E30 – How To Get Meetings With Your Ideal Clients

E30 – How To Get Meetings With Your Ideal Clients

In this episode, Gary discusses strategies and tips for securing meetings with ideal clients. The session features a breakdown of how to make yourself or your company someone prospects want to meet with, using examples of successful campaigns, personal branding on LinkedIn, and innovative outreach methods like personalized gifts and humor. The episode also covers the importance of follow-ups to ensure potential clients stay engaged. 

Discover:

00:00 Introduction and Overview

00:18 Welcome and Agenda

00:51 Be Someone They Want to Meet With

03:21 The Importance of Personal Branding

08:31 Effective Communication Strategies

11:35 Right Message, Right Person

16:23 Creative Outreach Techniques

19:32 The Power of Follow-Up

21:59 Unboxing the Cookie Box

22:56 The Follow-Up Dilemma

24:03 Recap and Key Takeaways

25:03 Help and Services Offered

26:24 Q&A Session Begins

28:20 Effective Messaging Strategies

32:06 Cold Calling vs. LinkedIn

40:05 Final Questions and Wrap-Up

41:50 Closing Remarks

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Hey, Gary here again, and today’s episode is gonna be another replay of an event we recently did, this one all about how to get meetings with your ideal clients. So this one is filled with content. There’s some q and a at the end. You’re not gonna want to miss this one. Hope you enjoy. All right. Welcome everybody to How to Get Meetings with Your Ideal Prospects.

[00:00:25] I want to thank you all for taking some time out of your day today to jump on this. We’re gonna be going about 30 minutes or so, and then we’ll take some time for questions after that. Like I said, if you do have anything you want to mention as it comes up, feel free to put it in the chat. I will be checking it periodically.

I’ve got it over here on my right hand side screen, so if you see me looking over there, that’s because I’m looking at the chat window. Alright, so without further ado, let’s, let’s jump into it. Let’s talk about how to get some meetings. So on the agenda today, be someone they want to meet with. So before we talk about them, we’re gonna talk about you and things you can do, whether you’re the founder of the company, an executive, or you work in marketing or business development, you don’t have any control over what the boss is doing.

We’re gonna talk about kind of how that entire spectrum works and what you can be doing. Talk about how be more human. And man, oh man. You’re gonna love the example I show you here of when that runs amuck. Probably one of the more interesting campaigns we’ve done recently is the 19% appointment rate, not not response rate.

Appointment rate, that we did for a client recently. We’re gonna break that down. And it was one message. I’m sorry, it was two messages. We’re gonna break down the first one though. The second one was simply a, Hey, did you get my previous message? Type of one? We’re talking about showing up like no one else.

Had a prospect I talked to earlier this week who said, Hey, you showed up like no one else. I thought that was a good way to phrase it. We’re talking about following up. If you’ve been on my previous events, you know, I love to talk about that. And then we’re gonna take some time for q and a. So let’s jump into it real quick, just about me.

I am the host of the Pipelineology Podcast. My name is Gary Ruplinger. I’ve got 22 years of marketing experience. Actually, I started, I was looking at this. It was year 2000 and I was still in college and I was selling CDs on eBay from my dorm room. I’d actually go down to the computer lab because they had a scanner to get the pictures.

Because I didn’t even have a digital camera back then. That, that’s how long ago this was. Right. This, this wasn’t even when digital cameras were separate from your phone. This is when they were really expensive and you know, you had the ones with the little floppy disc drives and stuff in them. Anyway, in my corporate career I ran call centers for car dealerships.

So we handled all of their inbound leads and set appointments. So this is where I really learned a lot about how to schedule meetings. And now that is what my company does, is we help manage outreach for business to business types of companies, and that can be agencies, consultants. authors. We work with manufacturing companies, healthcare, biotech.

Basically, if you are looking for business to business relationships, that is kind of what we do now. And I happen to think that the opening credits to peacemaker are the best ever. If you disagree, I want to see what you think is actually better than those opening credits. They’re the best. So be someone they want to meet with.

[00:03:24] This is our friend, the most interesting man in the world. So when we talk about this particular concept, what do, what do we mean? So there’s several different levels you can think about it. There’s the company level, right? There’s the brand, there’s what that represents. And then there’s the individual level.

