Episode 11 Troubleshooting Low Response Rates To Outreach
00:00 Introduction and Welcome
00:49 Troubleshooting Your Outreach
01:53 Realistic Expectations for Outreach
04:31 Crafting an Effective Offer
10:34 Consistency in Outreach
13:56 Following Up with Prospects
20:22 Targeting the Right People
23:43 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Started out cold calling chiropractors and it became apparent pretty quickly that, we weren’t reaching any chiropractors.
[00:00:14] Welcome to Pipelineology, the Business to Business Podcast for agencies, consultants, coaches, and businesses looking to build a pipeline of hot prospects ready to buy their products and services.
Never wonder where your next client is coming from. To learn more about our strategies, services, and for resources on building your sales pipeline, visit Pipelineology dot com. Now on to the show.
[00:00:43] Welcome back everybody, to another episode of Pipelineology, and I am your host, Gary Ruplinger. And today we’re gonna talk about troubleshooting your outreach.
[00:00:55] So we’ve had a lot of guests on recently talking about different types of outreach, whether that’s cold calling, cold email, LinkedIn messaging, combinations thereof. And we’re gonna be doing some interviews in the future with guests on different type of ad platforms, lead generation. But today I really wanted to cover what happens when that stuff.
Isn’t going right, the numbers just aren’t working. You just aren’t getting the right people in. So we’re gonna look at several different factors. I think I have. Roughly 10 or so different topics. We’ll kind of quickly go over and just give, I wanna give you some good actionable advice so you can look at your, overall sales funnel and figure out where the problem is, how to diagnose it, and how to fix it so that you can start getting more meetings and closing more business.
So, without further ado, let’s jump right on into it. So. First things first, let’s get realistic about numbers. I know it’s, it’s really easy to think, you know, you’re gonna send out your first cold email campaign and you say, Hey, you know, we’ve got 500 people. Just think if we can book meetings with 20% of these people, you know, we’ll, we’ll close half of them and life will be gravy.
[00:02:17] And the reality is that’s probably not gonna happen. I was listening to, talking to a colleague earlier and he mentioned sending out, I think right around they had a list of right around 2,700 people and over a a three month period they managed to book meetings with 24 of them. And the thing is, the client was happy with that.
They were happy with that. because it wasn’t, it wasn’t a sexy offer. It wasn’t super exciting. But nonetheless it brought in new business. So, if you remember our, our, call with Matt fco, he also said kind of similar things, that their goal is out of a hundred people over the course of their entire sequence to book around three calls with people, out of, out of every hundred.
And that’s with a lot of sequential follow up, different types of outreach going on. they said they can up those numbers by using, different types of cold calling approaches too. But ultimately you gotta kind of know what the numbers are, know what type, what to expect with it, and then you can start to figure.
Is it working? Because you, heck, if you’re getting, you’re sending out every a hundred emails, you’re getting 20% of people to respond, and you’re, you’re booking half of those people that respond back. You’re killing it. You’re doing great. and then if you’re not closing enough business, hey, we, we better look at some other things.
But in most cases that, that really isn’t gonna be the case. Response rates are low. It doesn’t matter if it’s, it’s LinkedIn cold calling. Right. If you remember Justin saying Justin Hughes interview saying. you know, he’s, he’s gonna give it three hours to call in and, you know, if he doesn’t get anybody in those three hours, alright, we got a problem.
We gotta figure it out. If he is getting people right, he’s, you know, he said, okay, we got something we can work with and we can, can proceed with this. But he didn’t say that, you know, every hour, if he’s not booking at least five appointments that he’s given up on that. So. That’s probably the first thing is just kind of be realistic about your numbers and kind of build around those types of expectations depending on what you’re doing.
Alright, so kind of let’s, let’s jump in here. I kinda wanna start with the big one first, and that is where I say the vast majority of the time is why. It’s, why you’re not getting the response you’re looking for and that’s in your offer. The big thing you wanna look at is. When you write that, if I’m reading it and I, I, I need to know what’s in it for me.
[00:04:53] For example, I, I, I probably have gotten more than one message today. That was somebody, you know, reaching out to me saying, Hey, you know, we do web design, we do lead generation, we do white label services. Is that something you’re interested in? and reading that, okay. I, I understand you do some type of, you know, work.
But there was, there was never any what’s in it for me moment, no benefit to me. I didn’t, I didn’t know what, what I’m getting, you know, I don’t know why I’m supposed to be getting on a conversation with you. I don’t know why you wanna schedule a meeting with me. I, and if you have, if the client has to try and figure out, okay, yeah, okay, you do white label things, maybe you get lucky.
