Transcription
Back at it, Connor. Back at it. Excited to be here. We're going to do a super deep dive into cold emailing. We have tons of content about cold emailing on our channel, but I wanted to take the chance to sit down with someone who is quite literally on the front lines every day. Not only just talking about what has worked for them as a number one SDR at Oracle, but Connor, two years in a row, was the number one SDR manager at Oracle. You've not only used this yourself, you still use this as an enterprise account executive, but you've taught this to thousands of reps on your teams. So, this is about as legit as it gets when it comes to a modern cold email strategy, and excited to dive deep.
Yeah, excited to be here. And to your point, this is something I started using as an SDR. I still use to this day as an enterprise account executive. But it wasn't until I was an SDR manager and I saw all the techniques and the advice people were following, and I'm like, "Man, that's the advice I used to follow, and I was getting no results from it." I, less is more, simple is better, better, repeatable structure, high quality at scale is where I try and focus and implement. And it's what took me from getting no results over email when I started to, by the second six months as an SDR, I was getting to a point where I was pretty consistently booking three to five meetings per week over email. And when I was teaching this to people as an SDR, I would get messages from people across different industries, verticals, SMB, mid-market, enterprise, like, "Hey dude, I was following a lot of the advice I took from the typical training and wasn't booking any meetings over email. I just booked three meetings over email this week using your framework. Keep it up, man." So, this is really what led me to honestly get on YouTube in the first place was I was having a lot of success with email myself, but actually coaching other people how to do it, regardless of the industry or the vertical they worked in.
Yeah, it's awesome, man. And that's why I love these long-form conversations. It's not as simple as a LinkedIn post or this one line, you know, "Made my email super successful." Maybe just painting the picture for everyone that's watching, maybe they have been following a lot of bad advice or advice that hasn't gotten them results. Could you maybe just explain in more detail why that is often misleading and doesn't lead to to anything?
Yeah, so there's two parts to this. There's two camps. There's the sales enablement typical training camp, and then there's the LinkedIn sales guru advice camp. So, I'll, I'll break both down because I see people taking both of those advices. So, I started out in the sales enablement camp. That's, I was taking, I went, I started as an SDR, I took everything hook, line, and sinker, like, if I just follow the sales enablement advice, it should work on the road. So, when it comes to a sales enablement standpoint, a lot of them, one, they're just teaching the same thing year after year. They're not incentivized to change it. They would rather just regurgitate the same five W's they always have. These acronyms that overcomplicate it. You're practically getting an MBA in psychology when they're like, "Start off with the personalization, then we go into use cases." I found with a lot of the sales enablement training, the emails are way too long. They have, they'll have five paragraphs, way too much in it. Use cases, and they're breaking it down like, "Oh, they're going to read this, and then this, and then you're going to get them in the, this is what the product manager is thinking, social proof." And, and it's a great psychology lesson, but then you realize that's not actually how it works in real life.
The other thing is they don't teach any sort of repeatability or or how to scale this or how to structure your day. They don't teach you because so much of emailing, it's, yes, you need a good message, but about 80 to 90% of your success comes from the things you do outside of sending the email themselves. Like, how are you using your tools? How are you automating certain tasks? How are you batching your buyers, making lists of common personas or common buying triggers, things you look out for? They're not teaching anything like that. I think they also teach follow-up cadences that are one, just done the wrong way. They're too fluffy, too vanilla. The emails and the follow-ups are not around booking the meeting. It's, it's too soft. It's like, "Worth a chat? Is this worth exploring more?" A lot of the follow-up cadences too are either too long, too stretched out. So, it'll be multiple days in between follow-ups, or I see these 15 touch point cadences that, in my opinion, are just way too long. We'll get into that, but after about four or five emails, I kind of just recommend you hit them early and often. You hit them hard, concisely, you make your point, you let them know you're there, and if they don't respond, you move on. So, they teach things that are hard to implement, hard to scale. And I saw this as a manager where my reps were implementing some of this stuff, and they're genuinely struggling to get out more than 15 to 20 emails per day on a good day. And I think we'll talk about how to get there. You need to be at 100 plus per day, and that includes follow-ups too, not all original emails. And it sounds hard to get there, but that's why I teach repeatability, common structure. So, that's one is sales enablement.