And like I said, if you are, if you are in sales or or marketing and you work at, let’s say you work at a a Ford dealership or something like that, we’ll take an easy example. There’s not a whole lot of control that you’re gonna have over what Ford in Michigan is advertising over all their commercials and things like that, right. You don’t have a lot of influence over that, but that brand, that represents something and that’s gonna bring, you know, give people a certain feel for what your company does. And this works at a much smaller level as well. Are you somebody that is your company somebody that they’ve heard of? Is there content out there?

Did they hear about you on a podcast? All these things make a difference when it comes to how many meetings can you get? Are you interesting to them? Do they think you have something to offer? For example, I’ve got a client right now, he’s in Los Angeles. And he has worked with companies like the CW, right?

The TV network, Warner Brothers. He’s worked with the director, Ron Howard. So these types of things, when he’s reaching out to people, make it really easy for him to get connection, or not just even get connections, but get meetings simply because they, they look at his background and say, wow, this is an interesting guy.

And it’s, it’d be easy enough, right? A lot of people say, my background’s not that interesting. I haven’t really done much of anything, but you didn’t share any of it. So they, that, that’s the idea. They don’t share any of their background either, so there’s no chance for it to be interesting. So even if your background, you think it’s dull, sharing it on places like LinkedIn and making sure it’s in your, your bio and things like that can be really helpful.

And even if you are trying to get meetings and not using LinkedIn. Keep in mind, it’s, it’s still probably gonna be in play just because it’s such a big network for professionals. So even if it’s not the main focus, it’s gonna come into play. For example, here’s somebody who sent me a LinkedIn connection, and this would be a good example of probably not what to do.

You can see Steven here. There’s no profile picture. and he’s immediately pitching me right there. So I, I know everybody sees these and they say, well, they must work. I see them all the time. let me kind of, let me tell you what’s probably happening here is these are, this is probably a fake account, probably not a real person.

They’ve this, whoever company is doing this, it probably has a hundred, maybe a hundred different account stuff. If this one gets burned in and it’ll get burned in a couple weeks because they’re just pitching in the connection invite. It’s gonna go away soon. So if you are thinking as a person who, a real human being like is on this meeting.

On this event that this is gonna work for you, you’re, you’re probably gonna find out that you’re gonna get a whole lot of ignores. People are gonna say, no, I don’t, I don’t know this person. And it’ll get restricted. So just kinda keep that in mind. I know we all see them a lot. so I just kind of wanted to, to say that’s probably a good way not to do it, for example.

Let’s talk about somebody who’s a little bit more interesting here and, full disclosure. I don’t know Anna Lee other than she’s a connection to mine on LinkedIn. Then I ran across while doing some research to find some interesting things for slides for this particular presentation. And you can see her tagline there, slinging SEO advice around the world.

We’ll write for burritos. Isn’t that great? We’ll write for burritos and, you know, these, these are the types of little details that make a difference when it comes to getting connections, getting conversations started. If you’ve looked at mine, you’ll see it says things like beer enthusiast on it. And I probably have just as many conversations about what types of IPA I’m drinking lately as I do about actual business things.

But it gets the conversation started, it gets, it gets things moving, and you can actually talk to somebody. So some other ones that we’ve seen, you know, on a mission to find the best margarita. Fueled by coffee and cupcakes. Ninth worst surfer in California. And Frank Kern used to use that one. I, or something very similar to it.

I’m, I’m trying to do it from memory. We’ll write for burritos just like we saw beer enthusiast, as you can see on mine, avid surfer. my client, Chris, that’s, that’s his, on his, and people, people want to talk about surfing with him all the time because it makes him a little bit more interesting. So when, before we talk, like I said before, we talk about your ideal prospects.

Think about how you want your ideal prospects to view you. not just your company, right? Where, you know, when with meetings, meetings are a person to person thing. Meaning if, you know, I’m, you know, I’m Gary and there’s Kevin, Kevin there. It’s, it’s not Pipelineology and Kevin’s company. It’s Gary and Kevin meeting, or Gary and Otis meeting.

Maybe Alex and Tom are gonna meet, but, think, think about it that way. So. This whole, who is this as person? You know what’s interesting about them? These things all help. So. The other one is kind of extension of that is, is essentially being human. I, I still, I still see this quite a bit, maybe less so with, people like in, Europe or America or North, north America, really.

But you still see this, like I had, I had somebody reach out from, I believe it was either India or Bangladesh. I’m, I’m sorry, I can’t recall which one. But, essentially it was very formally written here. It’s like, it was word vomit of here’s everything we offer. Please send your requirements. And, you know, we’ll get back to you and, you know, so the not interested.

