on the image and opens it and then it says you got an open now HubSpot and send Grid. Some of the like real big email delivery people have already built adjusted open rates, right? But this, there's a lot of engineering that goes into that and the sales engagement platforms don't have that. So it's very tough to trust an open tracker. Now if you, if you're, if you're a sales leader right now, you know, it's good to kind of get like a, like a little bit of a. Basically you just have to, you're going to have to ignore all this Apple traffic, right? And that's the way that they build this solution. So if you look at HubSpot right now, it'll say like, you have this open rate on this and then you have an adjusted open rate. Now that's where it gets really weird because the adjusted open rate is basically taking out any person who has an iPhone or you know, that's on this privacy thing, which is an increasing number. Right. So that's where it gets really weird is that you're not going to be able to trust those open rates the same way that you could, you know, before Katie.

Yeah, no, I mean that's, that's what's scary, right? Is like, all right, it just keeps getting harder and harder and harder to do and to do the right way. And so it's kind of keep going here.

So. All right.

I mean, I was, I was talking with a company, gosh, this was about a month or so ago, I diving into their sequences and they had a less than 1% response rate on their emails and like a 14 or 15% open rate. I was like, y', all, like, something's busted on the back end. Like, there's. There's not a solution to this. That's just like, oh, improve our subject lines. Like, something's busted. And this company had been sending all the emails, all the emails from the same domain for the last eight years, including all their marketing emails, all their nurture emails, all their prospect everything, Right. And so how are there tools out there for me to, like, find out, like, where my domain's at or, like, are there ways for me to kind of like, test this? How do I. How do I find out out?

Yeah. So what you want to do is there's a couple of things you can do to kind of look at this problem. The first thing you do is you can do a basic check to make sure you have the basic health hygiene, you know, like you're on the right track. That would be like using something like a mail genius, where you'd send an email and it would tell you which settings you might have off. Right now that's a basic setting. I always start there and I'm like, go fix that. That's the most basic, easiest thing you can do. It'll tell you if you have, you know, dkim, dmarc or SPF off. And if you do, you got to get that fixed, right? It can fix it in about 15 minutes if you can get them motivated to fix it. The next. The next thing you got to do is something called a seed test, which you can look at something like a Glock apps or, you know, there's other ones out there that you can get. And what this is, is these companies have basically set up inboxes at all of the major providers and they've put them into the spam. They're putting the spam filters on like you would send to a customer. Now for B2B emails you want to be tracking, obviously you're going to be emailing mostly people on Microsoft Office 365 and G Suite. And you want to basically see how your email looks when you email somebody on one of those services. Because, remember, you're never going to be able to tell if you're cold emailing people. You're not going to know if it's getting into their inbox, because if you don't get a response, you don't know if it made it right. Like, that's the problem with this whole thing. But the seed testing is where a lot of people aren't doing this. And what seed testing will do is it'll Help you with that problem around content. Now, I've seen some very interesting things with the content strategy. So one of the things that I've seen come up a lot is people will have. You know how you have. I don't know, Katie, you probably remember, but you go to a new company, they have a signature. You pull it out of a Google Doc and then you copy and paste it into your sales. Your template, right? Well, what happens there is that link sometimes gets reverted back to a different link, a tracking link. And then that link ends up causing. I've actually been at companies and seen companies that have actually completely got their email blocked because their marketing team or HR team had every sales rep put their signature on their email signature. And that link was the, was the tox, the toxin. And I've had this, this has been actually more than probably about 10 times after helping people fix this problem. But point is, is that you gotta get those seed tests done. You gotta do that. Then the last step is probably that constant monitoring with your IT department, or they call it DMARC monitoring. And you want to be looking at the postmaster in your, your G suite. And look, it's got to give you this data. You know, sales leaders, marketing, like, you got to get this information out of them and you got to work with them to make sure that they can report on it. Because this is a serious problem if you're doing it from the primary domain.