The LinkedIn sales advice, I think is, it's almost opposite where they swing the pendulum too far to the other side where it's too short, it's too choppy, it's, they try and personalize things at scale, but it sounds something like, "Personalization, observation, problem statement, social proof, interest-based call to action." You probably get these, I get these emails all the time where it's like, "Congrats on the new job. Saw you're probably focused on this. A lot of enterprise AEs I talk to tell me they struggle with this. See here how we helped XRE rep or X company achieve a 35% marketing ROI by implementing this. Worth a chat?" And it's like, it's the opposite where it's, it's too goofy. Like the, the sales enablement one is too long and too much and it's maybe like, good on paper, but in real life, people just don't take the time to read and digest that. And then the LinkedIn sales guru side, it's like unprofessional, goofy. I'm like, "Who are you? I know your personalization's fake. I know you don't care." Like, they'll be like, "Oh, you fellow eagle." Or like, "Saw we're both dog dads." And it's like, "Dude, I don't care." Like, you're just, it comes off as manipulative. And it's personalized, but when everyone's sending out the same framework, it's the opposite of personalized because it just becomes too obvious you're just copy and pasting this fake personalized template. So, I see reps fall into one or two camps. And look, those might work for some people. From what I've seen, those don't work at scale. They're too soft, they're not direct enough. I prefer to take a direct approach where we tell them who we are, why we're calling, what we want, and we make the purpose of the email more centered around the meeting and positioning ourselves as a valuable resource going forward, which we'll get into. But yeah, those are some of the common camps I see people falling into. And I, I fell into the sales enablement trap for sure when I started.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think it was interesting when I first came in as a rep, email was actually one of my most fruitful strategies, I would say. But exactly that. I remember some of the first, like, our, my sales manager is like, "Hey, here's this email cadence that you use. There's five paragraphs. There's how we work to Samsung." And we're sending that to a 150-person tech startup. Like, it actually means anything to them. Exactly. And I totally agree. And then also, I think on the flip side is I've seen this death spiral of reps that, that we coach, where it's like, "That doesn't work." And then you're like, "Oh, I actually got like one response one time by implementing this thing I saw on LinkedIn." And now you're just like chasing all these different people on LinkedIn. And one week it's this guy, one week it's this girl, one week it's that person's advice. And it's just really hard to get something consistent. And maybe taking that to your own career, I know you mentioned the first six months, you really struggled on the emailing side for you individually. Before we get to what do you teach at scale, what were some of the things that really helped you turn it around?
Yeah, so when I started out, you're right, I was trying too hard on every email, spending 30, 40 minutes trying to craft what I thought was a perfect email, and then not getting any responses. So, I was like, "I could have ripped 20, 30 dials in that same time frame. Why am I wasting my time with email?" So, for the first six months as an SDR, I dabbled in it a little bit and then completely stopped and only focused on cold calling. And it wasn't until the second six months when I started to figure out and change my strategy and and figured out how to implement email in a high-quality way at scale that my results really started to compound. I was still doing the cold calling, but I had this email going in the background. It was something I knew what I was doing every single day. And that's when the job, the SDR job, truly started to feel like a game. I could just show up, I knew what I needed to do, I was getting meetings and replies in the background on email. And it allowed me to focus on cold calling even more. So, my results basically doubled, and I was, I felt like I wasn't working as hard. So, I had more time to focus on high-quality areas.
