Episode 7 – How to Leverage Cold Email To Book Appointments
- Who is this good fit for (5:00)
- Our process of email outreach (6:00)
- Finding the right people to reach out process (8:42)
- Effective Messaging- what to say (10:45)
- Keeping those messages out of spam (13:34)
- Expectations, Benchmarks (15:55)
- Beyond Cold email (18:02)
- How do I keep in track- tools that might help (21:51)
- Typical results (24:00)
- Try to focus on these things.. (26:20)
Learn more about the content discussed in this episode:
https://www.outboundadvantage.com/ – Matt’s website
https://reply.io/ – Sales automation CRM
https://www.lemlist.com/ – Cold Email Sending Tool
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Transcript
00:02:43 Gary Ruplinger
Welcome everybody to another episode of Pipelineology, I’m your host Gary Ruplinger and today I am joined by the founder of Outbound Advantage, B2B appointment setting marketing and sales expert Matt Fabrico. Matt, Welcome to the show.
00:03:02 Matt Fabrico
Thank you for having me.
00:03:04 Gary Ruplinger
I am excited. As I said before, we started recording here that every time I talk to you, I feel like I’m learning something new about the cutting edge of just be to be prospecting and getting appointments ‘cause I know you are out their test and stuff all the time.
00:03:19 Matt Fabrico
All the time.
00:03:22 Gary Ruplinger
So, I was really excited to get you on about, well, cold email and processes. But before that, for anybody who’s not familiar with you or your company, can you give us a little bit of background about yourself?
00:03:33 Matt Fabrico
Sure, been in business and doing this for about four years now. We probably started off like everybody else five years ago. Um, doing Facebook ads run trying to run agency sell to chiropractors, dentists, things like that had a partner doing that. We went our separate ways. I was kind of the guy that was getting appointments bringing on clients, so I figured I was pretty good at it. So, four years ago I’ve decided to start an outbound agency helping B to B companies generate appointments. Um, get high quality appointments on their calendar. We’ve transitioned a bunch of times to make the service better and better. We’re currently working with a bunch of clients now bringing on tons of appointments. We’re incorporating new systems every single day. We work with companies that are usually somewhere at from 800,000 to 10 million. They have a product, the service that’s worth at least 10,000. I would say a primary. Most of our companies are technologies and SAS companies. For the most part as well as we’re getting into the industrial sectors now, we feel that there’s a huge opportunity there that we can really help them as well.
00:04:52 Gary Ruplinger
Well, that’s great ’cause that kind of leads right into my first question is who? Who is kind of this prospecting cold outreach? Who is this a good fit for?
00:05:01 Matt Fabrico
Um, for anybody to be company? Really, there’s different techniques, though, right? So, this is where a lot of people I feel get it wrong where they use if they’re targeting local businesses, there’s a different approach then you’re taking. When you’re reaching out to a company that’s doing 50 million a year, or if there is doing 500 million a year, there’s a different approach that you want to take, so it’s really for anybody who’s doing B to B. You just want to adjust your approach for your target market.
00:05:32 Gary Ruplinger
That’s very interesting. So, when it comes to, I guess if you want to jump into like the cold email side of it anyway before we even get started, I know you kind of mentioned there’s that you don’t. You don’t just start sending emails and say, hey, I want to send emails today kind of walk us through what? The process looks like if somebody says yeah, I want to do kind of an outreach campaign. I want to use cold email. What? How do you get started with something like that?
00:05:59 Matt Fabrico
Right, yeah, I mean definitely don’t want to do that. I mean, a lot of people, they’ll find a template on Google and just blast that template out to a bunch of people and get no results. And think old email doesn’t work. So that’s not the case. It’s any sort of outbound campaign you want to start with a market research phase, so you want to find out your buyer persona. Ideal customer profile, people who you’re reaching out to figure out their pains, wants, desires and then you want to figure out how your solutions can bridge that gap and you could do this in a couple of different ways. The best ways that we found through them doing that marker research is really looking at job boards. So, if you’re going out there, VPS operations in the manufacturing sector you just look for VPS operations, job boards, and Operation Sector. And the manufacturing sector, I mean and look at their day-to-day roles, see a commonality there, see what they’re doing, and then you basically see how your product or service can help them with their day-to-day activities and help their company grow. So that’s why you always want to start, that’s. Before anything, this is where 90% of the people missed the boat and its grueling tasks. I know people hate doing it, but it’s the most important piece.