Yeah, no, I mean it's so important throughout all this because if you don't do this stuff, right, like you don't know what's broken, right? Like you just don't know what's broken. You think it's the copy, you think it's the STR right now being punished because they have a bad domain. And it's like, what do you want me to do? Like, I can't, I can't get into the inbox very hard.

It's a very. And this is why, like, I know everyone's like, hey, you know, service people have it easy these days. This, this, you know, they've got all this technology. They can find everybody's phone number. Well, can. But they can't get any of the information to the people because they're not. There's no way to get. You know, that's why it is just as hard, right?

Like this is hard and it's, and it's moving into areas that sales people are not good at. That's why I think this is such a huge. Is messaging, perseverance, grit, like things that Sales people are good at that's great, but it doesn't solve this. And if you don't solve this, none of those other things matter.

The science comes down. And, and Katie, let me just tell you one other thing too. That, that's kind of, you know, the elephant in the room. So to, if you're thinking about a predictive model, right, like building a model and like figuring out like guessing is this spam or not, right? If you're like a computer, you're building an AI model and you're deciding if it's spam when you're looking for if something spam or not. Like, you know, here's a couple of things, right? Cold emails get really, really low response rates, right? They're in that 3% area if you're good, 3 to 5% if you're good. You know, maybe a little more if you're better. But you're in that area. And you know, cold email wasn't, isn't gonna model very well as you're looking at it from a spam filter perspective. Because they're gonna see high complaints, right? Because your SDR team's probably going to break up email or do whatever, you know, you're going to piss off your customer, you know, the prospect and you know, try to get the meeting right. They're trying to provoke them. It's a good, it's, you know, they're doing it for good, good reason, but it's also a little bit annoying. But the biggest part of this is if you don't think about the model, right, of what your domain looks like. Behavior. Right, behavior. That's how these models work. How many emails in and how many emails out and how many responses. This is where you start to realize, oh, I'm going to need a little bit of help here. And what I mean by that is that's why everybody's talking about something called email warmup. And this is where everyone's like, I don't even understand what this is. And nobody. And you know, people can't really explain it. I mean, you know, but that's what the email warm ups systems are for. It's to get these artificial responses through these warm up networks and then it brings your behavior, your behavior looks a little more normal because it's like, think about it. If you look at your company behavior, you have a group of 10 people, five people. If you have five or 10 SDRs and they're sending thousands of emails and they're getting 0.01, you just, we just mentioned it 0.01% response. Yet you have your finance team or your HR team emailing with vendors and they're getting a 30 or 40% response rate. So what you have to do is you have to know what that mail flow looks like to fix the problem. And what I really recommend you do is first of all, don't put your business at risk. Put this on a separate domain while you're figuring it out, because it does not make sense to go and smash your domain. And I even posted about this again today. But don't ruin your company's domain name because it will just. I mean, your CEO will be doing a fundraising.

The emails won't be able to go through and see. And now you're starting to touch on, you know, there's the two sizes of. Just like the U.N. i guess, unexpected consequences of this. It's not just the pipeline generation. This could affect your ability to fundraise. This could affect your ability to land candidates. This can affect your ability, right, to hire people. Right. I got spam from my own employee one time where like they got sent to my spam box like, what are you doing?

Like, how.

What are you doing outside of my stuff? That would cause. You can't even email me internally, right? And making sure that they're aware of these things. Because it's like you've been talking about this a lot is like, you know, cold email, it's gonna win the election, right? Whoever can get into the inbox. It's the truth though, right? Because if you're not in there, you're just not seen.

There's so many more use cases. This is the thing, the sad part is there are so many more use cases for cold email. If you can do it at scale, you think about like, you could mobilize events, you could mobilize. You could mobilize a lot of things. And remember, you're perfectly legal to email people B2B. You know, if you, if you email B2B buyers, as long as they could be a relevant fit for your product, legitimate interest and you know, you got the data through a way that wasn't, you know, that was not in a. I mean, this is. You actually need it to not come from a database, which is, you know, for GDPR anyways, but for the US that's not as big of a deal.

But.

