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Jason Bay cost effective prospecting and sales or grow your B2B small or midsize business, all the way from Austin, Texas, my home away from home.
Welcome to the show man. How the heck are you?
I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on.
So you frickin' cold emailed me with a video...kudos brother!
Yeah.
Just it just it filled my heart.
This young buck cut from the same cloth doing cold messaging and people say cold on cold calling doesn't work. What do you say to those fools and don't let me finish your opinion of these fools by calling them fools but go ahead and don't make me look foolish?
I've always come from. I mean, starting as a freshman in college. I worked with a company where we went door to door selling house painting services. So I've always been a fan of the cold approach. And what I like about it.
And I've heard this analogy used a lot with fishing right
When you use a net to fish, you're going to catch a lot of things that you want. You're going to catch all the things that you don't want and sometimes
Inbound is really good, but sometimes you attract people that aren't a great fit for you and
I don't know about you, but none of our big clients ever came to us through our website or through our LinkedIn.
We always had to kind of give them a little nudge, and let them know, hey, here we're out here. We created this piece of content, or here's what we're doing.
Instead of a time to chat that way, and especially as a small business, if you're looking to work with really big companies and your mid sized companies or even at the enterprise level.
The probably not going to come to you. So I say, if you're not prospecting and cold emailing and cold calling you're losing out on opportunities to work with your dream clients.
You're saying these fortune 5000 videos aren't just hanging around Starbucks on their iPhones, just like doing a Google search for
outbound calling services that
Yeah, that's a really interesting visual that I just sort of picture like a group of like really successful CEOs sitting in Starbucks. Like, oh yeah you know we had
Actually come to think of. We do need some sales services and some outbound help. I think I'll call it this tiny business out in Austin, Texas splitsville prospect. Yeah, just, it doesn't it doesn't work like that right here, and I know both that both know that
Yeah, that's what he thinks is going to happen.
So, all right for prospecting is that is that come on man, is it is that Armani suit wearing power God gal, are they, do they like that name or is that just too happy you too optimistic are you
You know, it's, it's funny you say that because a lot of people come to us and blissful. They tend to associate with like yo guy in like all these other things.
And I'm like, we're going to make it blissful for you. It's, it's not as blissful for us. You're not going to see, you know, that one out of 100 people that tell you to F off or unsubscribe or
Was supposed to be from that you're just going to run the appointments that we set up for you.
But really yeah that's that's a in all seriousness, we noticed that there's a lot of small businesses and even midsize companies where
You know they have sales teams in there. You don't really know how to go about doing this and there is a lot of friction, it's, it's not a great process for them because they don't really know how to get started, or how to do it correctly and how to not be annoying.
And we're kind of coming in and saying, hey,
You might not have this expertise on staff. But the good news is you don't need you don't need it. You can spend your time selling and doing what you guys do best and will tee up the opportunities for you and and sort of bring the approach and that
In the expertise and all of that, along with it.
So what are you finding. I mean what what works is it just is it as fundamental as making a list being bold enough to reach out and and
But, but people just don't want to do it it's it's not efficient. It's not casting this big wide net so they think it's below them.
And it's interesting question. I think that people look at this in a really simple way the people that that I talked to that are like hey, I've sent out thousands of emails. I have a 10% reply rate.
I've set up one or two meetings off 1000 emails and the first thing I think is like, holy crap you know that sounds like a lot of work to get one or two appointments. And I think to answer your question, that's really where it starts is is that list. Right. And I think for most people.
Sort of run into a roadblock. Is there like afraid of niche and down. I don't know. I don't know if you've seen this in your in your line of work. They're afraid that hey, if I go after
You one of our big niches is nonprofits. So if I was working with blissful prospecting. The first thing we would do in like an onboarding call is we we start digging into what are your ideal client profiles.
And people are like, well, we're industry agnostic. Yeah, that's my favorite thing to hear
Everyone's a prospect everyone can use our services to
Drink water.
Bottle water.
And
And every
Every you know every insect in Malmo and reptile is great.