00:07:21 Gary Ruplinger
So, using the job boards to figure out what messaging should be like what’s going to be relevant to that person.
00:07:29 Matt Fabrico
Right, yeah, so you wanna figure out you use those job boards to figure out you know what their data days are and what their companies expecting of them. You’re going to you want to look at? A bunch of them, right? And you want to find commonality? Is there an then you want to figure out how your product or service can basically bridge that whole gap and it don’t have to just be job boards, LinkedIn profiles. Google search is a great tool. Crystal knows I don’t know if you know what that is, but it’s basically a Google plugin that that builds this profile on each person. It gathers a bunch of information and it lets you know how they like to be approached, that they’re introverted, extroverted, and basically a whole bunch of things about them. And then you could also find commonality there.
00:08:23 Gary Ruplinger
So, are you also kind of using those job listings to figure out the right roles to contact? Or do you have the role you want to target in mind when you do this when you’re looking at the job boards? Or do you kind of use that to let you determine? Here’s what we’re offering to somebody. Now I gotta find the right person to reach at these companies.
00:08:42 Matt Fabrico
Right, so there is you want to build your ideal customer profile first, right? So, you want to find the market company sizes. The industries that you want to go after first. And then from there is the buyer persona piece, where each there’s different titles inside of those companies that you can probably reach out to, but you can help them all in a different way, so you want to look them all up and you want to create different. You’re not, your messaging is going to be way different to the CIO. Then to the CTO, cause I’m sure you can help them in different ways. Even though your service or product does the same thing right. But I’m sure you can reach out to them in different ways. Now there is a caveat to this where, you know there’s I know there’s certain people that you might be listening that reach out to local companies. There is so there. There’s usually in local companies, the only reaching out to the owner. So, it’s a big difference. That’s why the outreach campaign for those people will be completely different. So, companies like that are larger.
00:09:50 Gary Ruplinger
OK, so you gotta take a very customized approach to just depending on who you’re reaching out to get results.
00:09:56 Matt Fabrico
100% yeah.
00:09:58 Gary Ruplinger
OK, so that’s why that’s why we don’t just go to YouTube and find whatever the first cold email template that’s out there is.
00:10:05 Matt Fabrico
Right, I mean, yeah, exactly. I mean at first of all, that person probably saw that email 1000 times if it’s out there. But yet templates are good to take the frameworks from them, so templates are great, but you want to. You don’t want to use a word for word. What you want to do is take the frameworks and then put your own. Basically, copy inside of those frameworks.
00:10:32 Gary Ruplinger
So, do you have suggestions on the types of messaging that can be affective or kind of frameworks as you’re thinking about who you’re going to reach out to kind of figure out what to say?
00:10:46 Matt Fabrico
Yeah, so I mean for our first message, each message is a little bit different, But the first message is usually pretty similar to every single person. Obviously, the messaging is different, but the framework is the same, so it’s his first name we add. We usually add a personalized snippet in there, which is something we found that’s personal to them. Um and it makes it makes the reason why we’re reaching out to better as well, would allow people don’t realize in cold emails, people see that first line, so that helps the open rates as well. A lot of people just look at the subject line, but it’s the first line as well that helps get increased those open rates from there. We either go into a question where a question to capture their attention or we’ll go right into a value statement where we’re always focusing on outcomes. Never talk about your product, never talk about the benefits of your service and the email. Nobody wants a list of benefits; they only want an outcome you can provide. So, focus on the end result that your product will provide, and I guarantee just with that you’ve got great, better results and then from there we usually have a call to action and then sometimes for some of our clients in the PS section we might add a credibility statement. Um, we add different things in the PS section, but sometimes we can add a credibility statement saying hey, we just like we’ve just helped a company similar to yours. You want to name that company get X result and this kind of says hey we help them get the result. You look exactly like them. We can help you. Get to that same place.
00:12:28 Gary Ruplinger
Wow, that’s actually really, really good stuff. So, I mean everybody. Listening at home. Go back about two minutes and just right, take some notes down. I know I was there on how to kind of approach that, so you said you’re also you’re not just sending one message, you’re sending a sequence of messages, right?
