Speaker 1: Hello Jason, welcome to the show. It’s great to be on. Well, I’m looking forward to it. So Jason, I got to say, I was impressed by the way you reached out to me and I hadn’t seen this before. And so that’s what convinced me to, to ask you to, to come on the show. You sent me a personalized video. Why don’t you tell our listeners just a little bit about, you know, how you developed it, video and techno and what tools you use to create it. I thought it was pretty, pretty neat idea. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I think one of [00:00:30] the big things is, and you know, we sort of started talking about this before we hit record was you know, a lot of people are starting to do cold outreach and many of them are not doing it very well. And the things that really stick out, like a sore thumb are really around lockers.
Speaker 1: Personalization, right? When you get a message on linkedin or an email and it doesn’t look like it was written like as a one-to-one message and the language is really generic and there’s nothing in there that’s personalized outside of your name and company. [00:01:00] What I want to do when I’m reaching out to someone to see the exact opposite of that, what it’s going to stick out more to that person, but to the amount of research that it requires to do that is going to tell me if this is a good opportunity, whether that be for a podcast or for a client or anything like that. So videos is really big right now because, um, there’s a lot of, you know, sort of sort of this space that we work when working, excuse me, as referred to a sales development. And one of the things that a lot of salespeople and you know, [00:01:30] uh, entrepreneurs that do prospecting, are having challenges with is getting in contact with people because there’s so many people sending out videos and email, uh, messages or excuse me, email messages and linkedin messages doing calls.
Speaker 1: And it’s Kinda hard to break through the clutter in videos. One of the ways that you can do that. So I don’t know about you will, I’ve never really received a personalized video before. I think I’ve received one actually in the last couple of years. So it’s very rare that people send them and that’s sort of where it starts [00:02:00] is like, hey, how can you differentiate yourself and look different? And I figured the email’s a good way to do that. I use a tool called vid yard and we can go over the specifics of like what to say and, and all that stuff. But yeah, getting the tool, figuring out what you want to say, keeping the, you know, pitch 160 seconds if possible. And really just being a human is what it comes down to. And you know, meeting, let me, let me just paint a little picture for folks and if it’s okay with you, Jason, we can include a link in the show notes to that video [00:02:30] that you sent to me. Sure. Yeah. So I got a video, I got an email from you just said I’m in the first line was something like hands live and email. I recorded a personalized video for you and the first frame of the video had you holding up a handwritten sign saying hi will. So it was obvious just looking at it that it was a personalized video to me. So I’m like, hmm, that’s Kinda interesting. I haven’t received that before, so, okay, well I will check this out. This clearly kind of just by signaling costs, right? You had
Speaker 2: [00:03:00] invested more in the reach out than just someone who’s sending out something going to a thousand people. Right. So I’m like, okay, personally I’m curious. So I clicked on the video and you said, hey, you know, I liked, you know leashed I, you mentioned a specific recent episode. Now I doubt that you’ve listened to all 180 episodes so far, but my mother, my mother hasn’t, I wouldn’t expect you to, but you know, you listened to one, you mentioned it, you referenced it. You say, Hey, I like your podcast. I think you know, what I do might be relevant to your listeners. [00:03:30] Uh, you mentioned a specific recent episode and you made a comment on that and said, and here’s why I might, you know, be a good guest for the show. And you know, so it was like about 90, 60 to 90 seconds. So short.
Speaker 2: So nobody had ever done that before. I thought that was pretty neat idea and I thought it could be not just good for getting on podcasts but a nice idea for, for, not any but a lot of interest, you know, a lot of sales type roles where you have a limited number of high value clients [00:04:00] that you want to or willing to invest the time to record a video to reach out to them. Cause it, you know, maybe a year from now everybody’s going to be doing it. It’s like, oh my God, and that’s one more thing you gotta do. But right now it’s a way to distinguish yourself. Well, I’d like to walk through for both pieces, the technical piece of just literally how you create that using the vid yard, a tool. We will include that link and then we can talk about some of the research that went into it or that goes into this kind of thing. [00:04:30] And some of the things to say, some things not to say, but maybe start with just the kind of technical aspect of how do you create these things?