Yeah, and although your solution might be industry agnostic. You don't want to present yourself as an industry agnostic solution provider, it doesn't. No one wants to work with the the generalist
So the first thing we recommend with with outbound is you don't have to say we're only going to work with nonprofits, or we're only going to work with tech companies or SAS companies or construction.
But when you send an email to a SAS company that SAS standard better feel like you specialize
In SAS companies.
I think that's the first thing is figuring out, and you can look either as a salesperson or in an organization at hey
How to go, who were our best clients who are the ones we didn't like working with and and it's as simple as taking your, your favorite clients. So, the ones that
Were the most profitable. The ones that
I would say from a selling standpoint, I always look at the ones the shortest sales cycle, the people that are the easiest to pitch where you're selling something, it's not like a new thing you have to educate them from start to finish on
And then you can plug them into on the sort of low end a tool like sales navigator and start looking at employee accounts and
You might plug them into a tool like built with and look at, well, what's the common tech stack that these companies use
And then you can get as complicated as like a discover org and all that other stuff, but I don't really think that's necessary LinkedIn sales navigator look for some patterns, some similarities build out that ICP
And then you can start from there. So don't be afraid to niche down and really specialize because
I think people look at prospecting like it's
They look at it like it's 90% the cold email and I would say that the messaging and the cadence and all that stuff is probably half the battle. The other half is making sure you're reaching out to the right company.
And then also the right person at that company you're putting the right messaging in front of that person.
So what do you this ICP
ideal client profile.
So yeah, I like that. I just post built with
hadn't heard of that. But looking at what the company is using ones. So maybe you just give you some insight like are they have Salesforce I'm user or other things like that. Is that what it basically. So you have talking points maybe to to reach out to them.
Yeah, so another really interesting, you could do in the past, we've worked a lot with consultants and we worked with a consultant
Him and his team do really high end, consulting for business to business SAS companies. So like your sales forces of the world and he just helps them with their Facebook ads.
So it's a very specialized very niche niche, excuse me, one of the things we look for in the tech stack on companies was hey do you already have a Facebook pixel on your website and you'd be surprised a lot of companies don't and
We he's not in the business of convincing them. It should be should use Facebook ads. He's in the business of hey, you're doing this and I can help you do it better. I can help you.
Scale this out. Maybe bigger than you are right now or reduce the cost per acquisition for you. That's an example, if you're selling you know sales solutions you might look and say the Salesforce example, like you said, are they using a CRM that our solution might integrate with
Built with is a great tool. A crunchbase is a really another great inexpensive tool that's got built with and all this other technology layered into it.
So you can do these account based searches as soon as you figure out your ideal client profile you punch in all the parameters in there, it'll spit out a bunch of companies that are a good fit for you.
So I'm adding these here, I have not. I don't use either those
Are really like crunchbase actually I think it'll be really helpful for some of the stuff that you guys are doing on your end, really cool.
We all just hire you to saw I'm liking that I
Don't sell yourself short man.
So this is these sources. I mean, these are good and bad reason i say it is that they're fantastic because it gives you a lot of info.
To the individual quota carrying salesperson entrepreneur out there hustling.
always wore. You gotta be careful. I don't want spend too much time doing research because it's too easy to act.
And have nothing to show for it at the end of the day. Yeah, you know, things like these tools. I mean, a quick search type in a name. Boom. I've been just a few minutes before you pick up the phone or mega mega loom video and you're you're off and running. Huh.
Yeah, I mean, you bring up a really great point. There were a sales people.
Surviving, one of the things I used to do when I was in college, working for that painting company because we went door to door, like I said, and I was actually
Very. I still unfairly introverted, but very introverted them.
And I was terrified of doing this the first time. And I remember sitting in my car going through what if they do this. What if I get rejected. What if all this stuff. So sometimes you're right. All I need to do is get out of the door car.
start knocking on doors. And what do you know, people started giving me their information and I started doing some estimates right
Same thing here, you can get into the analysis paralysis type of thing I do feel it's good to before you launch a prospecting campaign do put some thought into it right, make sure that I'm not just doing the murder by numbers blast.