But what you really need to do is think about all the other use cases that cold email could be used for. And then what you need to do is build a team around this where you have Some excellence here. And you, you know, you might need to bring in the right resources. There are some people out there that know this stuff pretty well. You know, you can always reach out to me. But obviously this is, it's, it's a problem that you definitely need to invest in and you need to look at. Send your ops team to some, to, to some of my stuff that they have. Send your SDR team if they're interested. I mean, I think there's some transition roles that are going to come out of this, you know, mass layoff kind of stuff that's happening. I think there's going to be some STRs who could possibly slide into an ops role that could be really, actually pretty impactful for the company because they understand everything. But, you know, hopefully that kind of gives you a little bit of an overview for the, for the warm up and just the size of the problem.

Yeah, no, it's, it's so like this is a different tool sets, different skill set as, as well to go through. And so then let's walk back then on the flip side. All right, Jesse, My domain is garbage. Like, I know, like, it's. We've been doing things a certain way for a certain period of time. Da, da, da. Like what, what should we do now if it is already destroyed?

Like, is that it?

Like that? Shut up shop. Like, what do I do now to try to fix this? Or do I have to like, just get a brand new domain?

You could, you could pretty much fix any, any, any domain in about three weeks. So you have to stop the behavior that's causing it. Right? Obviously. So what's causing it most likely is. I'll tell you what you got to look at first. First thing, you got to go look at the most painful thing for you right now. For any sales leader or marketing leader, what's killing you the most is that CTA that you have with your SDR team, whatever that CTA is, if that thing is causing friction. And this is where, I mean, like, everyone's like talking about these like breakup emails, right? And I kind of pronounced them dead at the last, a couple weeks ago. But I was like, it's only because you can't really cause that kind of friction on email anymore because that person's going to be spiteful possibly, and they're going to hit that report spam button. Right? The education is getting out there and the UIs are being crafted so they can actually, hey, is this spam? Do you want to report this? Like, they're actually kind of into that, yes.

Like, I remember. God, this is so funny. This is now like a year and a half ago. I remember I posted it to LinkedIn of, like, Gmail suggesting responses like it was suggesting, no, I'm not interested at this time. I was like, oh, my God, like, how much harder did this get? Where. Now Gmail reads it and goes, you probably aren't interested in this. Let me just auto fill this for you. And all you have to do is click a button that says not interested. I was like, jesus. Like, that just got real.

Another one that's actually happening, too. This is another weird one that actually a lot of people aren't really. What's getting you another one is like not being in the spam folder, but being in the promo folder or the social media folder or whatever, kind of like other tabs. So one of the things that's getting them there is. And this is. And this will go against some conventional wisdom, but, I mean, I know the rules of it too. You know how you've always been programmed, hey, I have to put a link in the email to get them to unsubscribe, right? Well, that is not the best solution. What you really want to be doing is you. So first of all, you have to make it easy to unsubscribe. So don't think I'm getting you off the hook there. Right. You're still gonna have to do that. You have to put a. You have to put something to get them out of it.

Right.

Remember, you want these not to be automated emails. You don't. This is not a marketing email. This is not an automated newsletter or a, you know, promo to a webinar. This is a person emailing another person with legitimate interest, and that's why you're able to continue to do it. So what you want to do is you want to put a. P.S. if you don't want to hear from me anymore, because the word unsubscribe, most people have put a rule in their inbox that if the word unsubscribe is in. Is in the email, it's going to go into the promo folder. So there's another level where I'm seeing people get into that folder all the time. So you really, you know, and it might be a little bit of a fight internally because you'll have your lawyers thinking that maybe that's the way to do. They just. They might not know the look, they'll take extra precaution because they don't have a quota like you do, but. Right, but you Know they want to protect the company, which is in the best interest. But anyways, the point is, is you want to have unsubscribe. You want to get rid of the word unsubscribe because that's going to get you into the promo folder every time. And then you want to make sure you say, hey, if you want to you. But you want to make it super easy to get out of that sequence. And don't try to overcome objections. If they want out of that sequence, they're out. Right. Like don't. And, and make sure your company respects the, the rules of cold email, which is people opt out, they don't want to be emailed again, don't email them. I mean, you can call them, but you can't email them. Right. Like stop.