No thanks. Go away when you want to get meetings, writing like you talk, communicating the way you normally would to somebody if you’re sitting next to them, talking to them, is, is gonna be your best bet. And this isn’t legal formal writing. You don’t have to worry, Hey, does an Oxford comma go here? Is that, should that be a colon or a hyphen?

It doesn’t matter, right? It can be informal, it can be off the cuff. Just talk naturally. if you’ve ever communicated with me, you know, I like to use emojis. I’ll throw animated gifs in my, in my messages. Is that professional? Maybe not. Does it work? Absolutely. So I think a lot of times, you know, we get into this whole, yeah, here’s, here’s the procedure, here’s what you need to do.

Maybe you’re training somebody and. Kind of all of a sudden you kind of beat the, the thinking about them right out of them. And, and I’ve seen it happen, especially, especially with business development. You say, here’s the procedure. Do it like this, do it this way every time. And what happens is you end up in a lot of scenarios where a person just was allowed to think a little bit that wouldn’t be happening.

For example, let’s take Monica here. Monica reached out to me back on April 5th, today. We’re doing the event, it’s April 20th. In that time, she has managed to message me 17 times via LinkedIn. InMail, despite me saying I’m not in, I just push the button every time. At this point, I’m just curious to see how long it’ll go, but you can see that as of yesterday, on the very far right hand side of your screen, she still messaged me at 10:16 AM.

Thank you for your response. And I, I, I don’t know what, I don’t know what the deal is here, but clearly this is a procedure that’s gone amuck in given the way that there’s, there’s a real person that is, that is typing these in and I don’t understand. But again, this is, this is kind of like person not thinking, a person not using human inte using any human intelligence whatsoever.

To, to respond to you, 17 times. Can you, can you believe that? So I’m, I’m curious how long this is gonna go, and I’ll, I guess, come, come back, come back next month, and, if you, if you remember it, shoot it in the comments and, I’ll, I’ll let you know how many it ended up at, what the final tally was.

But yeah, right now, 17 messages after I’ve said, after I’ve said I’m not interested. So. All right, let’s talk about some things you that are the right thing to do. So right message, right person. So if you are on the last event, you know that, we talked about this then, and we’re gonna kind of, kind of review it again.

[00:11:48] because this is kind of the whole key to this is what is the right message for the person and this, right, there’s different messages for an owner of a company, a CEO. heck, the message can be different depending on what their title is as the owner. Are they an owner? Are they a founder? Are they a president?

Are they the CEO? right. That even the message there can vary a little bit because it can depend on how they view themselves and how, what type, what type of company they’re running. Right? A SaaS company person, probably SaaS founder, you know, a person running a, a plumbing business in, in your area probably says owner, But getting the right message that’s gonna be relevant to that person, right? If you’re even different levels of the company, the message should be a little bit different. If you do some type of technical analytical stuff and you’re talking to, you know, the director of marketing, you can probably give more details.

If you’re talking to, you know, the, the C-Suite person, probably more results driven type of messaging. So we’re gonna show you kind of an example here in just a second of what, That inaction. So as I alluded to kind of earlier, the 19, actually it was 19.5%. So, we sent out some cold emails and weren’t even personalized, so it was kind of crazy, right.

but the 19.5% appointment weren’t cold emails. So let me kind of set the stage for you, because this was for a client in, California law firm. And this campaign was a struggle because they wanted to build relationships with, with doctors and other professionals in their market to get more referrals. So it sounded like an interesting one to me.

And you know, they had some ideas about who they wanted to reach and once we started doing it, we realized that, you know, some of the meetings we generated that weren’t necessarily who they wanted to meet with and other connections were completely irrelevant. And we thought, you know, we have this huge market of people.

That aren’t responsive. we thought, what, what the heck are we gonna do to get more meetings? because that’s what we were trying to do is get in-person meetings. because they wanted to work with people who were local to them to get. And again, it was kind of, the idea was to get more referrals. So I’m gonna actually show you what we did here.

And you’re gonna say, this isn’t rocket science. And I’m gonna agree with you that this absolutely was not, but it worked. So I’ve, I’ve redacted a little bit of the information, but you can definitely get the gist of what we did here. So, here’s the message that we sent. So it said, you know, Hey, you recently connected with my boss on LinkedIn, and he asked me to reach out and this and this.

