How do you best approach someone if you don’t have any connections?
It’s far from ideal, and you will have a much better hit rate with a “social calling” approach, but sometimes “it is what it is” and you must go in cold.
Most people I know will opt for an email as the first attempt to reach somebody. I get it. Emails are free and you don’t get the same mental battering as having the phone hung up on you. Given that, let’s look at how you write a half-decent cold email.
If you want to improve your chances of getting anything out of a cold email, you need to put in some work. Emails are free of “hard costs” but not free when you consider the time to write something
Here’s a cold email that has had decent results for me in the past. I break it down below.
Subject line: Big Company’s social media initiative
Joe,
I noticed that Big Company’s CEO mentioned on a quarterly conference call that reaching consumers on social media is an important initiative for 2024, so I thought this might be a good time to reach out on this topic.
Often when companies tackle this issue, they find that they lack the appropriate tools and processes to do this efficiently and it can become a significant cost and time burden.
We’ve helped XYZ company handle such an initiative cost effectively and with minimum disruption to their existing business processes.
Would you like to learn more?
Nigel
1. Trigger event
A trigger event is the key element to getting any of your email read. You need to have done your research and found a relevant trigger event. This research takes time and effort. The more important the account, the more research you should be willing to do.
Our “good friend” ChatGPT can help a bit here. You can ask it about industry trends, and it does a pretty good job of surfacing them on a sector basis. Try a prompt like the following with ChatGPT for this.
“You are an expert on social media usage in the food industry. I am calling on a company in the food industry. I do not know much about this industry. Can you tell me about the major trends associated with using social media in this industry, especially what senior executives in this industry may care about in this area?”
It’s quite probably that a sector level issue may not be enough and you may need to dig deeper for an issue specific to your target company. Sometimes you can find this information on the Internet, as in my example above that references an earnings call. However, for many cases, the information you need may not be in the public domain. In these cases, if the account is important enough, you will need to secure an “informational meeting” with someone in the account, or someone outside, that knows what is going on there.
From this informational meeting you should try to learn about key events at the company that are in the area you work with. Then when you write a cold email, like the one above, you can show the target executive that you know what is going on in their area and what might be on their priority list.
2. Hypothesis
The second paragraph in the email is your hypothesis on what this trigger event means for the person you are writing to. This is where you explain the implications that typically occur when other companies deal with this issue. As someone that is researching this market and talking to other companies frequently, you likely have a perspective that the prospect does not. This is where you get to shine a light on what you know.
If you need a little help, you can call on your “consulting analyst”, generative AI. You can use a prompt like the following with ChatGPT.
“You are an expert on social media usage in the food industry. What are the typical issues for a food company when it uses social media to engage consumers? What are the implications of these issues and what are the typical solutions and benefits of these solutions?”
3. Solution and results
Finally in the third paragraph you can mention that a company that has worked with you has addressed these challenges and the kind of results they have generated. You are offering the prospect hope that you know how to solve this challenge, and that they may want to speak to you to save themselves a lot of pain figuring this out on their own.
4. Small ask
The final paragraph is your call to action. You will notice it’s not worded as a direct request for a meeting. Simply “do you want to learn more?” This is to keep the commitment level for the prospect low. Nobody has any free time. If you ask for time, you are asking for a lot. This a cold email. Your chances of ever hearing back are low. You need to ask for something small. You are asking for a reply—only, at this stage. A reply is a major win!