Speaker 1: Yeah. So if you’re sending an email, you’re probably using one of two solutions. You probably either using outlook or using Gmail. So the first thing would just be to go to, you know, vid yard. It’s the tools called video go video. So you can download it to the Gmail extension or do a search in your outlook for it for an admin. So it syncs directly up with your Google chrome. [00:05:00] So it’s just a chrome extension that lives in there. And essentially what you can do is you can, you can click on it and it’s gonna allow you to look at someone’s website or look at something else while you’re recording the video. So I’ll typically have the prospect’s website and I already have a good idea of what I want to say. Um, prior to that, uh, using the tools is pretty simple. Um, it’s really just a couple of clicks in the chrome extension. There’s a few best practices that are recommend prior to hitting record. So one, and you mentioned this well as you have a whiteboard [00:05:30] or a piece of paper that you can write the prospect’s first name on and that’s gonna embed that someday into the email and it’s going to show them that it’s personalized. Yeah, that was key. Other things, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 2: if it otherwise you would not see visually and encourage the person to click. It just looks like you record, you’re sending out the same video to everyone. But I mean if it’s the person’s name, okay. That’s kind of neat. It’s just for me. So, so keep going.
Speaker 1: Yup. And the mentality here is to not the process. So you know, a lot [00:06:00] of you listening to this, it sounds like you’re, you’re selling things that are fairly high end and you want to work with high end clients. What does not impressive to a high end client is when you try to deceive them rates. If you make it look like you’re doing more than you’re actually doing, it’s this not a good thing. So a few other things in that thumbnail. When it pops up, you’re going to have that person’s name on there. The other thing that’s really important is to make eye contact with the camera so then it’s going to look like you are actually talking to the person and this is a good best practice. If you’re doing a video call [00:06:30] like on Skype or zoom as well. If you look at the camera when you’re talking, it’s going to make the person feel like you’re looking at them instead of at a computer screen. Set a little thing there. And lastly, this is more obvious and it can to some people than others, but you want to smile. So in that thumbnail, definitely make sure to smile. I usually sort of wave at the camera, but be positive. Be Upbeat. This is just a good best practice when you’re prospecting in general.
Speaker 2: It doesn’t, it doesn’t hurt to smile in person as well when your actually [00:07:00] widely applicable recommendation. Jason. Alright. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I know that sounds super obvious but people get so serious when they do this stuff. So definitely want a smile in terms of lighting, you want to make sure the lighting is good but you don’t need like, yeah, I don’t have any professional lighting, I’m just going to Home Office. So the backdrop doesn’t need to be super professional either. It just needs to be a clean looking backdrop, you know, you don’t have dirty clothes laying everywhere or you know like really busy in the background and that sort of thing. And that’s [00:07:30] pretty much in terms of like the technical parts of doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Did you record this with like a laptop or with your phone or how did you record it?
Speaker 1: Yeah. Good question. Yeah, I just recorded it with the laptop. So just the laptop microphone.
Speaker 2: Okay. So just the laptop microphone and the laptop built in little camera. So not fancy in terms of equipment.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The other thing cause I use a Webcam, like a Langi Tech Webcam. Actually that’s HD. So it depends on what kind of laptop you have. I [00:08:00] noticed that the lighting on the laptops, like the Mac books is not like super awesome. So a lot of the tech web can’t wait to get a gift for 30 or 40 bucks what I paid for mine. So it’s pretty inexpensive. You don’t need a professional camera set up or anything like that. Okay.
Speaker 2: So you get yourself a Webcam and the way this works is like what you’re in chrome and did you, do you kind of hit record like you’re in Gmail and you hit record very quarter, the video card button or do you like, so [00:08:30] technically how, how does that, how does it get recorded?