But one of the main things I realized was, and it was a shift I made in cold calling too, was that I, the key input to booking meetings over email is responses. You can't book a meeting over email if you don't get someone to respond to your email. And I was looking at the emails I was sending, and a lot of them were either too long, or I wasn't making my point or being direct enough. That, what I'm looking to do here is set a meeting. If you're ending something with like, "Worth a chat? Is this worth exploring more?" or "Is or it's, I was hoping to set up some time next week if you're interested." Any fluffy, blank language that doesn't communicate that you're valuable and you're expecting this meeting to happen, that's, I changed my framework to saying, "Here's who I am, why I'm relevant to you," which is basically what priorities and challenges I work on that are relevant to them, and how we solve them at a high level. And then stating, "I'm looking to set up some time. I'm looking to set up some time next week. Do either of these dates work for you?" Something that's very clear. What I want is time on their calendar, not, "Is this worth a chat?" Why would I be even opening the idea that what I have to say or the reason for this meeting isn't important to them? I want to position, but like, I'm expecting this meeting to happen. Like, you're one of my accounts, you're one of the people I support, it's my job to meet with you. I have areas and ways that we can help. Like, when are you free? Is it this week or next week? And then the follow-ups need to be in alignment with that too, which we'll get into. But the number one shift was much stronger, more assumptive language in my emails.
I shortened them too. Now, most of my emails fall in the range of about four to six sentences, and they follow a three-body paragraph structure: who I am, why I'm calling, what I want. It's actually proven in psychology that in written word, the brain likes threes. Anything more than three paragraphs, like once it gets to four or five, it's like, "Oh, this is, this is too much." They're less likely to scan. You scroll down and back up, and you're like, "Yeah, you want you want it to fit on one phone." So, that was major. Short, concise, direct, assumptive. That was major change number one. Major change number two was everything I did before I started sending emails. And this was what was never taught to me. How it depends on the types of tools you have, but you basically need to do three things. You need to be able to filter leads by certain buying triggers, whether it's job title, department, industry, things like that. Batch your buyers. So, I call this coiling the spring. I would take the time to do this upfront and create all my lists in advance. So, I was targeting a lot of finance personas at the time. So, I had more executive level, like CFOs, SE SVPs of Finance on lists. I had VPs of FP&A on lists. I had controllers on lists. The lower end of the spectrum, like end users, financial analysts on lists. And then I created lists for each industry I covered too. So, each of those titles I just named, and more, but for financial services, then for retail. And then I created templates that were targeted for each of those job titles or departments and that industry, rather than just sending a blank generic, "Here's who I am, the types of things we work on at a high level." I could make it industry-specific. So, I was basically doing the personalization upfront rather than trying to do it each individual email. That was, those were two big things where I was trying to send emails like, "Oh, who am I going to target today? Oh, I have one CFO in financial services, and then the next person's a financial analyst in retail. I got to write a new email for them." And I was creating too much friction for myself. So, number one was the assumptive directness of the email. And then number two was coiling the spring and doing a lot of that upfront heavy lifting first before you just open your laptop. So, that way you sit down and you physically have things ready to go. You have your list ready, you have the associated templates ready. And if you come up with a template that's targeted for controllers that work in banking for, like, a specific sector, chances are you could have a hundred controllers on a list that all work in banking and send just about the same template to them. If you've taken the time to make it relevant to their role in the industry they work in, and all you have to do is change their name and the name of the company they work at, and the rest of the email can stay the same. This is how I went from sending 10 emails a day with difficulty to sending a 100 emails a day in an hour.
One of the things my mind naturally goes to is now you have this great custom email. What are your thoughts on how to actually structure an entire cadence where you're sending, and you tell me how many, but you know, four, five, six, seven automated follow-up emails? How do you think about that and structure your cadence?
