MBA1350 Q&A Wednesday: How do you deal with cold email pitches?

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Today's question is from Jim and Jim asks how do you deal with cold email pitches if you've been in business for a bit, if you have a thriving blog or a podcast or show or just a damn good product people love, you're gonna get cold pitches left and right in your inbox. Whether it's investors, whether it's people who wanna guest post, whether it's people that wanna be a guest on your podcast, whether they wanna have a coffee with you when they're in town, I I can go on and on, but the point is is that there are people that are hitting your inbox that want your time. You don't know who they are. You haven't seen them before or heard them before, and they're reaching out to you because they want your time, whatever it is. Even if they're going to guest post, for example, on your blog, it requires your time to respond to that, to say yes to that, to read the post, all that kind of stuff, right? And if you, if you're a listener of the show, you know that I say that your time is your greatest asset. You have to covet your time. And cold email pitches, as flattering as it is, is basically a bunch of people vying for your time. How do you deal with it? How do you do it? So you are professional and not rude, and you're polite and friendly and helpful. All the things we want to do, all the things we want to be. How do you manage all these emails are hitting your inbox. I'll tell you what not to do, what I used to do at the start, and how to handle this once and for all. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Jim asks, how do you deal with cold email pitches? Now, these are people you've never heard of, people that you haven't built a relationship with. You haven't met them at a conference. They're not a friend, they're just pitching you. They got your email somehow through the interwebs on something they want. Okay, that's the bottom. They want something. That's why they're emailing you. They want a guest post, they want to invest, they want to be a partner, they want to be an affiliate. Now, the problem with cold emails is that there's a lot of reading to do, there's a lot of filtering to do, there's a lot of decision making to do. And at the start, I used to read every single email. I used to reply personally. I used to go back and forth. It's not the first reply as a problem. It's the constant replying back in that thread, even when you politely say, I'm sorry, not right now, it's not a good fit. They'll go back and insist and it's just back and forth. And I would continue to reply, which will fuel that conversation again. And it was endless. And I was wasting so much of my day dealing with cold emails because I wanted to be a good person and I wanted to be polite and I thought this was the only way. I'm here to tell you it's not the only way. And if you want to solve this once and for all, this is what you have to do. You have to hire out for it. And it's not that hard. You actually need to just hire an executive assistant, even a part time one. Somebody who's gonna spend 10, 20 hours a week on this task and maybe some others that you want to get off your plate. And depending on where you hire them from, it can cost you as low as 400 to 800 to $1,000 a month. So, so worth it. Now, even if you hire part time just to take care of this, this will be a game changer for you. You're going to gain back so much time. Find out how much your time is worth. If you're going to hire somebody part time for $400 a month and you're spending 10 hours a week on cold emails, is your time worth more than $10 an hour? I sure hope so. So then make the investment. Now, what is this executive assistant? What is this virtual assistant going to do? Well, they're going to create a standard operating procedure for each type of email, each type of cold outreach. If they're trying to be a guest on your show, your podcast, then they're going to have a procedure for that. They're going to create one for you. They're going to create a form that this person would have to fill in order to even qualify to be on the show. That alone is going to weed out a whole bunch of people. Number two, and if you want an example of that form, check out 100mba.net applytoteach. That's our form for guest teachers. And you could see what we require. Now, hiring out for this is going to save you a lot of headaches. One, because you're going to get somebody who's going to document procedures for everything. Somebody's reaching out to guest posts, somebody who's reaching out for your time for a coffee, investors, whatever it is, they're going to create the procedure and they're going to do it for you. They're going to reach out and say, hey, I'm so and so. I am Omar's assistant. If you're interested in guest posting, the first step is to fill out this form. This gives us an idea if we can accept your guest post or not. Or if you don't accept guest posts, they can just say, hey, I'm Omar's assistant. At this time, we're not accepting guest posts. Thanks for your interest. And you don't even touch it. Now what does this mean? This means you have to give access to, to your inbox to your assistant. If you don't want to give them personal access to your personal inbox. That's totally fine. You can create a different inbox and make sure all inquiries get sent to there. Meaning that where you have your contact link at the bottom of your website, that that links up to the email you're giving the assistant. Worst case scenario, if things get mixed up, you can always forward the email to that inbox that they have access to, whether it's contactourbusiness.com or supportourbusiness.com the point here is you should not be wasting time with this. You need to do what brings in the revenue for your business. This is what Dan Martell calls $10 tasks. We just broke it down. It's worth $10 an hour, right? It's $10 tasks. You should be working on a thousand, $10,000 tasks. The things that bring in the big bucks, hiring the right people so that they can improve your product and improve your marketing and all that kind of stuff. So hiring out is the best solution to dealing with cold emails. Let them filter it out and then if the person that's reaching out has something of value that is in aligned with your values, what you need, your assistant can filter that out for you, present it to you, hey, we have three people, they're offering this. They can give you a nice summary on a call, nice and easy. And you can say, yeah, I'm happy to speak to that person for 10 minutes on a video call that's worth 10 minutes of my time. That person, no, just get back to him politely and say, not at this moment. So much simpler, so much easier. And you could focus on making your business better and not these admin tasks. I wish I can give you some sort of tool or automation or some sort of software that could take care of this, but this is the best way to deal with this professionally and personally with an assistant. It's going to cost you nothing in compared to what you're going to save in time and effort and headaches. Don't do what I did at the start where I answered every single email myself because I thought I had to. No, you don't. Your assistant, anybody on your team is an extension of you. They are getting somebody who is going to handle their inquiry. You're not ignoring them. And if they're a good fit, you will speak to them.

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As your business grows, as you grow in popularity, the more and more you're going to get cold emails. You need somebody to help you. You need to reclaim your time. You need to be covetous of your time. Cold emails will rob you of that. So make sure you have somebody in place and listen. Trial somebody for two weeks. You don't have to commit to them for life. If they're good and they handle your cold emails in two weeks, you know that they're good in the long run. If they don't fit your needs, no problem, hire somebody else. Sometimes we get burnt with a hire that we say, oh, you know, I tried hiring assistant doesn't work for me again, like our coach Dan Martell says, just because you had a car accident doesn't mean you stop driving, right? You got to get back into it and try. It was just a bad experience, a bad match. Keep trying. If you value your time, you will hire out for this. If you say, hey, I can't afford the $400 a month right now, think about how many hours you're spending on this right now and ask yourself, can I make $400 a month if I had that extra time? If the answer is yes, this is a no brainer. Thank you so much for listening to the hundred dollar NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe right now so you don't miss a beat. When we have a new episode, it gets published automatically right into your feed and is ready for you to listen to. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. We all want to feel what we're being professional and we're being personal with the people that reach out to us. We feel honored that people want to work with us and that's a great feeling. But in order for you to serve your customers, serve the people that matter the most to your business, you gotta be covetous of your time. You gotta make sure that you use your time wisely and you hire somebody that's caring and really will do a better job than you can with replying to these emails. They are representative of you and of course if they're a good match, you can spend some time speaking to them. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Is it time to reimagine your future? The right business skills may make a difference in your career. At Capella University, we offer a relevant education that's designed to focus on what you need to know in the business world. We'll teach professional skills to help you pursue your goals like business management, strategic planning, and effective communication. And you can apply these skills right away. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Eduardo.