Speaker 1: So the chrome extension, you can activate vineyard from any browser so you don’t even need to be at Gmail. I typically will have, like when I sent the video to see, I just had your website open and then I have the iTunes page open where I was listening to one of the podcasts. I was like, oh, okay. Well that that thing sticks out. That looks interesting. And I just had your website open. What you can then do through the extension in Gmail is embedded. So like you can open up a new email for [00:09:00] example, and there’ll be a little icon that pops up at the bottom, a little video icon. You can just embed the video right into the email.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then it’s not, so listeners though, it’s not just you seeing a link, oh here’s the link to video, but you’re actually seeing like the screenshot of the video and you can, you know, you can see. So you can click on it and then it will open up a new browser browser window. But you’re seeing, you’re seeing the thumbnail of the video there. Yeah. So you, if you have that chrome extension with Gmail, then you know within Gmail you can [00:09:30] kind of insert the, the video. Yup. And it works the same with outlook too. If you’re using outlook. And is there anything special about that tool or would it be just as good to like record it, upload it to let’s say Vimeo and make it a private video on Vimeo and then embed that video in your, in your Gmail? Is there any advantage to using the tool that you do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s, okay, so, so one thing just to kind of backtrack a little bit, the reason why people [00:10:00] are doing this through video card is it originally started as a tool for marketers. So people would do like videos embedded into newsletter style emails and they weren’t personalized videos, but they wanted to get the stats on how long people were watching it and all this other good stuff. And then sales people started using it to do one on one to one video and that’s where they started creating, creating these specific workflows. So the time that it’s going to save you is instead of recording a video on a third party software, I don’t know, maybe you use Camtasia or quicktime or whatever [00:10:30] you use. What you’re avoiding is having to record it, save it on your computer, uploaded into Vimeo. Take a manual screenshot, embed that into the email, then hyperlink it. It’s going to remove all the steps for you. So you can just hit record and it’s going to host the video on the site for you on the vineyard site. And it’s going to give you something that you can copy and paste into the email that has the thumbnail already. So instead of taking, you know, maybe 10 minutes, 15 minutes, um, to [00:11:00] do one of these, you can, you can rip them out in like 60 seconds, 60 to 90 seconds.
Speaker 2: Hey Really? So you can just record it and all the workflows designed for this purpose. So you recorded with the Webcam, you don’t even upload your can be recorded with the web cam. It’s automatically already uploading it to the cloud somewhere or you’ve got your thumbnail, you pasted it to your, you know, so the, other than the actual recording, like speaking time, recording time, it’s an extra 60 seconds worth of clicking and you’re, you’re done with it. Yup. All [00:11:30] right, so that’s cool. And then you see, does it actually give you stats on if it was viewed? And so forth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’ll tell you just the, I mean the free version will tell you if it’s viewed or not and then what percentage of the video is watched. Hmm. And then you can pay for other sort of stats. I don’t, I just use the free version.
Speaker 2: Okay, cool. I think this is a, you know, probably going to be an, I expect all of us are going to start receiving more of these personalized videos. It seems to be such a powerful technique, [00:12:00] partly because of the signaling cost to it. It’s a way to show that the person sending to you actually invested in a serious about it. And for a lot of, you know, US listeners either using it or in our own practice or you know, kind of advising our clients, you know, on to think about doing something like this with, for their, for their inside sales type groups. Let’s talk now a little bit. So that’s how you got my attention. I thought it was powerful. Let’s talk more broadly about the whole kind of workflow that you do [00:12:30] with your clients on kind of target. You know, figuring out, helping your clients have a target potential customers, how to develop the messaging for it, and maybe a couple other steps. Help us understand your whole process.
Speaker 1: So we really break this up into two parts. There’s a targeting portion and then there’s the messaging portion. And the mistake I see a lot of people make is focusing so much on the messaging and not thinking about who they’re reaching out to. And that’s where you get people wanting email templates, right? So if you’re using [00:13:00] an email template that you found it online somewhere, you’re already making a big mistake. Most of those get regurgitated. They’re not personalized, they’re not specific for what you’re doing. So really what we came up with is something that we call the reply method. And for the targeting portion, we have another acronym for that called open. So it starts the very first thing that you want to start with and the o and open stance for organization. So you really want to think about like what your ideal client looks like.