And I am actively looking for a white label provider for my, for services, but without a clear benefit to, to me. Your, your response rate’s gonna be very low and you’re not gonna get a lot of interested prospects. And I know that for a lot of us out there, offers aren’t terribly sexy, right? If you’re in, IT services or janitorial, you know, insurance, these types of things don’t really get people excited.
But if you present it in a way that. Is something that they’re interested in, whether that’s, you know, it’s gonna help them save money or, you know, prevent them from being all over the news cycle because they got hacked, different types of things, or, you know, preventing a COVID outbreak so that their place doesn’t, their facility doesn’t get shut down.
You know what, these, these are all things that they might be a little bit more open to. Yeah, so let’s just talk about, some good offers then. So let’s just, for the moment, imagine that you’re a car dealer or you’re, you’re prospecting a car dealers, so you’re reaching out general managers and you think, okay, so we have a program that’s gonna help them sell more cars each month.
You know, it’s gonna. Do X, Y, and Z. It’s gonna increase traffic and views to their inventory and get more people on their lot looking at their cars. Alright. All, all things that they want. So what do you offer them? Well, a good offer, and this is a, this is one that’s been used for, for many use years in the market, is, Hey, hey, Mr.
Mr. Car Dealer, I have a program that can help you sell 10 to 20 extra cars each month. Can we talk? Very straightforward, right, that you can see that there is an immediate benefit to the person hearing that they, they understand it immediately and know, okay, yep, I see that that’s something we, we do want.
Yes, let’s talk, but let’s take it a step further because I think for most people out there, you get that part. You get that you need to frame your message in a way that really, you know, highlights the benefit. So do a lot of other people. So how do you stand out? I mean, if everybody’s saying that, and the reason I’m using this particular example is having worked in that industry, I can tell you a lot of people say that.
So these days, just using that language is a good starting point, but it doesn’t really mean a lot because everybody’s heard it. So it’s, it’s not exciting. It sounds like everybody else. So let’s dress it up. So there’s two terms here that I like to use. That’s even if and without, so let’s, let’s try that.
So let’s say that, okay, so you know what we’re gonna do. You know the reason that our system’s different is that we do it without increasing their ad spend. Alright? So let’s try that. I help car dealers sell an extra 10 to 20 cars a month without increasing your ad spend. Yeah. Cool. Alright, so that makes sense, right?
Car dealers, you know, they’re oftentimes, they have an ad budget, but it’s usually a allocated. So, to, to try and get them to spend more is, is usually gonna be a much tougher sell then, wait, I don’t have to spend any extra money. All right. I’m listen. But let’s say that’s still not enough. Let’s say it’s still, you know, they still have hesitations to say, well, what’s the, you know, what’s the catch?
you know, we’re in a, we’re in a really, you know, heavily saturated market. I, I don’t, I don’t think this is gonna work. All right, no problem. Let’s, let’s try it again. Alright. So, I help car dealers sell an extra 10 to 20 cars a month, even if you are in a saturated market full of competitors without increasing your ad spend.
Okay. So feel free to use more than one of those. You can stack them, you can use multiple ones. essentially it’s anytime you’re doing this. for example, I, I did, some outreach to realtors, a while back, and in this case we were selling, YouTube ads. So one of the big things is, is we said without Facebook ads, because everybody else in the market at that time was bombarding these guys with Facebook ads, you know, you know, types of pitches.
So we specifically called out and said, Hey, this isn’t Facebook. You know, this is, we, we actually said exactly what it was. It’s a YouTube advertising one. Got a pretty good response from people on that. keep in mind this was about, probably about a year and a half ago, so I don’t know that that would work well these days.
They may have heard it already, but again, anytime you have something that is not what they assume it is, it’s good to call it out and let people know. Alright, so now that we’ve talked about the offer, let’s talk about the next part here is consistency. And we’ve already touched on this initially, is that you need to get back, keep getting in front of them.
[00:10:40] That’s why, you know, again, we’re, we’re talk about sequential messaging using different mediums to reach out, doing a process that can be several weeks or even several months long. Because the truth of the of the matter is people are busy and they may see your message and say, oh, that looks interesting.
And then the phone rings, they pick up the phone and. They, you’re, you’re done. They’re not going back to it. They’re not seeing it again. And so, you know, two weeks later, you know, they see your message again. Maybe this time you’re, you’re on LinkedIn and you say, Hey, you remember that email I sent you? And they say, oh yeah, that’s not, yeah, I do remember that.
I should reply to them. And, then another email jumps in their inbox from their boss and boom, they’re back to being busy again. So these days. Even if somebody’s interested, don’t just assume that they’re gonna immediately reply to the first, second, third, fourth, fifth message that you send them. You may need to reach out many, many times over a longer period, because the other part of that is that they might look at something today and say, Nope, no use for that.
