Episode 18 – How To Book 15-20 Demos A Week With Cold Email
Nick Abraham, from Elevaate Leads, joins Gary to discuss cold email. Nick shares his strategy for booking 15-20 demos a week using his personalized cold email approach.
Resources
Find Nick at Elevaate Leads
Mail Monitor – Inbox Monitoring Tool
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Nick Abraham: So now when they read the email, it goes really in depth with who they are and it’s completely personalized to the prospect. Now when I did that, our response rate was really well. I was still able to service my current clients and manage the team. And now we’re booking a ton of appointments.
[00:00:17] Intro: 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 onto the show.
[00:00:46] Gary Ruplinger: Hello and welcome everybody to another episode of Pipelineology. Today I am pleased to be joined by Nick Abraham from Elevaate Leads.
Nick, welcome to the show.
[00:00:57] Nick Abraham: Thank you for having me, Gary. I’m super excited to be here.
[00:00:59] Gary Ruplinger: Yeah, I think this is gonna be a fun one today talking, talking about cold emails. But before we jump into that, for anybody out there who’s not familiar with you, could you just share a little bit about kind of your background, your story, and how the heck you got here?
[00:01:13] Nick Abraham: Yeah, so I mean, it’s been a long journey, you know, going from just being a regular kid to learning how to do outbound sales. It’s been a super long journey. But to kind of give you a quick little rundown, my name’s Nick. I am the founder of Elevaate Leads. We are both a SaaS company as well as an outbound sales agency.
So, you know, we help our customers, our clients basically just do one thing and is to book more appointments with their ideal clients. You know, before I kind of did this, you know, I, I, I’m currently a student at the University of Arlington, in my senior year doing finance, which has nothing to do with what I’m doing right now and what I plan to do with my business.
And you know, I’ve just been in the business space, the agency space for so long and just kind of had a really good understanding of it, and it kind of took me to where I am right now.
[00:01:56] Gary Ruplinger: Well, how the heck does a student go from just, studying finance to running, both a SaaS company and an outbound, outbound agency?
[00:02:06] Nick Abraham: Yeah, I mean, it, it was, it was interesting. So like my freshman year in college, I was like growing Instagram pages and so I grew my first one out to like 50,000 followers organically. And then, you know, I started to kind of, and at that, at that moment I was working at a gas station as a part-time student.
And, you know, I started to realize, you know. You can actually make money outside of a hourly job. Like for me, like I’ve been conditioned, you know, my parents are Indian, been raised in Indian household, it’s, you know, become a doctor, you become a lawyer, you know, get a good nine to five job and work, you know, 25, 30 years.
And, you know, I, I was just so conditioned in believing that I just didn’t understand what it was like to make money outside of a regular job. And so working at that gas station while running an Instagram page that was profitable and making me money, and really making me more money than the hours I was spending at the gas station kind of opened my eyes up.
And then I, I really had a good skill at growing these pages. So I was like, okay, my freshman year I’m gonna start a business. I’m gonna start a business and I’m gonna basically help other people grow their Instagram pages. And so that was technically my first agency. And, you know, being a young kid in college, I’m like, okay, I have a really cool service, but how do I get clients?
Like, what, what do I do to go get clients? So they just come to me like, I’m confused. I don’t know how this works. You know, just sitting there waiting, wasn’t doing anything. I was posting on Instagram. I was posting and asking friends and nothing was happening, and then I just kind of was like, okay, what advice?
Just start cold calling. But then I was like, who do I cold call? Like where do I get these numbers? Where do like, you know, do I just go on Google Maps and just start dialing people up? But then I was like, there’s so many businesses and so many places I could start working with. What do I do? And so then that’s when I started learning about, you know, choosing a niche, a profitable niche.
And so I started looking at medical professionals and then I started cold calling them. And you know, obviously doctors aren’t the one to pick up the phone, it’s the front desk assistant. And so I was never able to land these appointments. And so then it took me down a whole, like nine yards trying to figure out how to get these appointments with doctors.
And it, it really, it came down to cold emailing and I learned, you know, the right way to do it, the wrong way to do it. And that’s kind of what. Got me to where I am right now. Eventually with that, the agency, we scaled it up pretty quickly. You know, we got it up to 10 K within, 10 k and monthly reoccurring, revenue.