That I'm personalizing things and I'm taking my time to you could start with 50 companies identify 50 companies that you like that look kind of cool. Spend an hour to thinking about
Hey, based on podcasts. I listened to, like this one here is the ideal sales cadence and the approach that I should use here's what a first email might sound like and just freakin send the emails and start making the calls
And so where are you getting these emails are you, is it through like LinkedIn navigator and things like that.
It's a couple methods we actually use a tool called Apollo. It's apollo.io
And essentially what they're doing is they're sinking up with platforms like LinkedIn. LinkedIn sales navigator like built with
And they're an easy way for you to go in there and do these account based searches and also get verified contact info. We also do so if that tool because it doesn't
What I found, and you probably noticed, this is kind of a
Challenge in our industry is finding good data and Apollo has great data, but it doesn't have all of the contact data for the company sometimes. So we'll get on LinkedIn sales navigator and use a tool called lead IQ, which I really like the folks over at lead IQ.
And then we can within LinkedIn sales navigator make those searches for the companies and pull all the information right there right into a spreadsheet and upload it to your CRM or whatever you're using to send out your emails with
So Apollo, so no one ever drown revenue that's pretty good.
I like that line. Yeah.
Yeah. Wonder if they suffocated in yo yo you get, like, oh, all that moment.
Yeah, I
Mean you gotta be for these people so so lead IQ is kind of the same thing.
Yeah, lead IQ is something that purely works off of LinkedIn sales Navigator. So you need a LinkedIn sales navigator account in order to use lead IQ. If you're a rep, you might actually prefer that workflow. It's a little easier to use, it's a little less a little more affordable.
And I really like it. It's got all the information there. It's it probably has the best contact data that I've seen it just doesn't really allow you to do like the big searches that I would like
That you can with a policy, I can pull hundreds or thousands of companies at a time, have our team, take a really close look at it, pull all the contacts. There's a good workflow in there.
Whereas lead IQ and LinkedIn sales Navigator. I love LinkedIn as a prospecting tool but sales navigator, it could use a ton of work on the product side it's it's not very fine tuned in my opinion.
For workflow than an SDR or or sales team or someone doing their own sales would would want
Right, so
You are
Not to give away all your secrets man because they got it. They got to have a reason to reach contact you.
I'm happy to share anything because to me. The secret is not what I'm going to share here it's it's really in how can you make it work for you specifically
Because every use case is different. And then also for our clients, making it the the wording of the emails and the copy, like in their voice to, you know, so ask away. I'm, I'm happy to share anything
So are you. So, I mean, I haven't used the paid tools like LinkedIn navigator and things like that much. I mean, I, I've done some experience with them but
Now the duty. I know like we were talking before record, you know, there's just so much bad
messaging that comes our way through LinkedIn. I mean, it's just so bad. And instead of me being jaded about it. I probably should see the opportunity right
If I can send a semi half decent human sounding which I'll probably make a million dollars on the first day because people are system to bad messaging is that is that kind of been your experience.
Yes and no. So the, the beauty of LinkedIn. I mean, we built our business on LinkedIn. When I was when we started blissful prospecting I was doing outbound for people as a freelancer and a consultant for a couple years.
And I was doing that to try to validate the service offering and make sure I knew who our market was and who the prospect was and find the price point, all that stuff before we started blissful
And I use LinkedIn. I just because you got to have a premium account, at least, to be able to send out that many connection requests.
But it's about 150 connection requests a day and it's set up 15 to 20 appointments for myself per week and half of those were bad with unqualified prospects, but the other half, I sort of define tune. So
I think that if you're using it right, just like with any type of prospecting
If you're using it the right way. And you're taking the time to figure out, is this a good person to reach out to and you send the messages and you don't make it
The biggest mistake I see people making with LinkedIn is a treat it like email with email, you want to be short, concise because people are dealing with hundreds of emails potentially per day.