Speaker 1: And it needs [00:13:30] to be more than, hey, hopefully you’re not saying we’re industry agnostic, that you’ll work with anyone in any industry. Even though you can do that, you don’t want to reach out to someone like that. It’d be like going to, you know, a doctor because you had something for us. Very serious disease. That’s the general practitioner, right? You wouldn’t want to go to the general practitioner, you want to go to the specialist. So in every one on here seems to be doing those specialized types of solutions. So you definitely want to appear as a specialist when you’re doing this type of outbound outreach. [00:14:00] So starting with the ideal client profile, getting really detailed on, hey, what are the size of these companies? What industry or niches are they serving? And is there anything that I would be able to tell about this company around maybe the tools that they’re using that would be an a good indicator.
Speaker 1: So, for example, if you’re a consultant that does like marketing automation, if they’re already using tools like hubspot, like there’s ways for you to figure out if they’re using tools like you know, Marquetto Proton, hubspot, et Cetera, [00:14:30] if they’re using any sort of marketing automation. So you’re going to look for those types of indicators on the organization level. So once you have a really good idea of like the company that you wanna go after, that would be a good fit and you can also basis and where it would start is just your portfolio. So what kind of companies are you working with right now and try to find patterns. A free tool that you can use is called Apollo and it’s Apollo to io. So you can plug in all of the companies that you’re working with right now and you can find these patterns and like employee accounts and [00:15:00] their industry and technology that they’re using on their website and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1: So after you’ve figured out the organization, the next part is the key and open stands for persona. And this is where a lot of people skip on this part is like really thinking about, well not only who, what the organization is then reaching out to, but who are the specific people that I’m going to reach out to them. And the reason why this is important is that we, even when we sell business to business, we’re engaging with people, [00:15:30] not companies. So we split these up into two areas. So a guy named skip Miller wrote a book called selling above and below the line. And essentially what we’re going to do is find an above the line persona and a below the line persona. So if you visualize the horizontal line, that’s where the decision is made. Lot of times people call it the power line.
Speaker 1: The above the line personas are your c levels and gps. These are people that are more strategic and thinking. So a lot of times they’re going to be a caring most about you know, revenue process, like [00:16:00] reducing risk and they’re going to think in terms of quarters. And then the below the line is war in your directors and managers. And these people are like the tacticians. The reason why we reach out to both is that oftentimes, uh, both of them can have equal, uh, sort of influence on the decision. And in business to business people tend to typically come together in committees to make decisions. So once we figured out like, okay, who, and do you want to use an example we built to make it more applicable? Is there, is there something that you want to use? Like [00:16:30] you, an example you can think of or, or like someone listened to this might be selling so that we can make it a little more actionable. Sure.
Speaker 2: So I think you’re most listeners of this show, independent consultants is the, the buyer often for independent consultants is not the CEO of a fortune 500 firm. Usually it’s often, you know, maybe somebody at the VP level, SVP level, they have a budget for consulting. That person might not have a budget to hire a whole McKinsey [00:17:00] team, but, uh, they’d have the budget to hire a can at top tier independent consultant for a couple months. So typical, typical buyer decision line, I guess the power line would be the, um, sort of that VP, SVP, yeah. Possibly EVP level could be a c level at a smaller company. Yeah. The um, you know, CEO or CFO of $100 million, $200 million firm, most people are probably focusing on that VP SVP layer.