Within six months we had about 17 clients, but with Instagram management, the margins are super low. and it just wasn’t becoming fun and just with the algorithm changes, it just wasn’t becoming a service that I could do really well at. And so. I ended up stopped doing that and then, you know, I kind of transitioned into kind of doing outbound sales because I just learned how to do outbound, like how to get appointments really quickly and really well, and get qualified appointments as well.
So I was like, okay, what if I do this as a service? And so then that’s kinda what led me to what I do now. I.
[00:04:40] Gary Ruplinger: Well, I love it. And, I think I, I think the listeners and are gonna be particularly interested, I’m pretty interested, I wanna, I wanna know that secret. I wanna know how, what, what does it really take to do cold emails well today?
because I see, gosh, I see that question all the time. Whether it’s in Facebook groups or on LinkedIn or, or, or just any type of, any type of networking event where people are sent. Okay. This is, this seems like it’s scalable. This seems like a good solution, but I just end up in the spam folder. So what, I guess, what are some of the, the things you’ve learned doing cold email that’s made it work for you?
[00:05:16] Nick Abraham: so I mean, first we, we had to consult with a whole bunch of, I would say like network engineers to really figure out. You know how to perfect the deliverability and actually just talk to the CEO of Mail monitor. Really great service with all around, you know, making sure that your email is actually delivering to the lamb box or mailbox inbox is the right word for it.
And you know, first thing that you wanna do is basically you. You have to buy a secondary domain. And so you know what that means is you know, you have your main domain, which is your company website. So for us it’s elevate leads.com, but you don’t ever want a prospect out of that domain just because over, you know, a six month engagement, you might lose deliverability of that email just because you’re reaching out to so many contacts and your response rate isn’t that high.
So you wanna buy a secondary domain that is very similar to your main domain. So for us. What our SDRs and our account executives use to prospect out of is elevate leads.net, elevate leads.info, and elevate leads.co. And all we do is redirect those domains to the main domain. So if they type in and if you type in elevate leads.net, it’s gonna take you to our main website, elevate leads.com.
So those are the domains that we use to prospect out of because eventually those domains deliverability is gonna get worse and you know, there’s nothing we can do about it, you know, but. You know, we just don’t want our main domain to ever get ruined just because we have so many customers and clients that, you know, we have to email out of.
And so that’s the first thing. And then what you wanna do from there, and this is like really technical stuff that, you know, it takes you forever to kind of figure out. But there’s these things called, like, there’s the DNS and the way that Adrian explained it to me, it’s basically. How everything just kind of works together.
And you basically wanna make sure that there’s these certain records on there, the DA, the D Kim, the SPF, and the Amex records. And I know Gary, you’re probably just thinking, what is this all about? But all I hear
[00:06:59] Gary Ruplinger: is pieces of flare, you know, just,
[00:07:02] Nick Abraham: but basically you just wanna make sure that those records are properly set up.
And what it basically does is just, it helps build your, the trust of that domain with like servers like Google, What are the other ones? Outlook. Yahoo. Just lets them know that you’re, you know, this is a reputable person. This is actually like some, this is the right person that’s emailing and it’s not just some, you know, scammer from some country, right?
and so that’s basically what you wanna do to get it all set up, and then you wanna slowly ramp up the amount of emails you do. So when you buy a new domain. And you should never do this, you should never send out, you know, a hundred same templated messages every single day. You know, your domain deliverability will get completely ruined.
If you do that, you wanna slowly ramp up the amount of messages you do. You know, you wanna send five, one day, you wanna send 10 the next day, 15, 20, 25, solely ramp it up and. That’s how you really get amazing deliverability. Like our email deliverability is absolutely insane. And that’s, that’s really key with emails, right?
So if you can’t get your emails in the inbox, it doesn’t matter how well written your offer is or how well written, the actual copy of the message is, like your, your, your prospects will never see it. So that’s the first thing. You wanna make sure your email deliverability is good and then. You wanna find the contacts that are your ideal customer profile.