So this, this is a good one because I know this one gets fuzzy.

In a lot of companies.

So someone responds back and says not interested. Does that mean I can't email the game? Or does that just then go into like a nurture campaign, which is a whole nother.

Yeah.

That you can't do. You can't take someone, you're going outbound. They say not interested, then put them into an automated nurture campaign all the time right now. But like, so someone says not interested, does that mean I can't contact them again later? Or do I have. What words do they have to use that says you're not allowed to email me anymore?

So there's some schools of thought to say to put in there to say like respond back with whatever, you know, like, like, like list or like make them respond back with something. You could do that. However, where I think that is interesting is if you want look if it's the exact right prospect. So they aren't asking to be off the. The list probably, but I think you kind of know they don't. They're not interested there right on that channel, that, that area, that medium. You probably should just say that's a, that's an unsubscribe. Some people might disagree with me there, but I think that's probably one you don't want to do. And, and here's the thing. If you're doing this well and you're doing it right, I can't tell you how many not interesteds I get in when I'm doing a campaign with somebody. There's too many of them that you would spend your entire day doing that and it would just be like you, you're like, it's too hot. The fruit would. If you do this, right. What I can tell you is if you do cold email, right, you're going to change your game and those not interested, you're not going to be so interested because there's going to be much lower hanging fruit and, and you know you're gonna, you're gonna really carve up a pretty efficient go to market. And by the way, I think this is definitely one of the most efficient ways for an earlier stage company to really find their product market fit. And there's amazing testing going on that you cannot get through ads through SEO any other way. You can't get this by then causing a little bit of direct response friction. Unlike look, you take somebody's time, they can be upset with you. Right. Like with asynchronous. Right. So that's another thing is like cold email, as much as people say they hate spam or whatever, I, I think if you surveyed everybody they'd probably say well it doesn't take any of my time to respond and I don't have to respond. Yeah. So that's why I think there's a, A, a tremendous amount of value for a startup to really figure out how to do this right and not ruin the domain and you know, scale it without having a hundred SDRs running the program because that's not what it requires anymore for this program. It's more of a team model and it's more of a. Probably one you want to have more of your senior leadership like marketing senior leaders and sales senior leaders. And this is maybe where I disagree with some of the people, but it's kind of a team. The email part of is more of a team sport.

I mean it should be right. And like where I've always gone through is like the only reason you have a team is if you have complementing skills.

Right.

And so I always love to hear like should marketing own emails or sales own emails? Like who's better at it? That's it. Who's better at it? At some companies it might be marketing. At some companies that might be sales. I wrote all of our sales emails, all of them. I reviewed marketing's emails that were going out. I was funny enough even on page about I was the voiceover for our like product videos on the website. Like copy is what I do. Right. But then there's other places where okay, marketing just needs to own that the skill set. Right. But around because this is when you and I have talked about this too because like and I plan on doing this of like building this out from the get go in a way that allows you to scale without needing 10 SDRs. Like, because if you're not personalizing and all you're using is like customization, Persona based language, you don't need a bunch of SDRs. You can automate the lead scrubbing to then automate the CRM, to then automate the emails.

Right.

And to have those things in place, like you can do all those things. So talk to me a little bit about kind of how to build this system in before we wrap.