The, her picture was at the bottom of this, by the way. We didn’t split test it. because it was a very, it was a small list to start, so I didn’t have enough to do to, to test on this. But essentially said, Hey, you know, I want to, here’s, here’s who I am. Introduce yourself. Here’s what I’m looking for. And I’d love to stop.

I meet in person. And I think of the people who replied to this, only one person, maybe two, said, no, I’m not interested. And that was part of the big thing was that. A lot of people said yes, or a lot of people replied first of all, and then a lot of almost everybody who’s who, who did reply said yes and why?

Why was that one is because it was, it was part of it, right? The right list is, these were all the relevant ones we could find from LinkedIn. Then we emailed them and we. Explain very clearly in our first sentence why we were, Hey, you connected with my boss. Hence why her boss didn’t message him. because this is her job.

[00:15:30] This is what she does. And we asked, you know, asked to meet. And, like I said, these, these, you don’t have to, you can outthink yourself, right? I, this was probably the fifth or sixth version of a message that we came up with. And this is the one that finally worked. And I thought, I thought the other first four were far more clever.

But they didn’t work. So sometimes you outthink yourself, but so maybe that past one that’s showing up, right? You’re getting, you’re connecting with the right people, giving them a message that’s relevant to them. That’s not gonna work in every case, right? There’s a lot of situations where you know you’ve got more competition.

I know a lot of us on this call. You know, as consultants or people in marketing, you know, even in in healthcare there’s, there’s a lot of people clamoring for attention. So it’s about thinking a little bit differently about how you show up. So, on the right hand side of this one, you can see a coffee mug.

And here’s that coffee mug is right here. I was gonna do it on camera, but I realized my, my camera thing on these is typically really, really tiny. so that’s a picture of, of this. And here’s what I do, is I will connect with somebody on LinkedIn. And for people that I’m saying, you know, these are the, these are the, these are my top prospects.

These are the one people I’d really like to meet with. I’ll mail them a coffee mug and say, Hey, I’d like to meet you for a virtual cup of coffee. Let me buy the coffee. and, and here’s the thing, it, it gets a really good response from people. Again, there’s nothing. Right. It’s not rocket science. It takes a little bit of work.

It takes some management. There’s some logistics to it, but. You’re, you’re really not seeing a lot of things like that despite that there’s, I mean, I’ve, I’ve talked about things like this on my podcast on multiple occasions. if you listen to the episode of Randy Geron, we’ll talk about the sending people, chocolate shoes.

on my account based marketing episode with Mike Maynard, we talk about mailing stones, rocks, and, saying, Hey, we’re just the stones throwaway, all these things. You know, you get a, you get kind of a little bit clever with it. Nobody’s really doing it. I think in the last year I’ve received one, maybe somewhat similar thing like this for somebody prospecting me and all of a sudden, there, there, there’s not a lot of clutter there anymore.

And I’ll, I’ll show you an example of one that I received about a year ago. But, if you are looking for more ideas for this, kind of get the creative juices flowing, one so you can kind of come up with ones that you think are gonna be relevant and work well for you. books like, ultimate Sales Machine.

by Chet Holmes. If you read his, dream 100 chapter, that should give you kind of some insight as well as actually this one, it’s called Get the Meeting, yellow cover by Stu Heineke. I have not read it cover to cover, but the chapter five on giving gifts. Pretty interesting stuff. caveat, just like with most books that, you know, were not written in the past month, the digital stuff’s a little bit outdated, but you know, the, the direct mail stuff’s pretty interesting in there, so.

When it comes to getting meetings, especially your, if it’s your ideal prospects, they’re generally busy. They’re gonna generally be tough to reach. So this is part of, you know, what you’re gonna need to do is show up like nobody else is showing up. for them. So really think about what you’re doing there.

you know, we’re, we’re constantly testing new things to try and figure out what’s working, working well. For example, right now we’re doing some personalized video messaging. Jury’s still out on whether that’s gonna work, but don’t be afraid to try things that are a little bit outside the, the traditional, yeah.

Cold calling, emailing, LinkedIn outreach type of stuff. I think beyond that a little bit, and you’ll be kind of surprised how, how well some of this stuff can work just because. It, it’s off of most people’s radar or it’s hard, right? It’s a little more work. This is probably usually my favorite topic to talk about, follow up.

And I like to say this is probably about the closest thing to a magic bullet that you’re gonna find. if you talk to, talk to Evan, my, my assistant that we were talking about, Evan, I think he’s, he’s still on. This is pretty much, you know, on. Monday mornings, I say, what? What type of follow up are you gonna do?