So there’s a ton of really good databases out there. for example, Apollo Up lead and basically you wanna match whoever your ideal customer profile is. you wanna find their contacts. So you know, for example, if we’re targeting marketing agencies, we’re gonna find marketing agencies that really fit who we work with.
You know, they’re, you know, above a certain revenue, they have this amount of employees, and we want to find the decision makers of those contexts. And you wanna make sure that they’re verified and enriched. And what that means is that the email is still valid. So you don’t have a high bouts and then you, you know, when you write your emails, and this is really like something I discovered whenever I was working in the, the medical space.
If you send the same template of message email, and it’s automated, everybody knows immediately. They know that it’s automated and there’s nothing that you can do, right? everyone knows when they see the hey first name. Saw that you’re working at company name would love to connect. Those are templated messages on LinkedIn.
They know when you put these messages in email, it, it’s just so obvious. And so don’t do that. It, it’s not gonna work. Right. Especially if you’re messaging like, like, you know, C-level executives like the CEO, the founder, you know, like those people, like, they get hit with thousands and thousands and thousands of messages every single month.
And so if you’re doing a template, a message, you will not stand out and you will not get a response. This is how you personalize your messages at scale without doing the regular placeholders. And so when I was doing my cool emailing to medical professionals, I noticed that if I was to personalize every single email, if I was actually to look the doctor up on his LinkedIn or his website and write a little sentence or two to give him a compliment about where he went to college or maybe, you know, he put a little fun fact about him on his website.
And I mentioned that in the email that my response rate was really, really, really good. Right. But you know, if you’re the founder of your company, it’s really hard for you to be able to manage all your clients and still prospect at the same time. You don’t have the, you don’t have the same amount of time to do 30, 40, 50, like personalized cold emails, right?
And so that had me thinking, okay, how can I systemize this? How can I basically personalize messages at scale, right? How can I basically delegate this to someone and still see extremely good results? And so. Luckily, I was reading a book called From Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross, and basically what Aaron Ross does, he has an outbound sales agency himself and he, he’s, he’s.
Absolutely incredible of what he is done. And what he did was basically he had his bef before his, he has a team of SDRs and their job is to cold call and basically get appointments set right? Like any kind of SDR and what he would do. So,
[00:10:47] Gary Ruplinger: not to interrupt you, just go ahead. For anybody who doesn’t know, what is an SDR.
[00:10:51] Nick Abraham: It’s a sales development representative. And so usually with like outbound sales teams, they’re on the lower end. When I say lower end, they’re just, you know, the base level. Then you got the account executives, you got sales engineers that’ll sit in the meetings, answer technical questions. but that’s kinda how, like an outbound sales agency’s kind of, you know, built, and so these SDRs, they’re doing all the prospecting, sending out the emails, sending out the messages, cold calling.
Following up their job is basically to get appointments set for the account executive. And the account executive is who kind of comes in and does the sales, right? He kind of, you know, closes the deal and so. Aaron Ross, he built a really good system. What he did was basically, before the SDRs were even able to cold call, he would have the people who built these contact lists write, you know, one to two bullet points about that prospect.
And so immediately when the SDR cold calls, he’s not just saying a regular script. He’s saying something very unique to the prospect, right? So it’s like no longer, Hey Gary, are you interested in X, Y, Z? It’s like, Hey Gary, I listened to your latest podcast episode saying X, Y, Z, and I really found that interesting.
Do you have five to 10 minutes to talk? You’re much more likely to say yes to something like that, right Gary?
[00:11:59] Gary Ruplinger: That. In fact, that is exactly, I think what one of your, I believe one of your interns did. He complimented my most recent podcast episode. So I said, well, okay, this isn’t, this isn’t quite copy and paste.
What’s, what’s the deal here, Uhhuh? So,
[00:12:13] Nick Abraham: it works. Yeah. And so I kind of get into that. So that’s what Aaron Ross did with his SDRs. I mean, I think he scaled the company to like a hundred million before he sold it. something like that. Some insane numbers and just doing a method similar to this. And so then they had me thinking, okay, what if I took that same route, but instead of cold calling, I did it for emails.