Yeah, so what, what works today is you got to do. There's a couple of kind of things that I say. First of all, you got to have all of your settings right on your, your DNS. You're going to do the male genius stuff. You're going to do that. The next thing you want to do is listen, trust me on this. I am doing so much testing. Get rid of everything in your email that is in plain text. Just go down to plain text maybe in the initial days you want. So it is taking the training wheels off if you go to plain text because remember, you can't actually get open open tracking on. So I'm saying go there right away. But what you need to do is a three week email warmup. There's some tools out there. I'm not going to name any of the tools, but there's, there's a lot. Just go talk to the vendors and find out why they're unique. And if you really, what you need is a partnership with somebody. Right? So the point is, is that you, you gotta be doing that email warmup and you really need to make sure that you're doing it for three weeks on a different domain. So what you want to do first is protect your. Isolate your main company domain. Make a commitment internally that nobody is ever going to start cold emailing out of it again. Okay? Make that rule and put that in writing. And if you're a founder, if you're CEO, CEO, whatever, do that today and just save the day because you're going to save the day. Then when you're building out this other system, it's going to take a little bit of time. Okay? And that's the problem. Salespeople don't always have time and they don't have the, you know, this is a little bit of a problem. But start now, start warming up some domains and start figuring out how to write copy that doesn't get you kind of complaints and copy that will drive revenue for your company and business. You know, there. So you want to do that. You're going to probably need your best people coupled with some people who have maybe been, you know, learning how to write, do copywriting. You have that and then I think what, what else? The other part of it is, is you have your, you have your email warm up going on, you have all of that. Then when you send, you want to keep your, your limits to about 50, 40 to 50 a day per domain. Now this is a surprising number to most people because they're like, well, wait a second, we're sending thousands out today. Yeah, but if you do the math and you're getting a 20% open rate, but there's only 5% that are actually seeing it. What if you got 10x that but you sent less and you knew they were going to get in there. What's happening is you're, it's diminishing returns. So you're actually just diminishing what you were getting before and you're putting up the blockers. And the other part of it is it's actually steered more towards any company that you probably want to break in with money. A lot of the companies with more money actually have tighter email security. So this is kind of a, you know, trend that's happening or, you know, more money or they're more tied to the technology of like, you know, attack surface. But really what you want to do is, is continually keep the health of the domain. You want to work with your IT partners, you also want to work with your marketing partners. Marketing teams have a lot more experience with this, with their, with their own kind of marketing systems, their marketing automation. They're pretty familiar with this. However, the one thing I would say is do not try to use. What I have seen marketing teams do is they'll try to get their team to use like a specialized IP and everything. Don't do that because you're going to get burned even faster. So put it off on a side domain. It's more of a growth project because what you're doing now is you're really just doing reputation damage to your company. And it's not even in the form of the emails being toxic. It's in the form of your mail delivery being ruined for other people in the company. The only companies that aren't really as susceptible to this are the ones with that just have like ma. Like I'm talking, you know, there might be like a massive it, like if you were Uber, right? If you were a salesperson at Uber, you probably aren't going to have to worry about this as much because your IT team already knows what's going on in your email. Right. Like certain companies have such a focus on security and IT operations that they don't have as much to worry about. However, those companies are going to have you shut off faster, quicker. They have those limits in place. It's. Except what's not going to happen is you're not going to have to deal with the complaints being as much of a problem. Because if you think about the amount of mail volume that's going out of an Uber or some of these other bigger, bigger, large organizations, it's just going to be hard to really, I mean they're sending so many emails, positive emails that you know. But the companies I really am afraid of is the companies who are growing fast. Series C, series D, unicorn status 20 SDR, sending out of the primary domain name, getting blocked complaints all day long. That is just not going to make it.

Yeah, and it's funny because I think it's happening. You see these companies that like, you know, got to their A, you know, buy, you know, a lot of spray impact, just as much touch points as they can. They get to that A, they raise the A, then they throw more people on that fire and they wonder why results start to come down. They might trip into their B. And now it's like, okay, now you're hiring 30, 40 reps on top of a domain of garbage and you can't figure out what's going wrong. This is why in the intro like calling it this silent killer because people.

Like it is, it's carbon monoxide, man. You, you nailed it. That was a just, it's just right in your, it's in your go to market. By the way, look how much money you're spending on this program too. Think about the data contract, think about the people, the training, the copy, all of the things that you're doing around that, that email marketing, you know, sales, whatever there. Think about that whole program and really think about the metrics. Because if there's a cfo, COO listening to this, you know, there might be opportunity to move that group to a much more effective, productive task right now. Right, because that's not gonna make it right.

