You’re an unwanted guest in your prospect’s inbox.
However, unlike most traditional advertising, you didn’t pay to be there.
Imagine if you had to pay $1 per cold email.
Fifteen emails, 15 bucks.
Want to send email #16 two months later?
Sure, pay one dollar plus a .75 cent irrelevant tax.
Got a positive response? Get a dollar back.
Would that change how many emails you send?
How about your message?
Would you be more selective in choosing prospects?
When you send a cold email, your prospects pay with their time.
Prospects get 120 emails a day. 50% are from unwanted guests.
Since it’s hard to tell if an email is from an unwanted guest, let’s say it takes 10 seconds per email to find out, including the productivity hit.
That’s 10 minutes a day. 50 minutes a week. 3.3 hours a month. 40 hours a year.
How do you give prospects back hours instead of taking them away?
Understand the events and circumstances that caused customers to “fire” their current solution and “hire” yours.
The more you know your prospect’s problem, the better your email will be.
Here’s four ways to get to know your prospect’s problems.
- Ask inbounds leads or new customers these Jobs-to-be-Done “first thought” questions:
“When did you first start looking for something to solve your problem?”
“What triggered you to think about this?”
- Scan testimonials and case studies. Look for customer quotes related to the problem. I call this the before story.
Here’s an example for CaptivateIQ:
Before Story
“Determining payouts involved a lot of manual data entry, and customizing reports for individual reps meant hard-pasting entire Excel pages into Google Sheets and then manually making adjustments, one sheet at a time, said Albert.”
- Read G2 Crowd reviews. Again look for language about the problem.
- Reddit. There’s probably a relevant subreddit group. Listen for problem language.
Start a Google doc called The Lingo Library that contains words customers use to describe their problem.
Use your customer’s words in your cold email.
Like this:
“Pete, What Business Operations Managers hate about their job is determining layouts – stuff like manual data entry, customizing reports for individual reps, hard-pasting entire Excel pages into Google Sheets and then manually making adjustments, one sheet at a time.”
Your customers are better at writing cold emails than you are -:).
Being an insider is the first step towards getting out of debt.