So what if I had a copywriter who had great English and was creative, basically do all the research for me? They researched each prospect, they wrote one to three sentences about the pro. And then I used mail merges to mer all mail, merge it all together and be able to send, you know, 70 to 80 completely personalized, unique emails to my prospects automated.
So now when they read the email, it goes really in depth with who they are and it’s completely personalized to the prospect. So now when I did that, our response rate was really well, I was still able to service my current clients and manage the team, and now we’re booking a ton of appointments. And so once I kind of realized this, I was like.
This is, this is really something that no other agency out in the world is doing like this is, this is something that’s huge. And so we take that same approach with LinkedIn. We take that same approach with however we do our outbound, but we focus on being able to personalize our messages at scale.
[00:13:28] Gary Ruplinger: Well, how the heck do you do that?
I’m, my head is like, this sounds like a great strategy, Uhhuh, but how, how do you kind of manage that and keep all those kind of wheels moving without it just completely falling apart? Yeah, like there’s, there’s a big part of me that just feels like butterflies in my stomach and says, what happens when that automation breaks, when that mail merge is blank?
And then nothing, nothing’s working anymore.
[00:13:52] Nick Abraham: So, so the way we set it up was we have a copywriter and basically the copywriter, her job is just to go through the list and write the sentences out, and then we have a head of copy that basically, checks it to make sure that it’s good and valid. And then she’ll be the one to upload that into the, like we use Mailshake to send out her emails and so she’ll be the one to.
Upload that into there. And then, she’s the one who’s, you know, end of the day checking and make sure it’s good, it’s qual quality sentences, and it’s, you know, actually there in there. And then, we just set it all up. And then I think Mailshake actually has a feature where if, let’s say a mail merge isn’t populated correctly, then it will tell you and not send out that email.
and so that helps us kind of, you know, make sure that all the emails that are being sent have a field in there.
[00:14:38] Gary Ruplinger: Okay. That makes sense. Mm-hmm. So I know when you kind of came on here, we were gonna talk about get, how this can turn into, I think you said, 15 to 20 demos a week by taking this personalized approach.
That’s, that’s huge. I guess how many, how many emails do you even have to send out to, to do that with this personalized approach? Or could you give us some kind of insight into what, what that looks like?
[00:15:03] Nick Abraham: Yeah, so I can kind of give you the numbers, right? So typically when you do personalized emails and your emails warmed up, like the numbers that we want to aim for and the e emails that we consistently try to hit is a 70% open, a 13% response, and about a 5% booking, right?
So if we send out about 80 emails Monday through Friday. That’s about 400 emails, right? And then times a 5% booking. It’s about 20 demos set, and that’s on a really good week. But, you know, usually we’ll hit around the 15 to 17. and then we’ll do other things as well, like, I would say our team on a weekly basis with discovery calls.
We would probably do around, I would say 26 to 30, maybe a little bit more than that. every single week and it’s, you know, but we, we do a, like a lot more omnichannel follow-ups. That’s just typically our, like if we were just to do cold emailing, we’ll land around that 20 to 15 or 15 to 20 range.
[00:15:57] Gary Ruplinger: Very cool. So what are, I guess, some of the insights you found on how to make this work smoothly? because mm-hmm. At first glance, it sounds like, boy, I, I need to hire three full-time employees just to make this work. I assume that’s not the case, that each client doesn’t require three full-time employees.
[00:16:13] Nick Abraham: No, no, not at all.
So the best way to kind of go about it is in like, you know. Using like, freelancers is a really solid way to kind of go about it. Like you could find copywriters and, just having them like, you know, you sending them a Google sheet and then having them fill it out, with the list and stuff. And then you, honestly, you could manage this all by yourself with just one freelancer to basically, do the, like the data entry part where, you know, she fills in the contact list.
it actually, you know. With all the technology out there nowadays, it’s actually really easy to manage, right? So, the way I would do it if I was starting from scratch again was, you know, if I had, if I don’t have any clients, I would do the personalization myself. because why would I wanna spend money and, you know, my time isn’t really worth much if I don’t have any clients.
I would just go ahead and use a database like UP Leader or Apollo to get my contact list, and then I would just go in and research each prospect individually and then upload it to Mailshake and let it go. But let’s say I do get a client and then, you know, my time is a little bit more valuable and I need to, you know, make sure that I delegate in the right way.