And because we found that when you follow up, that’s where the appointments come from. That’s where the meetings come from. So you want to show up, you want to show up like no one else, and then you want to keep showing up, right? You don’t need to harass people. You don’t need to do it every day. But continuing to follow up in a sequence, whether that’s three messages.

you know, over the course of a couple weeks, weather events, you know, a dozen messages over the course of a year with different types of strategies, you know, different types of, of kind of drips and, and contacts and connections with people is, this is where essentially if you, if you want more meetings, this is where that will happen is continuing to do that follow up messaging people, maybe somebody responding, Hey, let’s meet next week, and you message them in.

Nothing, nothing happens. You say, Hey, just want to check back and see, you know, do you don’t want to do, you just don’t want to meet and they don’t respond again. And, you know, maybe three or four messages later they say, yep. hey, I am ready. I apologize for not, not responding sooner. but yeah, I think we’re ready to go.

And then they meet with you and then all of a sudden you, you know, you’re like, oh, the deal’s closed. I’ve got a new client already. it it, it’s surprising like that. So, do, do the follow up, continue to message people. People get busy, especially now, right? They’re, they’re pulled in a thousand different directions.

a lot of times if you don’t, if you don’t respond for, for right, for a lot of professionals, if you don’t respond to that email at the top of your inbox, by the time you look back at it, you might not even be in, might not even be on visible on that first page of your inbox anymore. so just kind of keep that in mind.

That’s

[00:21:39] part of the, you know, part of why we follow up. And yeah, a lot of people do it because that’s, that’s where the meetings come from. So. I know again, it’s not rocket science, but trust me, this, this part is, is worth every, you know, anything you, whatever you’re investing in, it’s probably worth it. So let’s talk about another example then.

Like I said, this is one I thought was really interesting, so nowhere to go. So over here. So this is, this is a cookie box I got from, from this company and I thought it was pretty interesting. Never, never met them. I wasn’t familiar with who they were, but I, you know, there were, there were cookies in them. I, I, obviously the box is empty now.

I, I did eat them. but it was brightly colored. I thought, this is, this is a really kind of cool idea. I wondered what they’re offering and. If you ask me now, the answer is, I, I don’t actually know because they sent this. You have the nice little, there’s a nice little handwritten card, that little blue one you see there, and a nice little handwritten note on the back of it.

And I thought, okay, cool. I, I’m gonna, I’m gonna wait and see to see what they’re offering. because I, I don’t know if I’m interested in it, but I’ll talk to them. because I just thought it was really innovative and really neat. I think it was probably a month or two later before I ever heard from, from the person who sent it, like his, his name was Marcus.

And I said, yeah, I did get it. It was very cool. And I, he essentially said, Hey, thanks. I, I haven’t heard from him since. There, there was, there was no offer and there’s Right. I was, I was, like I said, totally willing to meet with them. I am. because I was, I, I, I was kinda shocked that they would take this time and.

To invest this money to send me this cool thing that I’m talking about now, but had no offer. Like I said, I don’t know what they do, I really don’t. so just kinda keep that in mind that even if you’re doing right, you’re showing up like no one else. Cool ideas. You still need to do the, the follow up.

You still need to message people. because these, those little kind of foot in the door types of things, whatever they are. We will get their attention and we’ll get them to remember you get them to help you stand out, but you still need to, to message and follow up on them. because people, people get busy. So just kind of keep that in mind.

So today, I, I went through everything really fast. I’m excited. so recapping today, we just want to be somebody that they want to meet with. Right. This is where, what can you do to be more interesting? And that’s, we talked about how you can do it at a company level. What types of content, you mean your company, you putting out content, doing podcasts, going on as podcast guests.

All kinds of different things you can be doing there just to kind of make that company be known. And also things you can do individually. Just essentially making your LinkedIn profile more interesting. Making sure that there’s little, little things there that make you more uniquely you and kind of on the same page there being more human, not trying to be too formal with things.

Just just talking to people. Just talk to people. message and engage. That is not anything we talked about, but we did talk about the 19.35% appointment rate message showing up like no one else. Things like that. So if you need some help with this, we can probably help you. basically if what I, when I talk to people, like, there’s usually two things that, that they either want.

It’s either, you know, I’d really like to get something like this started. I just don’t have the time. I, I don’t want to go through all the trial and error. Can you help, can you help set this up for me? Or it’s, gosh, I, you know. Basically nobody has any time, right? That’s the biggest thing. None of us have time.