This is equally as important, if not more important. That first email is very important to, to, it's almost like you're casting the hook. Like, you, the bait is out there. But 70 to 80% of meetings that get booked over email from my experience do not come from the first email, no matter how good it is. It comes from one of the follow-ups and redirecting their attention back to the first email. So, this is a big area where I get these emails all the time where I get an email on Monday, the first follow-up comes the next Monday, the second follow-up's the Monday after that. And it's just so obvious I'm on an automated cadence. And I'm like, "Oh, if I just wait a few more Mondays, they'll probably go away." So, I don't want to put myself in that bucket where this, I'm signaling urgency in my email. I'm saying, "I think this meeting is important, and I want to signal with my follow-ups that I'm a real person. I'm actually trying to get in contact with them. You're not on an automated cadence right now. I do think it's important to me." So, what I recommend for broad outbound email prospecting, if you're doing this at a high volume at scale, I recommend three follow-ups. So, initial email and three follow-up emails, maybe four. And they should come about within 24 to 48 hours. Any more than 48 hours, and the reply rates drop pretty dramatically. But if you're think about it, if you were reaching out to someone and it was important, you would follow up either the next day or the day after that. If you wait any longer than that, then your whole sense of urgency fades. So, if I email a group of contacts on Monday, I will send my first follow-up Wednesday, my second follow-up Friday, and the third follow-up either Monday or Tuesday. That way, in a 7 to 8 day span, they got four email touch points from me. And ideally, you're calling them if you can on the off days. So, email Monday, call Tuesday, email follow-up Wednesday, call Thursday. They know you're there at that point. 7 to 8 days, four emails. And we'll touch on the actual structure of the follow-ups in a second. But four emails, ideally a few calls in between, you did your job, they know you're there. A lot of times, it's just a timing thing. You're better off just moving on to a fresh list of contacts, a new list that hasn't been contacted, rather than trying to go the distance to like 15 touch points. I see these 15 touch point, 20 touch point cadences that, you know, you see a good LinkedIn post where it's like, "Oh, I followed up with this person 35 times over the course of three months, booked a meeting, and it and it went well." And it's like, "Great, but what about all the other thousand contacts you followed up with 20 times that just didn't respond?" That that time would have been better used just moving on to a fresh list. So, anything more than four or five emails, you start to devalue yourself where they're like, "I get these where people do follow. I respect. Did they follow up like 10 times?" But by like the ninth, I'm like, "Dude, have a little self-respect. Like, just move on. Like, come back and maybe a different." It's like, you, you lose, you lose a lot of credibility in their eyes.
So, my follow-ups, this is something I think is taught incorrectly by a lot of people. Are very short, concise, essentially telling them to go read the first message that I sent. A lot of follow-ups I see are too long. They basically disregard the fact that you already sent them a valuable email. That's why it's important to do the first email right. Because then I see these follow-ups where it's like, "Hey Connor, you there?" Or like, "Did I catch you at a bad time?" Like, "See this case study here?" And it's like a new email in itself. Where I, more my follow-ups, I, there's three. I send the first one, I give them the benefit of the doubt where I just, it's something along the lines of, "Hey, just want to make sure you caught my note. Do either of those date, if I propose dates, do either of those dates work for you? Or let me know if you have time to speak this week or something like that." They see that short, concise, and then they scroll down and they read the first message. They still don't respond to that. That's my benefit of the doubt follow-up. The second follow-up, I call, "Show a little professional dissatisfaction." So, you're not, you're not being disrespectful, but you're basically saying, "Hey, I sent you an email. I sent you a follow-up email." The third one is like, "I'd like a response to what I just said." This is where I get most of my replies. This is the biggest. This, it's so funny, all of the training out there, I've booked more meetings off this line than any other line, cold call or email. It literally just says, "Please give me your thoughts on this." It will be the second follow-up email I send. You can say, "Please let me know your thoughts when you have a moment." If you want to massage it a little bit, I just like to say, "Please give me your thoughts on this." They see it in their, the preview of the email, and their fight or flight mode, they're like, "Wait, what?" And then they scroll down and they see they already missed a follow-up, and now they go read your first email a lot more closely than they probably did initially, or they just missed it initially. But I like to give them the benefit of the doubt on the first one, just like, "Hey, just want to make sure you saw my note. Do you have time to speak this week? Or do either of those dates work?" The second one is, "Please give me your thoughts on this." And then the third one is what I call an assumptive breakup. Essentially, you, you kind of throw your hands up and guilt them a little bit, essentially say like, "Hey, like, is, would next month? You throw it a month out. Like, is next month a better time to talk about this? I just want to close the loop either way. Like, let me know." But every email is directing them to respond again, giving yourself a chance of a response. It's directing them to respond to your initial email. And it comes every other day. Any more than that, the reply rates drop. And it's easy to implement. Literally, all you have to do is scroll. Like, you wake up one morning, you go to your sent box in your email. If you're not automating it, you scroll down to the emails that you sent two days ago. So, on Wednesday morning, you go into your sent box, you go to Monday, you scroll down, and you send the same follow-up, copy and paste, to all of them. And that's how you can get a 100 follow-ups out the door in 30 minutes if you're just copying and pasting the same one. And then Friday morning, "Please give me your thoughts." That's my favorite day because, like, you get so many replies on that day. Just "Please give me your thoughts" to all the people you emailed on Wednesday with that follow-up. So, it's kind of, I call it an ABAB cadence, um, where I'll do a list Monday, a list Tuesday, follow-up list A Wednesday, follow-up list B Thursday, Friday, and so on. It's just an every other day cadence that only takes about the first hour of the morning to do. Then you can focus the rest of the day on calls, internal meetings, you have things like that.
