After mastering warm outreach, it's time to delve into cold outreach.

This involves reaching out to strangers to inform them about your products or services.

We'll explore how it works, methods of contact, recommended benchmarks, and the importance of this strategy.

Cold outreach builds upon the principles of warm outreach, making it an advanced technique best suited for those already comfortable with initial outreach efforts.

Understanding Cold Outreach

Cold outreach targets individuals who don't know you.

This involves contacting them one-on-one through various channels like email, phone calls, direct messages, or SMS.

The primary challenge is overcoming the lack of trust from strangers.

They don't know you, so you must quickly establish credibility to engage them effectively.

Key Challenges

Cold outreach presents three main challenges:

  1. Finding Contact Information: Unlike warm contacts, you don't have their information.
  2. Gaining Their Attention: Strangers are more likely to ignore you.
  3. Generating Interest: Even if they pay attention, they might not be interested in your offer.

Building a List

There are three primary ways to build a list for cold outreach:

  1. Scrape: Use lead scraping software (Apollo, ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Nav) to collect contact information.
  2. Buy: Purchase lists from brokers who sell contact information.
  3. Manual Effort: Join relevant groups and manually collect contact details.

Scraping Software: Start with lead scraping tools. Subscribe to multiple software solutions, test them with a representative sample, and if they provide quality leads, invest in them further.

Brokers: List brokers buy and sell contact information. Test sample lists from brokers and proceed with the ones that provide good results.

Manual Effort: Join groups and communities relevant to your target audience. Contribute to the community and collect contact details from these groups while adhering to platform rules to avoid getting banned.

Crafting Your Outreach Message

Once you have your list, the next step is crafting a compelling message:

  1. Personalize: Make the outreach feel personal. Use their name, reference their business, or mention mutual connections to make your message stand out.
  2. Provide Big Fast Value: Offer significant value quickly. This can be an exceptional lead magnet or a unique offer that they can’t resist.

Effective Outreach Strategies

Personalization: Research your leads and include personalized snippets in your messages. This increases the likelihood of a response as people appreciate when someone takes the time to understand their needs.

Simplicity: Keep your messages simple, conversational, and easy to understand. Rewrite your scripts to a third-grade reading level to ensure clarity and engagement (use ChatGPT for this).

Offer Value: Give them something your competitors charge for! Yes, give away the farm. Give something of substantial value upfront. Also, this could be a free trial, a comprehensive guide, or a valuable resource that showcases your expertise.

Contact Frequency and Follow-Up

Volume (100 a day): Reach out to a high volume of leads. Automation can help scale this process, but personalization is key to higher response rates.

Persistence: Follow up multiple times in different ways. Use a combination of phone calls, emails, texts, and direct messages to ensure you reach your target.

After you've attempted to contact them multiple times, multiple ways, wait 3-6 months. Then, do it again.

Volume trumps luck.

Automating the Process

Automate Delivery: Use technology to automate the delivery of your messages. This includes dialers, pre-recorded voicemails, templated emails, and automated texts.

Automate Distribution: Automate the process of sending these messages to a large number of leads. This increases your reach and ensures consistent follow-up.

Measuring Success

Track metrics to measure the success of your cold outreach efforts:

100 cold calls per day:

  • Pick-Up Rate: The percentage of people who respond to your initial outreach. (25%)
  • Engaged Leads: The number of leads who show interest in your offer. (20% want the lead magnet)
  • Engaged leads per hour: The # of engaged leads per hour of calling. (1 lead per hour, based on 5-hour calling session)

100 emails per day:

  • Open Rate: 30% open rate
  • Engaged Leads: 10% of opens reply (3% of total 100 email are engaged leads that want the lead magnet)

Cold Outreach: Daily Action Plan

  • Who:
    • Yourself
  • What:
    • Hook + Lead Magnet/Core Offer
  • Where:
    • Phone/Email/Physical Mail/SMS/Etc
  • To Whom:
    • List: scraped, bought
  • When:
    • Everyday
  • Why:
    • Get leads to engage and ultimately buy
  • How:
    • Live calls, voicemail, email blasts, text blasts, direct message, video messages, voice messages, direct mail, hand written cards
  • How Much:
    • 100 Attempts Per Day
  • How Many:
    • Day 1 - 2 times, Day 2 - 2 times, Day 7 - 1 time
  • How Long:
    • As long as it takes

Why Cold Outreach is Worth It

  1. Independence from Content Creation: Unlike other methods, cold outreach doesn't rely heavily on content creation.
  2. Privacy: Competitors won't see your strategies, making it harder for them to copy you.
  3. Reliability: Cold outreach provides consistent results once you refine your process.
  4. Compliance: Easier to comply with legal regulations compared to platform-specific rules.
  5. Sellability: A business built on cold outreach is more attractive to potential buyers because it doesn't rely on a single personality or platform.

Conclusion

Cold outreach is a powerful tool that, when executed correctly, can generate significant leads and sales.

By building a list, crafting personalized messages, providing exceptional value, and automating your processes, you can effectively reach out to potential customers and grow your business.

Start today and refine your approach to see the benefits of this outreach strategy.