I would go hire a freelancer, and then what that freelancer does is just do what I was doing with the personalization, and then I would be the one to check it and make sure that it’s good. And then I would upload that into Mailshake and let it run. And then once again, if I sign another client, my time is getting a little bit more scarce and scarce and so, you know, I’m gonna have to delegate again.
And then I would look to hire maybe an SDR, and then look to have him manage my account, but also my client’s accounts as well with if we’re doing outbound prospecting as the main level. And so that’s kind of how I’d go about it. but typically what I found is that, you know, one copywriter or one, yeah, one copywriter can manage about two clients’ accounts.
And one SDR can manage roughly two to three accounts depending on, you know, what you’re kind of doing with your follow-ups and stuff.
[00:17:58] Gary Ruplinger: Okay. Very cool. So I guess, when it comes to the personalization, what are some of the things you found are good, points to, I guess, emphasize, because I’m guessing it’s probably not the standard, tokens that we have in our automation.
Softwares of company name and, those types of things.
[00:18:17] Nick Abraham: Yeah, so it depends really who the, the target is. But for general senses, like, you know, we try not to say things that are really superficial, like, oh, congrats on being on Forbes, or Congrats on, you know, winning this award, or things like that. Like those are like.
Those are decent compliments. Like if we can’t find anything else to write about, we’ll put that in there. but like I found the best compliments are the ones where you really dive deep into who the person is, right? So like my favorite ones that our copywriters find is they find out who this their favorite sports team is.
For example, they’ll say something like, oh, like I saw that you’re your major Lakers fan. Are you watching the game this Monday? Right. Things like that, those are the lines that really get your prospect thinking like, wow, this person actually did the research and like, we just had a demo this last week.
And the line that, and I, I specifically remember the prospect telling our account executive this, in the email it said something about like, I saw how you love an, like an Americano coffee if that’s how you like it, or something like that. maybe I could send one over, if we can have a 15 minute chat, things like that.
Literally the prospect, she said she never replies to cold emails. She gets ton of these every single day. But that single email really dived deep into her her LinkedIn and found the one sentence where she speaks about her favorite coffee. And she was like, that made me wanna respond. And so that’s why she got on the call and she said that’s the only reason she got on the call.
And so it was just interesting and we get that all the time, like they, like a lot of prospects are like, wow, you found like something crazy about me. Like something that no one really ever says outside of like my inner circle. So it is pretty cool that you actually did the research for it and that’s how it works.
[00:19:53] Gary Ruplinger: That’s really cool. So are you, I guess, finding this information about them, do you, you said you’re kind of taking their social media profiles, like LinkedIn or I think you mentioned tools like Apollo? Yeah. or their website or kind of all of the above or.
[00:20:08] Nick Abraham: Once again, it like, it depends on the niche.
Like if you’re looking at local businesses, a lot of these, like, like dental clinic or dental medical practices, like they don’t really have much on their LinkedIn profile outside of where they went to school and stuff. So typically the website’s the best place to look on there, because usually they have like a, meet our team or meet our.
Meet our family and then they’ll go into like a good bio about them. but typically I would say for most of our clients, where we look and start off with is their LinkedIn profiles. then we just kind of do a quick look. We’ll look at, you know, maybe their latest post if they made a post a day ago saying something about, I don’t know.
something that happened recently within their clients. We probably mentioned that in the email. but yeah, typically it’s usually just scanning their social media profiles. I try to stay away from like their personal stuff, like Instagram and Facebook, just because it’s, you know, that’s more personal stuff.
I, I want to make sure that it’s something more business related. So website or LinkedIn is usually the two places that we go.
[00:21:02] Gary Ruplinger: Well, that’s very cool. And is, I guess, is this a scalable approach? Like if, uh mm-hmm. For, for somebody who’s, you know, they’ve got multiple sales teams or, or something, can, can this grow with them?
[00:21:13] Nick Abraham: Yeah, definitely. So I mean, like, it requires a little bit more pieces and like, once again, like this approach is really good if you’re targeting like C-level executives, but like, let’s. You’re targeting like, supply chain officers or compliance managers, like, you know, you gotta have to kinda do the research.