It's just not. And I hope people listening, like understand the seriousness of this and like you gotta put somebody on this. This is not something that you like, just like yo, like, oh, all right, fine. I just signed up for a warm up tool. Like you have to monitor it, you have to stay on top of it over time because things continue to change. And so now I knew this one was gonna be tough to keep to 30, 40 minutes here. But I do want to wrap with, like, my last two questions here, right. When the first one, right. Is the name of this podcast is Live Better, Sell Better. Because I also have this weird idea, right, that if we took better care of ourselves, if we had more joy, more energy, more fulfillment in life, that the sales would also get better. What would your live better advice be for people listening?

Well, I think if you're going to, if you're in sales and you're going to continue to do sales to live better, you're going to want to be able to get responses from your buyers or potential buyers, right? So just relative to the. What we're talking about today is, you know, landing in the primary inbox. Like, if you're sitting there doing this and you're just going through the motions and you're just, you're just sending a bunch of emails or, you know, whatever you're doing, right. I think it's not very fulfilling to send a bunch of emails to a spam folder, right. If that's your job today, you know, reevaluate things, right? There are organizations that are starting to try to get this right, or maybe you go into ops. I mean, what happened to me is I saw no companies were able to fix this problem internally. So that's why I built my own company. And, you know, that, that's, you know, for me, that's been live better, right? Like, I've just really done that. And, you know, I have a priority, right? Like, if I'm going to do sales, I want to get a response from, from, from the prospect at a reasonable rate. Do I do something over and over and expect a different result?

Yeah, no, it's so true. Like, it's just that's, it's. We got people that we, we lose from sales that were good people that were just never able or put into a system. Right situation to succeed. And they wonder, then they think sales isn't right for them when really it's like, no, like, you just weren't in the right system. You weren't in the right process to actually get the results that you were looking for. So, Jesse, my man, where, where can people find more of you? Where are you putting out content? Where are you continuing to teach people about this? Like, where can people get more of this? Because I think it's so important.

Yeah. So I've got a bunch of links to my. If you go to my LinkedIn profile, just. Jesse Willette, you can go in there. And you can look at my links in there. I have a lot of videos that I put out about this. I describe the problem in. Great. I also talk about some of the metrics I am releasing a course on just because I really needed something to kind of point people to. That wasn't always me getting on a call with some people. But what I've done is I've released a course that's going to talk about how to keep your domain kind of healthy and that and then how to build also growth systems around this. I mean, this truly can be your number one ROI program in your company. For us, it is. We've scaled, you know, fast with lead magic with this process. And really it's been nothing else other than personal brand and kind of that. And it's kept me as a bootstrap SaaS startup, profitable. So that's, you know, enough to be said there. Just from that perspective, it works.

I love it.

My man.

And like I said at the very beginning, like, I keep learning from you. I am seeing the future of this and excited to leverage it on my own and also for future teams that I'm working with. Jesse, y' all is who I point people to around this stuff because, like, I'm not gonna pretend to even understand this at half the level that he does. Funny enough, he and I have had these calls and I'm like, yo, Jesse, Jesse, pull it back, man. I have no idea what you just said over the last five. Bring it back to like, KD level here.

But taking you've. You've taken, like, I've been on some calls with you and some people. I already can tell when people get a little fatigued when they're kind of talking through this with me. And, man, you've gone to the next level, man. And I think, you know, plus with your blend of like, obviously with copy and all of your, you know, great kind of, you know, experience managing and leading awesome sales development teams. I mean, you know, I think, you know, you're selling yourself short. You're. We're way ahead of everybody else and that.

And it's exciting. You and I talked about this, like, when I. When I build again. This is a competitive differentiator.

Totally.

I know 99% of sales leaders don't know or understand this. This is a differentiator. If I understand this better, I will win. And so it's finding these things to go around and through it. So I appreciate you, man. Thank you so much for this. I'm gonna continue learning from you. In all this, but this was a phenomenal, man. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate your time. Thank you.