Yeah, that's awesome, man. I mean, so many great takeaways there. I am curious too, though, you're teaching this now to thousands of people at Oracle and online as well. I'm curious where now someone is just so desperate to get that meeting. Let's take the case that someone responds to that second or third email and is like, "Hey, I'm interested, but I'm not ready to meet." So, what, what are the potential range of responses that you're getting there if they're not agreeing to a meeting?
Yeah, so the three outcomes that can happen if they respond, but it doesn't happen until they respond. That's why it's important to elicit that response. They could say, "Take me off your list. Like, you're a scammer." Like, that's the, I call that a hard no. You'll get that sometimes, that's part of the game. What we're looking for is responses here. This is your high volume bucket of email outreach. So, you'll get some people that say absolutely not. You will get some people who are just like, "Sure, Friday works or next week works. I'm, I'm busy this week. Next Wednesday works. Feel free to send an invite." Or they send you an objection, a hesitation. Like, "I forget what example you just used, but like, hey, we already have a solution in place for this, or we don't have any budget, this just isn't a priority for us right now." But now you at least have a chance to overcome it. Where, what I find is, you, you can book meetings from responses like that if you just get double down and give them a good reason for why it still makes sense to meet anyway. I basically double down, I acknowledge their concern and say, "It still makes sense for us to set up time even if there's no budget right now, so that as priorities come up in the future, we're ready to support." I, we can go all very in-depth on that, that might be another video. But the point is, getting that response now gives you the chance to book a meeting. What I find when I start coaching a lot of reps and they're using passive language, or they're using these interest-based call to actions that aren't really asking for a response, then they don't get enough responses. The first thing when they start implementing the frameworks I teach, they come to me and they're like, "Dude, I'm getting way more responses than I used to. Even if they're not yeses yet, they can still tell like, 'Oh, people are actually acknowledging me.'" They would rather get told no or receive objections than just not get replies at all. There's nothing worse than sending out a 100 emails per day and not getting any responses at all. I would rather get these objections. But you have to sometimes be a little pushy and a little assumptive in a professional way to get that objection and actually give yourself a chance of overcoming it and booking the meeting. And what I do for those objections, I keep what I call an objection response bank because a lot of them sound similar. So, if you come up with a good base framework for handling, "We don't have budget," for example, I go to my objection response bank, pull out the blank base template for how I typically respond to that, and then I can just add any context I see about that particular prospect, lead, account, their industry, anything like that.
Yeah, this is a ton of depth. And I want to even go a little bit deeper here. If you have maybe an example or two of that custom opening email, I think your follow-ups are are pretty intuitive, so I think a rep can figure that out. But give us a real example of a custom email that you'd give to someone to start this cadence off.