And your emails gotta stick out and it's going to be really easy to respond to
LinkedIn. It's like this weird thing that's like social media. So it's got this like public aspect to it where people can see your profile and you got the social proof.
But it's also a place where people are open to having a conversation and know the CEO of a Fortune
So I think if you approach it more to start a conversation and like if I was us. I would I would use LinkedIn for is just to share, like all the cool content that you're making. You know, it could be
Hey, I was reaching out to you because I know that you're I see that your sales leader. I always love connecting with like minded people.
Etc. And you're funny dude, you could throw something funny in there and then the first automated message you could send after that is by the way I think you'd really enjoy this podcast with this really cool half Asian guy named Jason Day over a blissful prospecting
But that's like
You know I gotta
I get that a lot. You know,
But yeah, I think it's a context right it's it's understanding you know Gary van der Chuck really big on context.
Of between the different social media profiles and LinkedIn is one of those places it's social media. Right. It's where people have conversations. They don't want to get pitched like hard like you do in an email or a cold call
It's terrible, and LinkedIn.
And you never respond. Right. You never respond the block those people and just pisses you off. And unfortunately, LinkedIn,
It's getting to the point to where Facebook and Instagram got to where it's getting so saturated and people are learning about these techniques and this is kind of
Hopefully, what we'll talk about later today is the importance of like a multi channel approach of prospecting and that sending an email is not enough sending a LinkedIn message is not enough.
You got to do something a little bit different because most people any sales organization that's like decently smart is already doing cold email and LinkedIn and they're probably doing cold calling too. So you kind of need some other stuff to differentiate yourself.
Let's jump right into it. I mean, I agree. I did candidates about, you know, one is the loneliest number
You know,
As date if you have one lead source if you have one source of income, you know, what if you have one computer right now. I got multiple computers.
This craps boom that Mac Book Pro. It's all I switch. I mean I redundancy right I back up to my computer a backup to the cloud. I back to to Dropbox. So, I mean, one is a dangerous number
So how are you bringing all this other
You know, and how can mortals do this.
So to backtrack a little bit. The reason why we started coming up and like looking for other ways to do this sort of stuff is that
We read this study, there's this group called the bridge group. It's the bridge group are sorry excusing bridge group Inc com and what they do is they study
Inside Sales teams and they studied about close to 500 tech companies are the last five years that do a lot of heavy outbound
And one thing they noticed is that in the last five years, basically, since 2014 the number of quality conversations per day.
So they count a quality conversation as you send an email to someone and they said yes I'm interested or no, not interested. You cold call them and they picked up the phone and you had a conversation with them that either move you forward or stopped.
It went from eight per day in 2014 to 5.1 per day in 2018 and what happened in inverse proportion of that is that the number of attempts to get those conversations went up from seven to nine.
And it's only continuing to go up. So essentially what we're seeing is that it's it's getting harder and harder and harder to have the same number of conversations
So what they showed in that study is what they call the technology adoption lifecycle. They compare it all the tools that people are using for outbound
And what they showed is that about 50% of the people that are doing this stuff. They're already cold calling they're already doing cold email, they're already using LinkedIn.
So if you have an approach that only includes one of those channels like you're really far behind, especially if you're just doing cold email.
And what we noticed when we're in our client accounts and the cool thing about running a prospecting company is that we do the same exact thing for ourselves. So like the email I sent you. That's the same exact stuff that we do for our clients.
And one thing that we noticed with our tools is that if we send 100 emails out in a week.
We noticed that. Yeah, we make it half of them to open the email, maybe a five to 10% response rate but there'd be this like 10 or 15 people that had a really high engagement rate. So they were opening emails clicking on links.
But they go through an entire eight to 10 email sequence and never respond
And what we learned for that one to reach out to those people again with video or within LinkedIn connection requests, is that these people are really busy.
And your email just gets buried in the bottom of their inbox and sometimes that extra little bit of personalization sending a 32nd video is all it takes to get them to actually pull the trigger and say, you know what
Okay, this Jason guys been like sending me a lot of emails like some good content. He's got case studies, but you know that that video we use our puppy that we just got in video sometimes and that that works pretty well, but he has something unique that you like using
Lead IQ. One of the guys that Sales, VP over there. He plays guitar. He writes like custom songs. It's, it's super hilarious.