And then maybe it’s a, you know, for an ad provider, two weeks later, they’re firing their agency that they’re working with. Things have just, you know, deteriorated fast. And then the next day you show back up, Hey, you know, can we talk about, you know, some, some lead generation services? I say, yes. Yeah, your timing is great.
It’s, it’s amazing how good your timing ends up being. The more you know the, the longer and more consistent you are with that. like I said, I’m, I’m consistently impressed how often that, usually it’s somewhere the third or fifth or sixth message, if somebody says, oh, you have great timing, right? Well, I, I, I mostly, I don’t have good timing.
I just am persistent because a month ago when I first started contacting you, obviously the timing is off, but if you stick with them, your timing is, is gonna get better. At some point, you’re gonna catch them at the right time. And if somebody says, Hey, contact me in a few months, do it. You know, put a, put a reminder, it takes all of two seconds to make a reminder to, to touch base with somebody again in the future.
it’s just kind of part of prospecting. And sometimes they’ll say yes, sometimes they won’t, but, or I’ll the, for the amount of time it’s gonna take you to do it. Absolutely. Reach back out in a few months and see. Don’t be afraid to ask him. Oh, sure. Happy to follow up with you in a few months. May I ask what, what’s gonna be, what’s going to change in, in a few months that you think will make a difference?
Again, that can seem very forward to people. But again, it, it, it’s, it also can seem like a very legitimate question and you usually aren’t gonna get a lot of pushback on it. They’ll just tell you, they, they might just tell you, Hey, we’re just too busy. I don’t have time to talk to you right now. Or they might actually tell you, you know, well, we’re actually launching this and this, it’s not ready.
So I couldn’t Do you use your services right now, even if I wanted to? But once this is done, okay, so, so now, you know. So don’t be afraid to ask questions to people. They’ll usually answer. All right. Which kind of leads right back into the next one here then is following up. So I know a lot of, I see it all the time, is somebody actually responds back and says, yeah, I’m interested.
You know, let’s, let’s talk. And they don’t, they don’t say, Hey, give me a call at 2:00 PM uh uh, today. And, and let’s chat every once in a while. Maybe, maybe one out of 10, maybe one out of every 15 people will actually do that. I did before I, before I got on, we had, one of my, one of my clients had exactly that, Hey, gimme a call at 11 this morning.
And we sent it over to the client and he’s like, great, I’ll give him a call. Very excited about it. because it’s a very, it’s a, a local client for him, potentially a very big deal, but most people aren’t like that. They don’t, they don’t say. Yeah, let’s do this and such a time and let’s meet. They’re gonna say, sure, I’m open to that.
[00:14:56] You know, they’ll, they’ll give you a vague response. So for you, your job is to get that time firmed up with them. If they’re kind of open to it. You can suggest some times and figure out when you want to actually meet. But I see people drop the ball here because what they do is they’ll respond back, right.
You’re. You’re a professional, you’re gonna respond back and say, yes, Mr. So and so. I’m happy to meet with you tomorrow at two 30 or Monday at one. Which one of those works better? And it’s totally normal for there to be complete radio silence on that. They just don’t, they don’t respond to either one.
Your job is then again, the next day, Hey, just wanna touch base on this. just wanna see what time’s gonna work well for you. I can do blank and blank if it’s the same times. Send them if it’s, if it’s not and they’ll say, yeah, you know, they might get back to you. Then say, you know what? Neither of those times work.
can we shoot for something late next week? so keep in mind there’s gonna be some back and forth on this, which. Well, while we’re kind of talking about this, I know there’s gonna be a temptation here for you to say, oh, great. oh yeah, you’re interested in talking. Here’s my calendar link. Feel free to schedule a time at your convenience.
That works okay. On inbound types of marketing, if you’re doing advertising, whether it’s LinkedIn, or some type of, you know, traditional, outreach, you know, display ads, AdWords, things like that. People will, will schedule, if you’re doing outreach outbound, kinda like we’ve been talking about for a lot of our episodes recently.
They won’t, they, they’re not gonna use it. They’re not interested. They don’t, they, they, they wanna feel catered to, so don’t send out your calendar link to them. Now, one thing, unless, unless you’re like on the third or fourth exchange. Then you can say, Hey, I know we’re having a little trouble getting things synced up.
Here’s my calendar. do you just wanna pick a time that works best for you? If they’re responsive and you just aren’t able to work things out, feel free to try it then, but. For the first interaction or two, don’t do it. And in fact, what I like to do, for, especially for different verticals where I know a lot of people have their own scheduling calendars, us, us marketers, we, we love having scheduling calendars.
They’re great. So if you’re working, with people like that, maybe it’s consultants, coaches, those types of people that, you know, even, even some real estate agents. You know what? Just ask, Hey, do you happen to have a calendar link? I’m happy to schedule some time on your calendar, and if they have one, they’ll give.