Yeah, so I have a few examples here. These are the base framework. So, I have examples of this on my channel. That keep in mind, these are not exact words to say, it is the framework of who you are, why you're calling, what you want. There's lots of different variations of this, and we can go more in depth on it. But essentially, here's an example if I was reaching out to a finance persona. A very base framework, it's nothing fancy or flashy, and that's the point. People are not doing this stuff. "Hi John, my name's Connor Murray, and I'm part of the your XYZ company financial applications team, responsible for supporting XY ABC company. Given your role, I'm looking to introduce our team and get aligned with your priorities going forward." That's the who you are. It's very simple. This is a more formal, you're positioning yourself as part of their account team. If they're not one of your an existing customer, I'll show you another example in a second. But that is who you are, very simple. You're not doing anything fancy in the opening. "Saw we're both this, saw we're both, we went to the same college." You're just saying, "Here's who I am, the company I work for, and the team I'm part of." One to two sentences. Then it's, "My team specifically works on priorities related to," and in this case, "expense optimization, financial forecasting, and automated financial reporting. We work with clients to deliver real-time visibility into financial data, reduce unnecessary operational expenses, and automate month, much of the month-end reporting process." So, you're just naming that is a high-level example, you can go more in depth, but you're naming priorities, challenges, and outcomes that this specific persona is likely to care about. So, that as they scan it, again, it's a timing thing, a lot, but they're like, "Oh, financial report? Yeah, like we have been talking about accelerating that process, or it's just been a nightmare. I was having to stay up on Saturday and Sunday to close the books on time for the month." And they see that and they're like, "Okay, maybe." Like, then they read the email more carefully. And then you finish with, "I am looking to set some time, not, 'I was hoping to set some time if you're free, if you're interested.' I'm looking to set some time for an introduction as my team will be the main point of contact for any priorities in these areas going forward. What does your availability look like later this week? Thanks in advance, Connor." Not warmest regards, thanks in advance, Connor. But it's, first paragraph: who your name, your company, the team you're part of. Second paragraph: what priorities and challenges you solve, how you solve them. The third one, very concise: what you're looking for, time on their calendar. That is the base framework. There's lots of ways to adapt that.
But I just want to read one more example of of how this can be adapted. And just to clarify, this would be outbound. So, the example you mentioned, maybe they have some exposure and or they're an existing customer of your company. This would be they don't use your company at all. Maybe at most, they've heard the name. It's pure outbound. Oh, yeah, this is outbound. So, this is a different persona. So, "Hi John, my name is Connor Murray, and I'm part of the construction team in this case at XYZ company. This is how you can make it a little more industry-specific. We work with networking teams in the construction space to improve system reliability and accelerate response times. My team." So, that's the who you are. "My team specifically focuses on priorities related to network management, managed cloud hosting, and mobile device management. And we work with clients to proactively monitor and maintain networks, plan and execute cloud migrations, and streamline the onboarding of mobile devices." So, that's the why you're reaching out. In this case, "Do you have availability for an introduction this week? Let me know when works best, and I will send us an invite. Looking forward to it, Connor." So, it doesn't sound flashy, but I promise you, when I was an SDR manager, I saw the templates people are using. No one is just straight to the point: who you are, why you're reaching out, what you want. If you send a hundred of those a day and you follow up consistently, you will, you will get lots of replies and lots of responses. And naturally, some of those responses will convert to meetings. But a lot of people, they're too cutesy with their emails, they're overpersonalizing it, they don't sound like a professional. That's the whole point of the email is these people, they get what account teams are at this point. They've worked with salespeople a lot. They know you're reaching out. You're saying, "Here's who I am, the team I'm part of, priorities and challenges I work on that are relevant to you, and here's how we solve them." And you're saying it in a way that's assumptive. I call it assumptive alignment. You're expecting this meeting to happen. You're not asking if this would be worth their time or worth a chat. So, that's the hook. And then you follow up with those precise assumptive follow-ups that are essentially redirecting them back to that initial email.
Yeah, and I think this is why these deeper dive conversations are so important because again, it's the psychology that especially sales enablement and also LinkedIn sales influencers tend to not take into account. Even if you, you know, maybe they're not ready to meet, the fact that you came in so professionally, and if any of those things are truly relevant to them, they're going to respond. And maybe they say, "Hey, I'm not sure I want a meeting yet, but tell me more about X, Y, and Z" as one of many types of responses. But again, the overall point from my side and what I love about this is that it really is the psychology. It's like, even if you call someone and you said the wrong name, that actually opens a conversation. And the fact that they're like, "Oh, I'm not John, I'm actually Peter. Why are you calling?" Now you actually have a chance to talk about why you're calling, you know what I mean? So, these are so, so many great nuggets here. And and maybe throwing it back to you as well, um, maybe you get this base framework in, what are ways you see that people take it to that next level? Even just your own experience, if it's how you made it hyper, hyper custom and relevant, I'd love to hear.