But that's what we noticed there aren't a lot of people. I don't know about you, I've only received one cold email with a video in it ever and it blew me away. I was like, wow, this is really freaking cool
So this is kind of where the industry is heading is is is adding video and using a tool called loom into the sales cadence.
What am I, how he's made for radio
Yeah, you
Know me why.
You'd have to get the prospect to tune into that channel that would be the only problem.
So are you sees work at big companies, small companies. I mean, is there, it doesn't work.
So this. So what I've noticed is that the larger the company because we use this approach. I mean, I don't know if you've heard it like the above the line below the line approach with selling
Really good book. It's called selling above and below the line by William Miller and what he talks about is like how to approach.
Not only sales, but also the prospecting end of things. And looking at catering your messaging.
Depending on the person is above the line. So these are like executive. So typically sea level VP level people that are doing decision making in are primarily driven by revenue profit.
Wants to reduce risk etc versus the below the line individuals are more of like your directors potentially managers people that would be using the solution, most likely that you're selling
The reason why I bring that up is that the bigger the company and especially above the line, folks, you got to do extra work to get these people's attention.
So if you're prospecting to, you know, a lot of our ideal client for example for nonprofits is 11 to 50 employees.
Sometimes we can just they respond, just to the cold emails and a LinkedIn outreach. Sometimes we don't even need to do video
But for companies we work with a nonprofit right now. We set up a meeting with Victoria Secret and like REI, and like these really big companies and we're reaching out to the marketing department.
We might have to do a little bit of extra maybe it's a little bit of extra personalization. Maybe it's a couple extra touches. Maybe it's having better content.
So to answer your question, yes. This does work at these larger companies. And in fact, it's kind of a requirement if you want to reach out and get someone from fortune 1000 that's an executive at a company to commit to a 30 minute call with you. You've got to do some extra stuff right
Do you get into any kind of mail marketing like
We're just, I don't have anything to share on that yet, we're just about ready to start doing direct mail this year.
And that's, again, the same sort of approach. It's the ideal sort of cadence that we've seen is two emails. The first week, and that email is
The first ones in introductory email that's that's personalized it's got the first two cents have to be personal.
Little bit more about who you are, what you do, etc. And then a
Case study or a really valuable piece of content. A follow up email that week asking eight. What do you think of this and then from there, we kind of spread it out. We look at that first week, who was engaged. Open the emails. We didn't response and send a video to those people
And then they get another email that week. And then the next week that might get a LinkedIn connection request. And then the next week.
They might give them a call or we send them another email, let me sort of kind of space it out week by week what we would do with direct mail is insert it right into that cadence probably early on and reference that in an email.
But I'm really excited. I mean, there's the what we'll probably end up doing to test this, this test it on ourselves.
And there's really, like, one thing I use a lot. It's an app called poster Graham, you can download it right on your iPhone. Pretty sure they have an Android version as well. You can send postcards for two bucks anywhere in the United States.
Post agree or agree.
Post a gram. Yeah, post a gram
So you could throw a custom image on there so you could put an image of the prospects logo or a picture of yourself and you can write something personal.
And you know, I think we're people really appreciate handwritten stuff. But I think we're kind of in a day and age where if you just write something personal on the card. I think that's good enough.
Right, you took the time to read something that's unique to them. That's not just hi first name and then some template and message. Make it personal.
Yeah for sure and its people, they, they don't have a good message or not creative so they don't they don't want to invest in things like this.
Because it's it's real. Yeah, but they don't realize how much your time is worth, but not spending money researching or goofing off that feels free
Yeah, you know, it's not really. I agree with you, 100% and I think as business owners, especially and
I noticed that a lot of business owners tend to slack in this area where they haven't really thought about
What is our ideal cost per acquisition. Like, what can we afford to acquire a client.