Speaker 1: [00:17:30] Got It. And what type of consulting? So
Speaker 2: human consulting, most listeners to this show, we, if you’re a [inaudible] listeners, I would love to hear from you. So if you, uh, if I didn’t describe you, well let me know. You can email me at unleashed at [inaudible] dot com and me if I didn’t
Speaker 1: capture you correctly. So, so, okay, great. So we’ve got management consulting, typically gonna work with CPS, SVPs, that sort of thing. So, so there’s your persona then [00:18:00] what you want to do is take it another step further. And what I want you to think about is like, Hey, what are these people’s goals in relation to how I can help them? Are there any fears that they have associated with that? And then what are the obstacles that they might encounter on a regular basis or semi regular basis that we keep them from accomplishing those goals. So once you have all of that information, what it does is it gives you some really good like word for word things that you can use when writing, email, copy and messaging copy [00:18:30] or when sending videos. So once we’ve established organization persona, so that’s the, oh that’s the t and open the e is how you choose to engage them.
Speaker 1: And the number one thing that you need to know here is that email works well, phone works well, video, social, all of those work well. What doesn’t work well is if you only use one of them. So if you only send people emails, the likelihood that you’re going to get ahold of them is less than a half as likely as if you’re combining two channels together. So that could be email, phone, [00:19:00] email, video, it could be phone and video, phone and social, etc. Your chances of getting ahold of someone increased by about two and a half times. If you’re doing at least two channels, then that’s interesting. I have not heard that before. It makes intuitive sense. How did you come up with that? Is that some, what’s the research behind that? Yeah, so inside sales.com they’re a sales engagement platform. So sales engagement platform is essentially something you can plug these activities into and say, Hey, I’m going to reach out to these people [00:19:30] and I want to uh, you know, contact them 12 times over the course of a month and I want to do this many emails, this many phone calls, et cetera.
Speaker 1: And they have hundreds of thousands of emails that get sent through their system and activities that get completed. And they studied, I believe it was around 40 45,000 outbound cadences. So cadence is like a sequence of these touches. And what they found is that the people that only did email had about a nine and a half percent success rate versus people that used like email and [00:20:00] phone and it was about 22 and a half percent success rate. So that’s like getting a response. The big thing that they found too is that there’s a certain number of emails and phone calls that you would make or leaving voicemails that are optimal as well. So the sweet spot seems to be four to six emails, two to three voicemails and then one or two touches on social over the period of about 30 to 40 days. Um, and that’s going to, so I’m like you say that again because that [00:20:30] is worth repeating.
Speaker 1: I, I wanna I wanna make sure that, that I, that I captured that. Yeah. Yeah. It’s around four to six touches via email, around two or three touches through the phone. And that could be leaving voicemails also cause most of the time you’re not going to get ahold of the person. Sure. And then that would be one or detaches number social. And that’s over the course of about 30 to 40 ish days. What counts is the touch on social, a touch on social could just be sending a connection request. And then once you’re connected with someone could be liking or commenting on something if [00:21:00] they wrote. Okay. So, not necessarily sending them a message, but you know, sort of, yeah, you don’t have to send them a message. If you send a connection request and you include something like, I always like to personalize those.
Speaker 1: Of course. You know, maybe like, hey well love what you’re doing. At least your podcasts on leash. I like this episode. I’d love to follow you. You know, something like that. And it’s a personal response. You could start a conversation with them. But the point of doing multichannel is that you don’t know what the person you’re reaching out. So you don’t know what their preferred method of communication is. And typically what [00:21:30] a lot of the stature showing is this kind of a generational thing. For the most part. Younger people don’t like picking up the phone for some reason and prefer to do email and social. And then we’re, we see the older generations preferring more phone and social and again, everyone’s got their personal preference though. So you want to do a little bit of everything so that if the person you know wants to do phone or, and a lot of it has to do with the type of role that they’re working in too.
Speaker 1: And very technical people are in front of the computer a lot. Right? Versus [00:22:00] reaching out to someone that’s maybe more in sales that’s likely going to be on the phone a lot or during a lot of meetings that might be more likely to pick up their phone. So point is unless you tested it, you don’t know, like you want to do a little bit of every sentence. Okay. That is really, really interesting point. But the multichannel, let’s keep going. Okay. So we o p e engage, right? And then n s for need. So this is really like figuring out like what is the big need that you’re fulfilling and what is like a trigger event [00:22:30] that might cause them to like one to work with you. So for example, like we sell and do prospecting and sales training. So a big trigger event that people might need.
