What Contributes To Cold Outreach Success?

People always ask us – “is cold outreach dead?”

Surely in an age of automation and AI, cold outreach is no longer effective.

Many of us hate receiving spam messages, or cold pitches via cold email or via LinkedIn.

How do we answer this? And as cold outreach specialists do we see the end of cold outreach any time soon?

The reality is that everyone we have ever met in business was a stranger to us once.

We met them somehow and over time we worked with them, served them or bought from them.

Cold outreach is simply one of the ways to grow the circle of people and businesses who know us or who we can do business with.

Other ways include paid advertising, networking in person, publishing content or community building [among other things].

The key to all business development is to find the right people, offer the right value to them and provide a service that is genuinely wanted and needed.

SPAM by definition is a message or offer that is irrelevant.

So cold outreach is not the problem here, irrelevancy is.

Here are some secrets to effective cold outreach:

Step 1 – Forget volume and focus on finding the right people.

Targeting the right people so that making the right offer, one that is relevant and compelling, becomes easier.

We would not feel uncomfortable offering strangers $10,000 in cash in the street.

To the right people our solution is like a gift.

So if we can only find the right people, we will no longer feel or be spammy.

Step 2 – Focus on massive value.

Something that makes cold outreach so unpleasant is when someone we do not know is asking for something.

• Asking for our time and attention.
• Asking for money or our patronage.

When we contemplate other forms of new business generation such as speaking at events, publishing content, or building a community, a stranger will provide a lot of value before making any pitch for business.

The same thing can be achieved through cold outreach.

If we focus on finding the right people and making them an “offer” not an “ask” we can open up doors to the first conversation.

If we can position our first encounter in such a way that a new prospect cannot say “no” then we know we are onto a good thing.

An easy way to do this is the position our first offer as an opportunity to learn or gain insights.

If we offer advice, tips or a mini consultation that exposes immediate clarity, then value and trust is established andcan pave the way for the next step – a relationship and then business partnership.

Step 3 – Volume and consistency.

While we do NOT want to focus on volume initially, if we can solve step 1 and step 2 [the right people and the massive value] the next step is to focus on volume and consistency

We take this step as a method of filling up our network.

Why stop with one or two if we can offer massive value to a whole horde of people?

The key here is that while we are indeed offering great things to our ideal prospects, not all of them will be in the right place to respond and buy now.

As such we do need to keep up a volume approach [as long as we are targeting the right people] to ensure our pipeline is full of new business.

Step 4 – Open the doors and the windows

This means that when we engage in cold outreach to strangers, as long as they are the right people and we are offering them massive value, we anticipate more attention on us.

They will come looking at us online – our website, our social media, our blog, our newsletter, our events, our publications.

We want to make sure that all our doors and windows are open so they can learn as much about us as possible.

We want them to see the lights on, the coffee pot on, the fireplace lit, and the welcome sign up.

The more education content we can share that shows how we work, how we are different to others, how we create transformation for the right people and how our clients rate or recommend us, the better.

Keeping your digital presence up to date means that more cold leads are likely to take up your offer of value, approach a relationship with you and move down your funnel, towards a sale

In brief, the most successful cold outreach campaigns contain easy to understand, high value offers, targeting decision makers who are actively in need of a solution.

Successful campaigns are lean, without too many differing offers or features, providing value and a strong incentive to say “yes” and clear evidence that results are likely to contribute to success.

If you would like craft your successful cold outreach campaign, one targeting the right people with massive value, then simply comment below or email [email protected] and we can set up a short conversation.