Or it’s pretty much, Hey, will you just run it for me? You do it not, I just want to show up to the meetings. So if you’re looking for help on either those, hey, you want somebody to help set this up, get it built for your team and let you guys take care of it, we can help you there. Or if you say, I just, I would love somebody to just kind of manage this for me, set it up and.

[00:25:55] And handle it. And that, that’s all I need. I, I’m, I’m, I just want to show up to meetings. I just want some good meetings with people. I just don’t have time to do all of the, the legwork. So if, if that’s you, if that sounds like something you’d like, schedule an appointment with me, you’ll, you’ll talk to me directly.

There’s no sales person or anything like that. You can go to the appointment lab.com or you can just email me directly, Gary, at Pipelineology. So that was my, my brief 62nd sales pitch. So. With that, I’ll open it up to questions. Feel free, you can either unmute yourself or you can go ahead and, message me in the chat.

Oh, we have a quiet bunch today. That’s okay too. Alright, so one last call. Any questions from anybody? Otherwise I guess we’ll wrap it up and you can, you can go about and get about your day.

Yeah. I have a question. Yes, sir. I am doing well. How are you? 

Yeah, great presentation. So I think, I’ve been on LinkedIn for over a decade now. So I understand the nuances of the platform. I think the challenge is, is twofold. one is you do get a lot of messages involved for sure on a lot of books, and I think.

Some of the messages you showed earlier, on the receiving end of that as well, so thank you. I think the, the key is how do we stand out? You showed some examples, but still the reality is that when you see eight or 10 messages, which are something you would just say, okay, this is another one. Again, versus the one that you do see, which, you know, you may want to respond now because more extra.

How do you really keep that going and, and do you think it’s probably makes sense at some point to, to jump off the platform and do a direct team instead and, and again, some pro and cons of that approach? 

Sure. I’ll, I’ll kind of answer that question in reverse. So, first part is how do you know when to essentially go off platform?

When to, to, to essentially message somebody outside of LinkedIn if you’ve connected with them. And when we do that is typically, you know, if we’ve messaged somebody, maybe we’ll message them two or three times, maybe didn’t get a response. typically that is where we would, just send them an email and say, you know, something to the effect of, Hey, you know, we recently connected on LinkedIn.

I’ve sent you a couple messages, I didn’t hear back. No worries. if you’re like me, you probably don’t check your LinkedIn messages anyway. I’m emailing you instead. I know that’s kind of wordy. You can certainly make it a bit more succinct, but, something like that essentially is essentially giving yourself a warm introduction from LinkedIn and then you can kind of say what you wanted to, to, to talk about.

So that can basically get you a good response doing email, go off platform in terms of how do you cut through the clutter on LinkedIn? Well, that is. That is its own challenge, right? Because if you’ve been on it for a decade, you’ve, you’ve seen the evolution more. Now it seems like anybody who wants to connect with you is, is trying to sell something.

[00:29:28] So here would be my recommendation. Is that in your first message, don’t, don’t, don’t selling, no pitching, no questions, nothing. keep it short. Maybe a little funny. really what you want to do there is the kind of behind the scenes. The idea is that. You want to say something that’s just interesting enough to get them to click on your profile, hence why we talked about making that little tagline more, more interesting itself.

So you want to reach out to somebody so that that’s don’t, don’t save you my profile. because they won’t, they’ll disconnect with you right away, but be a little bit interesting and I wish I could tell you exactly what to say there. it really kind of depends on you, but. And what, what you want to, you know, who you are and what’s authentically you, but we find that that is actually typically the best approach.

Because it’s not like anything they’ve, that you, you probably receive or send from people, right? Of the last 50 messages. They all are like, Hey it’s nice to connect with you. Hey, when can we meet? You know, I sell blah, blah, blah. So don’t do any of that and just, you know, have some fun with it. Be creative and you’ll, you’ll probably do better just by not doing anything in the last 20 messages you’ve seen. So, so you’re saying make it more personal and personal than opposed to more form efficient? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, try, try, have some fun with it. You know, like I said, I think mine, there’s several emojis in the one I signed. It’s not professional in any way, shape, or form, but it’s fun.

And, and that’s these days, I mean, everybody can do formal. Everybody does professional. Have some more fun. Got it. Thanks. You’re welcome. Let’s see here, in the chat, I see Brett, do you work with consulting companies and referral? Brett, we can work with consulting companies. message me and, we can get some more details on what you’re thinking there.