00:12:46 Matt Fabrico
Correct, yeah, and I think I know we spoke a little before the call we. Um, do a little bit more than just cold emailing so. But yeah, typically we for just the email alone. We’re sending 6 to 8 messages and I know a lot of people stop it for because they think 4 is the magic number for some reason, but I. I mean we sent millions and millions of emails and I know expert other experts before me who send millions of emails and little do you know the 1/3 of positive replies come from message 5 through 8. Especially when you’re reaching out to somebody in a business development role. So, if you’re reaching out to an owner or somebody who’s trying to grow revenue, you want to reach out to them more.
00:13:34 Gary Ruplinger
So how are you keeping that many messages to the same person out of spam?
00:13:42 Matt Fabrico
At this point, so we have a whole deliverability team that’s. You could have a whole interview just on deliverability, but pretty much you have to have similar activity. You want to start out. You wanna have obviously the obvious SPFD KIMD mark setup where we use G suite. The platforms that we use. We use lamb list, and we are we’re using our on their beta, but we’re also using Reply dot IO or some campaigns as well, and the reason for that is ’cause we do a multi touch sequence on different platforms. But to get back to your question deliverability, it’s really just engagement. So, Gmail wants to see that your emails are being opened and read and reply to, so we have a whole team that’s sending and replying to emails. Lemus does this by the way they have a Len warm feature. That’s pretty good, but we actually have our own team that does that just because we like to send, we send value so it’s really all about engagement.
00:14:51 Matt Fabrico
At the end of the day, I mean, that’s what it comes down to. Yeah, and you want to ramp up to? I didn’t want to leave that out. You don’t want to go out and just send 200 emails. They want you want to start slow. First of all, you don’t even want to do that anyway. cause you want to make sure your messaging is working. This is another thing that I see a lot where people. Will just send out 200 or 500 emails not even knowing if their message is resonating. It so you want to ramp it up little by little and that’ll help your deliverability as well.
00:15:25 Gary Ruplinger
That’s sharing some great Golden Nuggets here so for somebody who’s looking at this saying, OK, that’s the sound. This sounds great. What should somebody expect if they’re going out to doing this and to say, yeah, this these? These are the elements that make a successful campaign. These are the benchmarks we’re looking at versus this isn’t working. Are there certain expectations that somebody should you know, kind of go in prepared for so, so they kind of know?
00:15:56 Matt Fabrico
Yeah, I mean it depends on your market as well, right? So obviously if you’re going to reach out to a smaller, smaller companies. Response rate I could imagine is going to be a little bit. Well, actually let me take that back. It depends on the industry as well, so there’s a whole bunch of factors that go into this, so I don’t want to mislead anybody, right? So, I mean, there’s a lot of factors that go into this, but expectations benchmarks that we like to go for our clients is we like to see a 2 to 3% meeting a book ratio? Which means if we add 100 Contacts to that campaign, we want at least two to three appointments booked and that’s for our clients. After a certain amount of time, we want to increase that, but for what we have we have a pilot plan. That’s our main goal from the pilot is to get that 2 to 3% and then we try to look to see if there’s ways to increase that. And then we can start ramping up the campaign from there. But I would. I would definitely in the beginning you have to test a bunch of things. I wouldn’t expect 2 to 3% off the bat. Even when you do your homework really well, they’re still going to get feedback from the market, so look at your replies. Even the negative replies. Sometimes there’s ways things that you can look at inside of those replies, and you can use that for your next campaign to get a better response, right?
00:17:29 Gary Ruplinger
That’s pretty. That’s great, so. I know you go beyond cold email; you’ve I know we were talking about this a little earlier is that you don’t. You don’t just rely on cold email to get results specially to kind of keep things consistently producing UVA. Really, really impressive multi touch approach. I’ve seen some of your flowcharts that you shared, so could you kind of touch on. I guess what that looks like how you go beyond the cold email.
00:18:02 Matt Fabrico
Yes, so I mean we added multi touches. We’ve tried everything and with the multi touch just lets you know just give you some numbers. We saw 1100% percent increase in the number of appointments booked. Wow. Huge increase often just from just cold email so. We added multi touches so after we get the list, I can give you a picture after we get the list of prospects, we. You could do one or two things. You can add them to. You could take that, list the emails and put them in ad role. Start a retargeting campaign at the same time. Go out and find those people on LinkedIn. Start engaging with their posts. Things like that. Let them just start recognizing your name and then send your first email. Make it personalized. Make sure it’s personalized so you’re standing out. You don’t have to personalize the whole email. There’s a whole conversation about that as well. You there is, you know, there’s a really targeted campaign. If you have whales that you want to go after that are, you know multi six and seven figure deals, then you want to personalize every single message. And if you have a really small market.