And a lot of times they're really surprised when I do this exercise, was it since three smaller businesses, but some of the midsize companies, the sales reps are not really in tune with like their commission
And like, how much a client is worth to them and how much they could invest and how much easier would be and how much time it might shortcut.
The sales cycle with a client, right. So just be really in tune with those numbers and like, dude, you should be able to afford a $2 postcard, you know it's it's super easy takes a couple minutes to send out, it just little stuff like that makes a huge difference.
How come I didn't get a postcard.
You have one coming in the mail. How do you know once I'm in the mail.
Yeah, good kids.
Well, yeah, most people they don't. I mean, Dan Kennedy all about it. Whoever can afford to spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.
You know, if, if you know the lifetime value of a customer. If you know it takes to convert them.
When the UPS or repeat sale or referral or testimonial is going to come in, you know, all of that you can invest more money if you know, then yeah, you're just going to try to hustle and roofs it to get the sales, but if you know
You can spend more money you can invest in poster invest in LinkedIn sales navigator, you can invest in having Jason, do all this for you. Right. Can I get an amen
Yeah. Amen, brother.
So how do you break up your two between prospecting for new clients versus fulfilling current clients.
I mean I'm fortunate. I have a co founder and wife Sarah, who runs the operations of our company. So I'm still in tune with strategy and I do, actually, a lot of the email copy and coming up with sort of clever things but
Her and our operations team kind of take care of the rest.
So to answer your question, I mean for me. If you're in charge of business development at a company on it's got to be a daily habit for you to process. So the first hour and a half ish of every day is
Hey, am I making progress on finding our dream client. Am I recording these videos because we do the same thing for ourselves to do for our clients are you putting in the work.
To find clients and it's just like anything else, just like exercise for eight if you do it consistently over time, you're going to get results, it's going to work.
So,
Are you are you seeing that the customers.
Mean when you send that note or you go right for
You know, hey, let's have a meeting or are you saying like, would the first message be a video saying, hey, you might like this free report, I just made, or does it vary.
Depends. So, and I think context is so important, we kind of talked about this at the beginning with like knowing who you're reaching out to
If I'm reaching out to an executive at a fortune 1000 company. I'm going to be a straight to the point. As I can be very succinct and I'm not gonna
I'm not going to sugarcoat the fact that I want to talk to this person or someone on their team.
The first email is not always the best place to do that because one of the most important things is, I mean, it's like basic stuff that you know like the B2B buyers journey right like the awareness consideration interest.
We assume when we send cold outreach to someone's they're already aware they have a problem and that's like the worst assumption to make
So I think the email it should more be something like, you know, something personal.
Hey Wes I listened, just like what I said did with you. I listened to this podcast with so and so really dug it. For this reason,
I was reaching out because we help companies like yours with their prospecting and helping increase their sales revenue in their sales pipelines. I put together this really cool piece of content. I thought would really help you and your team with this specific challenge.
Is this an area are having challenges in right now and leave it open like that. The next email might be interested in chatting further about this, you know, I think the big thing with the email copy is you have to
And this is something I've learned over time and was taught you can really empathize with the person, too. So you've got to really be aware of.
Like one of the things that we help our clients do is like when he's picked out that ideal client profile and we start thinking about
Okay, CFO is are the best contact at this company. What's a day in the life of a CFO like
What are they trying to accomplish, what are their challenges, what keeps them up at night, you have to address those things in the email copy and that's that's really the toughest part but
Yes, I don't go straight in for the kill. Usually, the very first email. It's more like hey if you're to something they can you know I can kind of turn the person off.
Right. Yeah. Well, it's the old you know Robert call you're into the conversation going on in the prospect yummy. People don't do it. They jump right to the conclusion that, oh, you're an idiot and solve this fundamental pain, you need to talk to me or you're an even bigger like
Well,
Oh, and your babies. I mean, you know, it's like I'm probably not returning that coal.
Yeah, in a guy like you is you know you're just gonna be like you don't up for this right I delete.
I'm not getting nobody got time for that.
Space. Yeah, nobody got time for that.