Like obviously you don’t wanna put too much work into something where you can get the same results with doing little to none. Right. For example, like one of our clients, they basically target supply chain officers and we wouldn’t. Send a personalized line to these, the supply chain officers, right? And the reason why is because chief supply chain officers, like they don’t get a ton of outbound messages like on a, on a monthly basis, right?
They might get a few, they may get none at all. and so when you send a message that is completely templated and it goes direct to the offer. They will respond most of the time. so it doesn’t make sense for us to kind of do the personalized line. Same thing with compliance managers. Like if you go straight into the offer, they’ll reply most of the time just because they don’t get that many outbound messages.
You just have to kind of be unique in the sense with how you write your message. But if you’re writing to C-level executives, it’s probably the best move. Like if you’re, let’s say, like I would say the, the people who are getting hit with a ton of outbound messages are, small to medium sized businesses, founders, CEOs, Those, those fields right there, like you should probably personalize it to get that response. But you know, the, like, to answer your question, is it scalable? It is. If you have the right systems in place, it, it really is like, you know, we’re managing about, I would say right now, we just brought on four new last week.
We’re managing right now, 17 different email accounts, to, you know, book appointments for our clients and you know, that’s what, 17 times, 800 emails in total. I’m gonna pull out my calculator and show you. That’s about 13,000 emails that we’re doing on a monthly basis for our clients. And so it is scalable.
You just gotta have the right systems in place and have like a, a team of copywriters ready to go, and like SDRs to kind of manage the accounts and stuff. But it, it is really scalable. You just gotta have to figure out the systems and processes behind it.
[00:23:12] Gary Ruplinger: So if somebody’s kind of looking to, to skip the line here of trying to figure out how to hire SDRs and trained copywriters and all that, I believe you, you do have a service for this type of thing, correct.
[00:23:23] Nick Abraham: Yeah, so I mean like, kind of like to explain how we kind of go about our business. You know, we were, we started as a, an agency that we did the outbound prospecting for, you know, mostly other agencies and a lot of, other like B2B businesses. And so yeah, we, we do have a service for it. This is our main tip service.
And the cool thing about us is that. And I don’t wanna seem him too salesy or anything, but we really go by pay per performance. Like we, we only get paid whenever we generate appointments. I’m a really big component of believing in our service and I believe that we really provide the best service in the industry.
And so, we only wanna get paid if we can provide results for you. So that’s kinda how we go about it. but we also have a tech, tech side of our company, and this is where our SaaS product kind of comes in and it’s basically. You know, just helped us really rise to the top with our prospecting. And so for a lot of people, sometimes it makes more sense to use our software rather than kind of go for the full service.
[00:24:15] Gary Ruplinger: Oh, very cool. So if somebody wants more about that, is it your web? Should we send ’em to your website or should I text message? You stalk you on LinkedIn?
[00:24:24] Nick Abraham: You have to send me a personalized cold email and then maybe I’ll work. But, the best place to go is training.elevaateleads.com and it is with two a, so E-L-E-V-A-A-T-E leads.com.
That’s a good place to kind of see an entire, I would say like live demo of how we kind of build out the systems to out do to, to do outbound prospecting. But let’s say you want to see the software, a live demoed software, then you can just go to demo dot elevate leads.com and you could see a really good live demo of our software and see a whole bunch of customer results and customer testimonials below it.
[00:24:59] Gary Ruplinger: Okay, perfect. Well may be sure to put both of those in the show notes for anybody who’s looking for that. Nick, is there anything I haven’t asked you today that I, I should have? That’s,
[00:25:10] Nick Abraham: That’s pretty much it. I just wanted to teach your audience how to personalize the cold emails at scale and be able to get more appointments.
[00:25:16] Gary Ruplinger: No, I, I love it. I, I think we’re gonna look into it too and see if we can use, use that to get more appointments for ourselves. So, very cool strategy. Nick, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate your time today. And, everybody go check out, Elevaate Leads. if you wanna get, more, appointments from your cold emails.
[00:25:35] Outro: 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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