You’re welcome Tracy. Thanks for joining. Great. Glad to have you. Sorry. Not yet. Well, maybe, maybe you’ll have some questions here in a minute. M patch 67. All right. Let’s see what we got here. Okay. What channel or approach do you find the most success with booking meetings, emails, calls, LinkedIns. For reference, I’m an SDR selling a marketing solution B2B.

For me, cold calling has been the most effective, but it’s pretty rare. Anyone answers the phone.

[00:31:55] That is a, that’s a good question. And if you’re doing the SDR work. You, you’ve probably got some pretty good insight into it. So, here’s, here’s how I would answer that. I, I hate cold calling, so I don’t do it. I’ve, I’ve hired some people to do it in the past and kind of had mixed results. If you as an SDR are doing it and getting results that way, I would say keep doing that.

Right. You don’t, I would, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel if you’re getting enough results there. What I will say is that for me, the the best meetings, and I know it’s kind of a. That’s always a little harder to quantify versus 10 meetings versus five versus good meetings versus bad. But, you know, for me, the best ones generally come from LinkedIn simply because you’ve kind of got that, that network effect there, that they’ve accepted you into their world.

You can see their background, you can see their experience, so. The conversations start off, several steps further ahead. You don’t have to do all the rapport building and stuff necessarily off the bat. because they’ve essentially done that. When they checked out your profile, they figured out who you were.

So, I would probably say that is that cold calling. If, if you’re doing it and it’s working, absolutely keep doing it. That can be very effective. I know we’ve, you know, we’ve got clients who have had pe people doing it and it works for them. I like LinkedIn just in terms of the quality of the meetings, and then email.

Email is a good supplement, but you need to send either a lot of email or take a lot of time to personalize it, to, to get good results from it these days. But they’re all effective channels in different ways. my favorite is LinkedIn. but do, do what’s gonna work best for you,

[00:33:41] Carolina. Alright, let me read through this one real quick. All right, so I’m a business developer for artificial, for an artificial intelligence startup. We do platform for biometric authentication. All right, this sounds really interesting. I only reach out on LinkedIn. I had a good month of great getting meetings, but now we’re kinda stuck.

I send follow ups every week. What do you think? It would be a good idea for a first message? because it’s a difficult solution to explain. So Carolina, I’m gonna tell you. I’m, I’m gonna make an assumption here, and I know it’s always dangerous to do here, but one of the things if you’re female in doing outreach is it’s, it’s actually easier for you to get meetings if you just ask for it.

Hey, I’d like to meet you for a virtual cup of coffee. It, it’s weird if, if you’re at actual one doing the meetings, if it’s, Hey, you know, I’d like to meet with you. Actually, it’s gonna be with my boss, you know, you know, Joe or something like that wouldn’t work as well, but, I’ve, I’ve. I kind of found that it’s a little bit uncanny that way, but it’s a little bit easier in those types to actually just, Hey, you know, do you have five minutes for, for a virtual cup of coffee?

Would love to love to meet with you and you’ll probably get more meetings that way. So don’t, don’t worry so much about trying to explain biometric authentication. if you want to focus on your solution though, instead, focus on. Hey, this is, this is what it helps, it solves this problem. And I, I, without, without talking to you, I wouldn’t know exactly what your use cases are, but that’s how I would focus that messaging is don’t, don’t even try and explain what it is, target companies that would have that problem that this solves.

let’s see. Blessing. thanks for this. Let’s see here. I on a team about to launch a B2B platform. How do you just approach businesses getting to sign up? Most of these businesses aren’t on LinkedIn. That’s very interesting that you are. I guess my first question would be, are you sure they’re not on LinkedIn?

But if they’re not on LinkedIn, email or email or cold call, get the list and, and reach out to everybody. I remember. Gosh, when was this? This was, it must have been like, 2013 was when I was first doing, marketing at, at car dealerships. And there was a company that they were called, I remember the names though, it’s called, they were called, on the block.

[00:36:14] And essentially dealerships get lots of trade-ins that they can’t resell. They’re, they’re not a acceptable quality. so they go to a wholesale auction. Right. And, like get bought by somebody else, or get sent to scrap. And their thought was, we’re gonna help dealers monetize those trade-ins. interesting idea, but essentially you put a page up on your website and they’re gonna show you, you know, here’s all the stuff you can do to, to sell them.