So I think that the the empathy is very, very important. And this is something you can research on Google. It's there's so much great information about
What keeps CFO is up on that you could Google that a CFO challenges and I mean there's just all kinds of stuff for whoever you're reaching out to you to just get a little bit of empathy to show the person that you know you know them. You understand them. No, no.
It's so fundamental instill just get it wrong. Yeah. It takes work. Right, that's, that's the big thing is that it's a difference between going to the gym.
And lifting weights and going through your sets versus like really pushing yourself. Right. It takes the same amount of time to really push yourself really make sure that you're getting all the reps and that you have good form.
That you're tracking that stuff. It's the same amount of time.
Really to do that. It takes a lot of hit you know focus. You got to focus to get to do it right. It's just disappointing. I think a lot of prospecting comes down to discipline, which is why a lot of companies.
That we work with choose to kind of outsource it because it's a very hard thing to manage in house correctly.
Yeah, yeah. It shouldn't be, but it is, but if it were if they were good at your job.
Right, yeah.
Yeah.
Very cool. I mean,
There's the phone still work.
You know, we don't use the phone at all. One thing that we do that's different. We're not like a sales development rep for hire, what we actually do is we'll send the email all the outreach, on behalf of the client.
So if you got like a owner of this nonprofit, let's say, or we work with another company that sells insurance.
We're sending the emails out from that person the LinkedIn messages out from that person. We have a cool little workflow where they've just spent 30 seconds recording a video we do all the busy work to get it in an email sequence to follow up.
And we haven't really had to do calling if our clients were open to it. I, you know, I'd love to have them do it. But yeah, we're not really at the point where we really needed to do it. And I don't know if we really ever will want to do it.
Right, so yeah.
Are you finding. I mean, does a generic message or is the ROI good enough for you know custom one off message because like the video you sent me was coming.
Yeah, versus a generic hey I
Just thought about you, you might like this.
Yeah, great question. I
We have not seen a generic work because people are not dumb. I mean, most of the people who reach out to you are very technical.
Or their sales are marketers and they know marketing automation and how this technology works. They know it's easy to use merge tax in an email. They know it's easy to use something template and then put a custom image on it, you know.
So that's so it doesn't work. It has to be personal. Yeah, and
Not every outreach has to be personal. The first email their very first impressions. Got to be personalized in the video that you send them. It's got to be personalized and if you can do as much of that, within reason.
The thing that I recommend and that we've learned is, if you kind of at 20 year approach and say, I'm going to focus 80% of our personalization on the top 20% of like people are really want to work with.
And people that are actually showing engagement with what we're doing. So if they're opening up emails and clicking on links. I'm going to
reward them, so to speak with something personal and spend time with those people. Because there's a certain percentage of people that are never going to be receptive to cold outreach, no matter what you do.
Right, so what, so maybe I misunderstood the because you have them recorded video and then you do the busy work. Wouldn't that be a gym video
Now, so what we do is we help them prioritize on a weekly basis. So to use that example.
Like a bunch of them.
Yeah, so we'll
Take our
Okay, yeah, I'm not even kidding with us. Like sometimes we see people open emails hundreds of times over the course of two or three weeks, and that means they're probably forwarding the email around. Right, right.
You never get a response from them. And then we just send a video to those people
But yeah, it's helping our clients say hey, if you only have an hour to a week outside of the calls that we're setting up for if you can dedicate that time.
We're going to make a really efficient for you. We're going to do all that work to line them up and we're going to tell you exactly what to say. You just got to show up and say it.
Nice okay yeah and and and badging like that is smart my podcast for him. I'm doing for us to this way anybody if they watch the video. I'm in the same shirt. I'm not wearing to start for a month.
Well yeah, I might, but on these I'm wearing one day you know because badging it, but I know for me, it was weird at first when you when you're
Doing record video or audio and there's nobody there.
geared at first.
So do you kind of coach, then you got to nudge them is, you know, sitting in from an iPhone. Your, your webcam. Hi, Jay, you really could benefit you. Hi, Joe, you
feel weird doing that at first because I know I felt weird for a long time is just how you do it.