They’ll send it to you right over, tell you, yep. Book a call. So I would, I would highly, highly recommend. Using that line, that tactic first before telling somebody, here’s my calendar book. A time that really, it really does, it really only works with, like coaches and consultants. And even then you’re gonna get better results by kind of taking an old fashioned approach of, you know, here’s some times I have available, what works best for you?
Next part. Is there’s this temptation to want to pre-qualify people, and I get it. Nobody wants to waste their time on calls with people that aren’t that interested, that aren’t serious, that can’t afford what they’re doing. Don’t try and do pre-qualifying without outbound prospecting. Again, it’s not gonna work.
Here’s what you do instead. So it takes a little bit more thought. However, we take two approaches to this and I, since I get asked this from clients pretty frequently, here’s what I tell them is here. So here’s what I’d recommend you do too, is well, we take the approach of that. We, we don’t, we certainly don’t wanna waste your time.
So what we do is we try and target the right people from the beginning. So that might mean building your list on LinkedIn first so that you can get a pretty good idea where good quality prospects are coming from. And second of all, we’re gonna use copy. So the messaging that we use is gonna be designed to appeal to the people that are good fits for it, and ideally try and repel the people that are, are not a good fit.
So if you are in a market where a lot of the, the, the, what the perceived marketplace is just not a good fit for your services. Using some, some of the language that attracts the right types of, clients. lemme just give you an example here. If you are, you are saying that, you know, a good prospect for you, let’s say is a.
yoga, yoga instructor, but they have multiple studios, so they have their own team. So you would tell them, Hey, we can help all your locations. If they have one location, they’re, they’re gonna read that and say, oh, we only have one location. And I guess maybe they’ll respond back and say, Hey, yeah, we only have one.
And I guess we’re not a good fit. So, the other thing there would be is you get a list of the places that have multiple locations, so that way you’re targeting them and you’re using language that tells you that. Yes, this is, this is for you. So those are gonna be some of the really big things, but now let’s talk about targeting the right people.
So, back when I was first getting this agency started, this was back in 2017, started out cold calling chiropractors, and it became apparent pretty quickly that, we weren’t reaching. Any chiropractors, they were busy with clients, especially the ones that had enough, especially the ones that could afford to do those types of advertising, you know, that we were selling, which was Facebook lead generation for them.
They were busy with, with, with clients. it’s a, it was a pretty saturated market at the time. It still is so. By us picking up the phone and calling, we got very well-trained gatekeepers that weren’t letting us through no matter what we said. So we were not able to use that method to reach the right people at those places.
So what did we do instead? In this case, we did direct mail. We wrote hand sent out, hand addressed letters that were still gonna get looked at by the gatekeeper. But the attention to detail and the messaging there oftentimes meant that it got handed to the chiropractor, the doctor, and they said because it looked important.
[00:21:54] And that was our, our way to get past them, was to say, okay, cold calling isn’t gonna do it. What other methods do we have? cold email also wasn’t terribly effective. LinkedIn would’ve been a good strategy to, to try, But we ended up settling along direct mail for that campaign, and we got enough response and we got people to, to get in our pipeline from, from doing it that way.
So the, the Converse one, if you’re saying, you know, you wanna get in touch with, GMs that, let’s go back to car dealerships. Cold calling is actually pretty effective. It’s pretty common in that industry, but there are people who are used to taking calls pretty frequently during the day. whether that’s from customers or, other, other dealerships and and whatnot.
So they’re not typically in meetings all day and they’re not usually in front of customers either. So cold calling them can actually be an effective strategy. But what if you just realize that you know, you’ve, you wanna use certain types of advertising or you wanna use certain methods. Well, you can adjust your offer to fit to the people that you’re talking to.
let’s say that, you know, you, you have a, a digital ad solution and you wanna use cold calling. and you’re saying, yeah, you know, we’re gonna cold call all the, all the medical practices around the, the state. Well, it might mean that you should probably maybe change your, your offering to be to, A demographic that’s gonna be more receptive to that type of messaging.
So maybe, maybe you gotta work with contractors or maybe you gotta work with dealerships or somebody else where you can do that. So that, that is, also an option for you. So I, I’m gonna probably call it right here. I think, just because I think I’ve given you probably a lot of different ideas. You might have a whole lot of stuff floating around in your head.
And I don’t wanna get it too overwhelming, but I know there can be a lot of, of different parts of a, of an outreach process where things kind of fall apart. So hope you got a lot outta this one. I certainly enjoyed making this one for you. And, we’ll see you on the next episode. Take care everybody.
[00:24:20] Thanks for listening to the Pipelineology podcast. We hope you enjoyed today’s episode and look forward to seeing you on the next one. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider giving us a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
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