So, what I just shared is for volume, like high, high volume outbound prospecting. If you have a large territory and a lot of prospects and leads, you can go after. A big mistake a lot of reps make is because they're so hyper-focused and and over-personalized, they don't send out enough emails. And there's this big net they could be casting and rocks they could be overturning that they're just not because they don't have a repeatable structure in place. So, that is a base repeatable structure that once you put it in place for different titles and industries, you can hopefully just use that and not have to change it that much. And that can be in the background, high volume, reaching out to prospects that you otherwise wouldn't be contacting. Now, it's, what about accounts, strategic accounts that you want to set aside and be more focused with? You should have those two buckets. You should have the high volume bucket where you're getting a high enough quality structure in place to the best of your ability, and then you're just going for replies and responses and in meetings and replies trickling in from that. If you want to be more strategic with it, I still follow just about the same framework. But if you know anything specific about the account from public documents, like 10Ks, specific priorities they're focused on, and the best way is if you're also cold calling in between and you're actually talking to individuals at the organization, the best opening line, it's the biggest weapon if you have the information is saying something like, "I spoke with blank person and I understand that XYZ is a big focus for you this year, or understand that this is a priority or a gap for you this year." If you can start off with a simple line like that that signals credibility and that you actually have done some homework and have spoken to people in their organization, then everything you say after that holds a lot more weight. But if you just send the base template like this, it will work, but it's not, it's not going to work as well if you're trying to be really strategic. Like, if you need to get in touch with someone, you want to be taking extra additional information that you've either learned like from their 10Ks, their earnings reports, transcripts, things like that, like actually going in and it's just that's not something you can scale to a 100 people. So, you have to have a small bucket of people each week that you're like, "I'm really focused on getting in touch with this person." Maybe it's your account executive told you, "Hey, if you get a meeting with this account, it'll be an opportunity." So, you set that account aside so that you can not just do it from an industry title perspective, like the, the examples I just read, but you make it much more specific to that exact company. And if you can also be cold calling in between, then that's, that's like where it becomes a weapon. If you can actually speak with someone and say, "I understand like, I spoke with XYZ person and I understand blank, blank, and blank are are key focuses for you this year." Now, everything you say after that carries a lot of weight.
Yeah, it's crazy, man. I mean, we get hit up all the time at forhigherlevels.com of people who send me emails. And I've literally gotten maybe two cold calls ever. Yeah. And at the point now where it's like, it's a combination of all of these things. You have to test and experiment. But the fact that no one even follows up with a call on their email, I just get 50 emails a day and I don't even care. So, I know this is a, it's a video on cold emailing, our conversations around cold emailing. But if you need, if you have strategic accounts or strategic prospects in, let's pretend you had a gun to your head and you like need to get in contact with this person, you can't just rely on email. You're not going to be maximizing your chances of of getting a response from them. You have to be leveraging at least two channels, if not three. I think phone and email is enough if you're persistent enough. But LinkedIn too, voicemails, things like that. You have, if you really are trying to be strategic and get in touch with someone, you can't just be relying on email.
And maybe a few things as we start to go towards a close. One, I know you've made an extensive video on cold calling, so I'll link that in the description. But one of the things you're big on as well is tracking progress as well. And I think this is something that often people sleep on. Maybe they're actually getting responses because they took this and implemented it right away. But how do you optimize it further? How are you tracking this? How are you really squeezing out?