00:19:11 Matt Fabrico
But if you’re going after a bunch of smaller deals, you know 10 thousand $15,000, I would create a really targeted campaign segment. Each buyer persona and create a different campaign for each buyer persona, and then start the first email campaign. So, you’ll run the first email, let it go out. Couple days is no response. You can follow up with a second email if there’s still no response then you try to connect with them on LinkedIn. Referencing that you try to send them an email and you try to you know, so they might go back to the email now and look at the email and respond to it. Just because you wrote them that LinkedIn message, we’ve seen that happen. Or they might. They have a higher connection rate on LinkedIn because now they feel like it’s a little bit more personal than just your generic connection template that you would use. From there, there’s still no response. Call them most of the time you’re gonna get the voicemail right, leave them a voicemail. Hey, we sent you an email and I’ll link the connection requests mentioning the outcomes. You know that you provide focus on the value proposition. What happens there? They don’t call you back, but they will go back and look at the email so. It all kind of works together, so that’s why we take multi touch is we do a really multi touch approach. Then we’ll send, will create a generic even video template email for each persona as well so it’ll feel like it’s really targeted and specific to them. Put that in the sequence will send them in in Mail. And you’re just reaching out on multiple platforms, right? ‘Cause different people like to communicate in different ways. So, some people might respond to the text. I mean, you know the email. Some people in my response to LinkedIn somewhere respond to that email and it’s just kind of what we’re seeing. And it all works. We finalize it all works together and watch. I guarantee if you just add that voicemail piece. I guarantee your email open rate will skyrocket just from that because you can have more people going back to the email just to look at it.
00:21:17 Gary Ruplinger
So just literally just kind of pick up the phone, get sent, give him a call, and leave a voicemail.
00:21:23 Matt Fabrico
Yeah, or we have an automated so we. You also can put ‘em right into a voicemail drop if we have the ability, we find mobile numbers so and Direct Line numbers where it just leaves him a voicemail. Wow, you could do it. You could really do it either way, yeah.
00:21:42 Gary Ruplinger
So, I’ve as your as you’re saying all this and you don’t have to give away your secret sauce here, but how are you keeping track of all of this to do that?
00:21:50 Matt Fabrico
You could do this. All in reply that I owe. You could do it. Lemme list new beta feature. They have multitasked now sales loft outreaches all those tools let. Allow you to create those campaigns and stay on top of it.
00:22:07 Gary Ruplinger
Oh, wow, so there’s literally a tool tools out there to help you really do this. Type of multi touch outreach.
00:22:15 Matt Fabrico
100%, Yeah, I don’t mind giving it all away. cause if you like doing this 8 hours a day feel free. One other tip that I have for that multi touch campaign is once somebody connects with you on LinkedIn, don’t send them a text. Pick up your phone and go to the LinkedIn app and send audio message. It you’ll see a lot higher response rate from that just as well. cause you can’t do it from your computer. You have to do it from the app. The LinkedIn app, but you’ll see a great response right from that.
00:22:51 Gary Ruplinger
Well, that’s that isn’t that is really, really cool. Yeah, I know, I know. Before we jump down here, you’re talking about SDR teams or sales development representatives. I’m getting that acronym, right?
00:23:05 Matt Fabrico
Correct, yeah, SDR BDR. Yeah, some people call it different things.
00:23:09 Gary Ruplinger
So yeah, I know I know when I worked in automotive, we call. Ours BC Business development center. So yeah, everybody is a little different. Little bit different lingo, but so you’re building these teams then to do this outreach correct? So, this isn’t like it. Sounds like you got a lot of tools that help run it along, but I also hearing a lot of. Actual human personalized touch points in there to get these results.
00:23:37 Matt Fabrico
You have to. Yeah, you have to have a human element in there. Yeah, I mean we have a couple of people working one campaign. We have one person getting the data. You know we have one person actually running the campaign. Day-to-day, replying. Getting appointments on the calendar and then we have callers as well.