Speaker 1: What we have to offer is if they’re hiring salespeople right now. So if we see them having ads for sales development reps, business development reps, and that’s a trigger event, that’s something that we could talk about in an email that is also likely an indicator that they are investing in their sales. And if things are going well enough that they’re growing. [00:23:00] So what’s the need? What’s the big need, what’s the trigger event, what are things that could happen that would be an indicator that they’re, you know, likely in the market for what you have to do. Okay. What are those sort of a, and so that makes sense for your firm. You know, hiring salespeople equals, well they’ve got to train the salespeople. What for the clients that you’ve served, what are some other triggers that you have seen? Yeah, so another thing too is if you’re working with publicly traded companies, you can look at their quarterly reports.
Speaker 1: [00:23:30] So like for example, like one of our clients sells like tax, like your like tax credits and like things like that. So like helps companies take advantage of like r and d credits. So one of the things they could look at in like quarterly reports are, hey is this company in r? And d? If they are and they’re talking about it, that would be a good indicator that obviously they might be in the market if they’re not doing that sort of stuff and taking care of it in house. Another type of client that we work with is [00:24:00] professional services, so like if, if a accounting firm for example is looking for companies and the other thing that they could do is, you know with tools like linkedin or Apollo is they can see if a company, their head count is growing. They can look at specific departments too that are growing. So departments that are maybe more cost centric, like your engineering departments and your technology departments is the head count growing in those departments. That’s another trigger that you, that you can look for as well.
Speaker 2: [00:24:30] Now how would you, how would you do that in, in Linkedin? LinkedIn’s it makes it easy to look at the total number of employees. If you wanted to look at just the people in the finance department, how would you do that over time?
Speaker 1: Yeah. So you can actually do these exact searches through their tool sales navigator. So if you sign up, I think it’s 80 bucks a month and you could get a lot of really cool account intelligence so you can look and you can say, Hey, I want to target companies fortune 1000 that have these types of departments that are growing [00:25:00] right now.
Speaker 2: Okay, cool. So that’s in all right. So open. So that, that’s really all about the targeting piece.
Speaker 1: Yep. One other thing too, in terms of like management consulting is you could, and you could look for people that just started working at a company too. So if they just had a c level or VP type of person, and these are like triggers that you can set up on, on linkedin just by following companies. But you can look for people that are newly hired too. It might be something to look at.
Speaker 2: And uh, how [00:25:30] would you do that in Linkedin?
Speaker 1: Yeah, so same sort of thing with a linkedin sales navigator. So you can set up a notifications and trigger when new new people are hired or when people change positions too.
Speaker 2: Oh really? Okay. And sales navigator. Can you do, can you look at, don’t tell me, you know, every new person that’s hired, but I want to see any new VP level or above hires.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So you could, so one of the things that you can sort by when you’re doing lead searches is how long the person has been working at [00:26:00] that company. So you could look for people that have been working at Dec, you know, the, within six months of working at that company and then, or vps of, you know, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2: Hmm. Okay. That’s cool. I didn’t know that.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So like one of the things that you could do in your outreach that would be kind of interesting is yeah, you can mention something about specifically how you helped vps of whatever department, you know, sort of navigate through the challenges of starting at a new company. You know, and you could share a piece of content with them, uh, that would be helpful. And asking them if they’re interested in talking about [00:26:30] it. Um, so there’s, yeah, there’s all kinds of things that you can do that are, that are pretty cool with linkedin.
Speaker 2: Okay. Awesome. All right, let’s talk about the reply method, right? For the messaging.