And basically you have your own auction thing. Weird concept didn’t work. But I got contacted so many times, essentially they just hired a bunch of people, gave them all the list and said, call everybody. And they did. And we had nine stores at the time. So I got to talk to a lot of people about this and tell them all no.

But if they’re, if they’re not on LinkedIn, that would be the way to do it, is figure out where the email list is, you know, give them a good offer. I’m assuming if it’s a new platform, you’ve, you say, Hey, it’s free to try, we’d love to, you know, get you a free trial or something like that. And if you don’t have a free trial for a, if it’s software, get one.

Alright.

[00:37:27] Candace, what do we got? Do you have any tips for how to vary the messaging over a few weeks, months when people aren’t responding? I just heard from a friend who took a meeting who’s been in touch several times over the past four months. Varying approach a bit until my friend bit. well, I mean, couple things you can do is, is one, it’s, if the messages sound pretty similar, it’s it’s okay.

Having, having written a lot of follow up messages, there’s, there’s kind of the ones you, you spend a lot of time really thinking about your sequence. And then there’s the, okay, somebody’s responded. Now how? Now how do we actually get them the rest of the way there to actually get that meeting? So, there’s different things you can send.

So let’s say, you know, you’re, you’re trying to reach out and it’s over a few months. Some things you can send just, Hey, do you mind if I send you a case study? different type of approach. Hey, you know, I’m doing an event, something, right? Something like this. Kind of different. And then, straight to the offer, you know.

Hey, just wanted to see if you got some time to meet. Here’s, here’s what we do. Do you have some time to meet? hey, just wanted to follow up on this. Hey, just wanted to see if you got my last message. little things like that, that basically you can kind of have really thoughtful, laid out mess types of messaging, and then there’s, hey, just go straightforward, write a mess.

Short, really to the point message. So. That would be essentially how I do it is think about some things that are more, a little bit more content focused. Case studies, events, hey, I was on this podcast, things like that. And then it’s goes, go straightforward, direct to the 0.2 sentences tops. So I would vary it like that, vary it in length, vary it in approach, and that’s likely how you’re gonna get your best.

 

[00:39:25] Best response. I’ve, you know, if I’ve got, if I’m feeling really creative, I’ll send animated GIF of, you know, at one time I’ve sent my head photoshopped on a dartboard, all kinds of weird things just to, just to get attention. And it’s, it’s weird that, that those are the types of things that people respond to is again, things, things you can do that stand out that don’t really require a whole lot of extra effort.

Well, you’re, you’re welcome, Candace. so hopefully, hopefully some of those work for you. Alright, anybody else? I think I got all the chat covered right now. Anybody else want to jump in? Feel free to unmute yourself. Alright, well then I think we’re gonna call it. Really appreciate everybody hopping on.

Thanks for all the questions everybody. Always great to, Hey Gary, I have one. Yes sir. Yep, go ahead Rose. I have, I’m a copywriter, content marketer, but I was also a broadcaster for over 30 years, and I’ve kind of been reluctant to add that to, I mean, it’s on the profile, but not my, in my headline, my profile.

[00:40:33] And because it’s hard to, you know, relate that to copyright and you just, you know, how, what’s a disc jockey gonna do for me when it comes to copyright? But I like the idea of interest. Do you think that would be a good idea to add major market radio personality onto my profile? Oh, heck yeah. Yeah. Those would be exactly the types of things we’d be looking for.

Like if we were working some with someone like you or like, what’s your background? How’d you get started? We find out Oh yeah, you were, you are a radio personality. Absolutely. People are, you’re, you’re, you’re basically a, a minor celebrity, even if they’ve never heard of whatever station it is. So it’ll definitely help you with connection.

[00:41:11] It’ll help you get responses. Even though it’s not related to copywriting. Okay, I’ll do that. Thank you. You’re welcome.

[00:41:23] And yeah, even in the comments Royce, they see, they thought, oh, I immediately thought this guy’s got a great voice. Right. You, you, the radio guys, they always, even if they’re not doing anymore, they always have a great voice. So, very cool. Alright, anything else? Otherwise, I’ll, I’ll let you guys, I’ll get back to your day.

All right. You’re welcome Jen. Jay, thanks for coming on. I appreciate everybody and, take care. Have a great rest of your day. we’ll be doing the next one in about a month in May. So I hope you can join me for that one too. Take care.

[00:41:59] 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.