00:23:59 Gary Ruplinger
So, when what are what are typical results you see from the campaigns you’re running then, and I’m sure it varies from industry to industry, but are there any you know on average you see this many booked appointments or anything like that from this whole multi touch system.
00:24:16 Matt Fabrico
Yeah, I mean I can give you our numbers ‘cause I have. I know it like the back of my hand. So, I mean if we sent, we add 100 Contacts to the campaign we’re booking for four to five appointments and it’s not off of the first message. So, a lot of people get this wrong. It’s over the course of a campaign so 14 different touches over three months where? Seeing around 4:00 to 5:00 meetings, so there’s a lot of follow up that goes into it. So, a lot of people they’ll send the first message, and they won’t get anything, and that’s not your book ratio. The book ratio is over the whole campaign.
00:24:52 Gary Ruplinger
So, I’m hearing is persistence, persistence, persistence on an outreach?
00:24:57 Matt Fabrico
Yeah definitely, oh now you have to be careful with this as well though, because we target. Business development people, right? So, they’re used to outreach. They probably do average themselves. They respect outreach, so they don’t mind being more aggressive. They actually appreciate it as long as you’re coming in with value that you can add to them, right? A lot of people thank us for reaching out and following up, but there’s different roles now in different companies, right? So, if you’re reaching out to a technical person? I wouldn’t be as a great. I would still follow up, but I wouldn’t. I would wait a longer period between messages because their technical people that are not usually sales guys. They’re not used to being, you know, on the phone as well. They usually want to read something before you book an appointment, so there’s different approaches for each role.
00:25:47 Gary Ruplinger
So, you really have to give a give thought to who I kind of like you said at the beginning is what that avatar of that person looks like.
00:25:55 Matt Fabrico
Exactly, it all comes back to market research, so the most important piece of though. Now the campaign.
00:26:02 Gary Ruplinger
So, do so. Do your homework.
00:26:05 Matt Fabrico
100%.
00:26:07 Gary Ruplinger
Well, this is this is great. I mean these are. These are some amazing kind of tips you’ve given here so far. What else should I be asking you like what? What else should somebody know about this type of thing?
00:26:20 Matt Fabrico
Um, there isn’t really a lot that goes into it for, just. I know this is more you want to focus a little bit more email. Deliverability is probably the main factor you want to make sure that you’re delivering. I know spam filters got really strict over the last 12 months we saw it too. That’s why we have a deliverability team. Now to make sure that we’re in boxing and we’re maintaining fifty 6070% open rates across the board. So, you want to focus on that. Make sure that you have something in place. Like I said, it’s about engagement. Whether you create that engagement yourself, you try out lemme listel em warm feature. There’re other tools out there, like Mail warm that’ll do this for you. You want to test out those things, that’s probably one thing I would focus on in the second major tip that I can give is focus on outcomes. Keep focus on the outcomes of the people that you’re reaching out to. You gotta remember if you’re reaching out to a, you know a director of technology and your solution helps with something increasing revenue. He’s probably not soon going to be super intrigued by that, so you might want to come at a different angle and figure out how you can help them in some sort of way. Or just change your buyer persona.
00:27:46 Gary Ruplinger
That’s great, so matter really, really kind of appreciate you doing this. If there’s somebody out there who says you know I need a system like this, I need a multi touch outreach campaign. Should somebody get in touch with you.
00:27:59 Matt Fabrico
Yeah, so you can go to our website and book a call which is outbound advantage.com. Let’s take a look at our videos first. We can’t help everybody where we’re being a little bit pickier about who are selecting his clients now where it’s kind of revamped things. We if you have a product or service at least 10,000 in value. You have a sales process in place or B to be company. Then we could probably figure out something in your market has to be big enough as well. If you have a really specific market, we normally we don’t really do complete ABM strategies, account-based strategies. So, we want we want their market to be a little bit bigger. So just keep that in mind if you do want to reach out to us.
00:28:48 Gary Ruplinger
That’s a that’s great. Well again thanks. Thanks so much for coming out Matt, I really appreciate you doing this kind of sharing this. I got up. I have a page full of notes already to myself, so great. I really appreciate your share and I’m going to have to get you on the show again to talk about some of these other things. Like I said, every time I talk to you learning something new so appreciate it. Well. Thanks Matt. Take care and have a great rest of your day.
00:29:12 Matt Fabrico
Alright, you as well have a good one.
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