In my last post, I showed you a template for a cold email (below for your reference). I think it’s a pretty good email, but it still has only a small chance of working.
There are just too many things stacked against emails these days. It seems like a major accomplishment just to get an email into someone’s inbox at all—then you have to get them to actually read it and be intrigued enough to act. A lot of “gates” to get through.
So what can you do?…Pick up the damn phone!
Cold email template
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
The phone would be an amazing piece of technology if it wasn’t so old but it’s still your best chance of having a conversation with another human being. (Yes, there are challenges with people working from their cell phones at home, but these challenges are much smaller than the mountain an email faces.)
If you are going to call someone cold, what do you say? Fortunately, the basic script is logically not that different from the cold email above—with a few tweaks.
I like Jason Bay’s cold call opening technique, called a “permission-based opener” for cold calls.
In this approach you don’t go straight into discussing what you’ve found from your research, you instead ask if the prospect can give you a few seconds to explain why you are calling. This gives time for the prospect to snap out of whatever they were doing before you called and orient themselves to whatever you are about to say.
This call opening looks something like this.
“Hi John, it’s Nigel. I know I probably caught you in the middle of something. Do you have 20 seconds for me to share why I’m calling?”
All you are looking for here is an answer like “OK. What’s this about?”
If you get the permission to proceed then the middle of the cold call can look very much like the middle of the cold email from last time. Here I assume you have done your research. Copying from our email example from before, this can be something like:
“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.
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 cost and time burden.”
Now you will find out if your research was any good or not! You need to ask the prospect if this sounds like what they are dealing with.
Ask something like:
“Does that sound like the sort of thing you are seeing?”
If the prospect indicates that they have seen issues like this, you can switch into acting like a consultant. You can ask a few relevant questions to understand what this company is seeing in this area. As with all good consultative conversations, it’s natural that the prospect does more of the talking here than you do.
Since you’ve interrupted this person in the middle of doing something else, it’s appropriate to make sure this conversation does not go on too long. After asking a couple of questions, you want to summarize what you’ve heard and suggest scheduling a follow up call to dig deeper.