So, I get really in-depth on this. I wish we could have like a, a screen right here because I have spreadsheets where I show people how slight improvements in either open rates, reply rates, and in meeting book rates, we're talking like 1, 2%, how many extra meetings that can lead to over the course of a month, a quarter, or a fiscal year. Because when you're doing volume at a high quality, if you go from your open rate being 20% to 25%, which is super doable, that's a huge, you're going to get a lot more naturally replies from that too. That's, that's a 25% increase in your open rate if you go from 20 to 25%. 5 divided by 20. So, I look for open rates, reply rates, when they get replies, how many of those convert to meetings. You, there's a lot more, um, inputs you can track. But if you're just starting out with this and looking to measure your results, that's where I recommend starting. Or, what's your open rate? What's your reply rate? When these emails get opened, and when people reply, how many, what percentage of the time do you actually book meetings from it? And then I tackle it one by one. Because open rates, if you have low open rates, that's a different symptom than not being able to book meetings once you get replies. Open rates probably means you need to work on your subject line. You probably need to work on the opening text of the email itself, things like that. The velocity of your follow-ups, if you're following up more frequently, it's more likely to get opened. Where with reply rates, a lot of times that's where I look for the passive versus assumptive language. If they're not replying, you're probably using interest-based or weak calls to action and using passive language like, "If you're interested, I'd love to set up some time." So, that's where I look for that. And then meeting booked rates, it's more, what are we, what are we saying as the why? Like, the why part of of reaching out? Like, what priorities and challenges are we naming and how we solve them? That's the most important part of the email to really nail down. Because once you get them to open, once you get them to scan it and read it more closely, then if what you're saying is not relevant, they're less likely to take the meeting with you. So, those are the three inputs I recommend tracking. And it's crazy. I've shown this, and I have a video where I do this on my channel where I break out from the SDR singular SDR level, an SDR team of 10, and then an SDR organization of, call it 100, how much a difference it can make in terms of opportunities and pipeline, just by increasing some of these inputs by literally 1 to 2%. And it will, in cases, triple or quadruple pipeline and opportunities. It's insane.
Yeah, it's awesome, man. Maybe summarizing because I mean, this was incredibly valuable. I know everyone listening is going to get a ton out of this conversation. I'd love to hit on maybe, I don't know, four to five major takeaways and just recapping the most important things. And as we do that, just calling out too, that if you're looking for live coaching and this system in incredible depth, Connor is actually the live instructor at Cold Email Engine, which is linked in the description as well. But with that said, Connor, um, maybe summarizing some of the biggest takeaways. If I'm a rep right now that is loving this conversation, how would you, in the shortest way possible, summarize like the things they can implement this week?
Let's see. So, one, coil the spring. You don't just start ripping emails or figuring out who you're going to contact or email on a day-by-day basis. Have all of those lists built out. And for reference, I used to take anywhere from two days to even a full week where I would just, I would just grind. I would show up early, work late, do it over a weekend if I have to. Because once you have it set, it takes a lot of heavy upfront lifting, but you have those lists ready to go, you have the associated templates ready to go. And then every day when you sit down at 8 a.m., you can just pick a list, pick a template, and send a hundred of them, however many it takes, before you go into the rest of your day. So, that's one, coil the spring.
Two, eliminate all passive language. I've created in Cold Email Engine what I call a passive language checklist and how you can replace that language with examples of more assumptive language. This really increases reply rates, it really increases meeting booked rates. So, coil the spring, replace passive language with assumptive language.
Follow up consistently with no longer than 24 to 48 hours. AB cadence. Um, most meetings get booked over, 70 to 80% get booked over a follow-up, not the initial email. So, don't freak out if you send a good email and they don't reply right away. It's likely going to come from a follow-up.
And then four, track your basic inputs. Track what your open rate, your reply rate, your meeting booked rate is. Because different, different inputs tell a different story as to why or why not you're getting certain results.
Yeah, well, this was awesome, man. Also, just calling out Connor has tons of gems on his YouTube channel as well. This is on the Higher Level's YouTube channel, but I've linked his channel in the description if you want to go deeper. And as mentioned, Connor is also the live instructor for Cold Email Engine. He goes into this in a ton of extreme depth. But nonetheless, I mean, even just this video alone had so many gems. So, I hope everyone enjoyed it. And man, another deep one, dude. Appreciate the time. Thanks for having me back on.
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