Yeah, it's gonna feel weird and most of our clients have never done video before. So yeah, we actually go through like an hour training session with them to get it going just to show them how easy it is.
But it usually takes four or five reps and the biggest tips I have with us are like if you can arrange the script on your screen pretty close to the camera.
Now you want to make sure you're making eye contact with the camera that's extremely important.
Smiling and then what we do at the very beginning of the videos. They just have a piece of paper or whiteboards and write the person's name on it and then the thumbnail of the video in the email has the person's name on it so that they'll know that it's personalized
Right, but keeping and then keeping it 30 seconds or less. So we help them for find the pitch and all that good stuff.
Yeah.
The
Right, that
The
JUST FORGOT WHAT
Is your fourth podcast, man, I gotta give me a little bit of a break. I don't know.
Report for these
Do jujitsu after this. I can't drink. I gotta stay back scheduling.
Yeah, using the camera. Oh, I was gonna say with smartphones man it bugs me so much when you see look at themselves like look at that little bitty poll look in the
Camera
The camera.
I mean, it's a really good honestly a good technique, just for zoom calls like this to make eye contact with the camera when you're talking like it makes a prospect feel like they're talking to you instead of to their screen.
And there's a very subtle difference, but I just used to do so many like virtual interviews for the companies to work for. I'm just hiring sales reps and things and like
That's one thing they've really drilled into us. You know, like you have to if you're not going to meet in person. You have to really connect through the call and you do that by looking at the camera icon. Just pick, man. Amen.
Man final words of wisdom, what, what should our list. Do they, they're on a train there on a plane or on an automobile or in a mountain bike during a treadmill, they're swimming. LAUGH They're waterproof.
As soon as they get back to their desk. What should they do as a result of listening to this to move the needle.
I think the biggest thing is the mindset around what I always say is don't prospect to make a sale prospect to start a conversation
So what that means is that you've got to find people to start conversations to not to sell to you got to earn the right to sell to them I prospecting
So the first thing I would do is use one of these tools that we recommended identify 50 clients that you could go after that would be on your dream client list and start figuring out and thinking about
Well, who's the person that I would need to talk to at this company using LinkedIn.
And go to their profile. Just look at them as a person instead of a prospect. Like, what would I need if I'm reaching out to Wes
What's important to West. Well, he's got a podcast. He's obviously like sales I seems like a funny guy. Right. Um, how would I start a conversation with Wes, he probably gets a ton of emails every day. He's got a podcast that people
A ton of like cool people have been on her. He gets hit up a lot. Like, how can I start a conversation with them.
And that's all, that's all I would do from there. I would just keep it very, very simple and think conversation. Most of this stuff if you just take a little bit of time to brainstorm, you can come up with all kinds of creative stuff. Yeah.
It's it take the time most don't. That's why they call you and me, man.
Yeah.
Very cool. I like to everything. Mr. Jason brace blissful prospecting and we got your newsletter as well. So, but from in the the navigation, but I've linked to both have linked to your LinkedIn profile.
As well as selling above and below the line all good stuff, man. And I linked everything that we mentioned as well poster Graham bridge group resources Apollo. So lots of good info, man. So hey, your proof. Dude, this old coal yo email stuff works. Cool.
Yeah, thanks for linking to all that stuff. I definitely recommend checking out the newsletter, it's, it's not like a company updates newsletter, I cannot stand those your newsletters are really good by the way.
But I love that it's just very actionable and most cases are very to the point and we do it the same way.
I consume anywhere between five and seven hours for the content each week on prospecting and sales and I put that in an email, you can consume in like five minutes. So it's got tool recommendations.
Instead of linking to an article. I'll tell you that one or two sentences that I think are the most important for you. So definitely check it out. That'll be the best way to get, you know, feel for us.
Okay, I will link to all that, sir. Jason Bay, all the way from Austin and great to have you in the syllabus.
Awesome, thanks Wes.
Have a great day.