Speaker 1: So we talked about targeting. So basically, basically everything up to this point has been, Hey America, am I reaching up to the right company, Marie Champs, the right person at that company and engaging them in the right way? And then am I looking for some sort of trigger, like a reason to reach out to them? So the R and replies stands for results. [00:27:00] So one of the things that’s really important is that you’re sharing and talking about a business goal that the prospect will care about. So we’ll, do you have like something that we could use that would be like specific in this scenario as well, like a VP of something and like, can you tell me a little bit more about what goal or KPI that they might be using to sort of measure their success in their position? And we can use that as an example. Uh,
Speaker 2: sure. So let’s see, off the top of my head, [00:27:30] maybe we’re reaching out to a, you know, maybe it’s a consultant who does due diligence, kind of work or market landscape helps companies understand given industry, and maybe they work with private equity firms, but in this case they’re looking to work with the head of m and a at, uh, in corporate development at a, at a company. What that person cares about in terms of results would be, you know, have they actually managed to close deals [00:28:00] and you know, complete acquisitions in any given sector.
Speaker 1: Okay. So where do you want to really focus on the results then is lik when a prospect gets an email, they need to go from, well, Hey, what is this to? Hey, these results look interesting. So with that primarily comes up is around the value prop and how you talk about what you do. So if you’re reaching out to a head of mergers and acquisitions and it’s, it sounds like closed deals and then, [00:28:30] um, these acquisitions that you were mentioning are the most important things to them. So you’re going to talk about that. So you could say something along the lines of, you know, hey, um, you know, we help, uh, heads of mergers and acquisitions increased the number of close deals by x percentage or x amount over the course of helping them in 12 months. You know, however you want to say that specifically to what’s applicable to what you’re doing.
Speaker 1: So you, you would probably know the industry verbiage a little bit better than I would. So you want [00:29:00] to have that specific like closed deals if that’s important to them. Do you need to share results for a client that you got results with, whether it be through a case study or just a statement there where you’re talking about the specific thing that you help them with. And in this case, increasing the number of closed deals or their percentage of close deals, however they measure that. So, and this is where it comes in on the persona side, like really understanding, hey, who this person is, how they measure success and sort of how you can insert your consulting services. [00:29:30] So that value prop really needs to talk about, hey, I can help them with this specific business goal that they care about and here’s a tangible result that I can share with them.
Speaker 1: And typically the best way to do that is through that value prop statement. And then if you have a case study, you can share that or some sort of testimonials that you can link 200 website. The other thing that you’re going to want to do on that results portion is talk about, you know, some of the other companies that you might have worked with as well that are similar to the company you’re reaching out to for [00:30:00] social proof. Okay, so that’s the results portion. So that’s the are so reply the the e is for empathy. So the thing that the prospect really needs to go through in this part, when they’re looking at your emails, they need to go from, you know, hey, it doesn’t look like this person really understands me or our business to this person’s like really speaking my language. And the way that you do that. So those goals, challenges and fears that we talked about, uh, when we’re doing the persona, uh, we [00:30:30] really need to use that type of language in an email or an a video that we’re sending as well. So I just kind of direct this to you. Well, like what are some of the, so we, we know like what heads of MNA want to accomplish? Like what are, what is like a typical challenge they might have in accomplishing that?
Speaker 2: A typical challenge might be they’re probably incredibly busy with, you know, multiple, you know, potential discussions going on. So probably the, it’s probably a challenge to kind [00:31:00] of conduct the due diligence and have sort of time to do that there. Equally, you can go to kind of the big consulting firms and get that, but that can be very, very expensive. So, you know, finding an affordable but very reliable and high quality, um, you know, consulting team who has access to be able to do expert interviews, maybe has even data or already understands the market to some degree. Being able to find that that team is, uh, is probably, [00:31:30] you know, something that, that they need.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s great stuff right there. So, um, so with the empathy piece, the way that might sound in an email is, you know, hey, I know you’re probably super busy with just some discussions that you guys are currently having and some of the things that you know that you need to do, um, you might not have the bandwidth for like the due diligence, the, you know, it sounds like prioritizing also as a is a big challenge. Um, so you’re, you’re specifically talking about the challenges that you know, that they’re having on [00:32:00] a daily basis that are keeping them from either accomplishing their goals or this could be keeping them from doing as good as they could be doing. So it’s a very important, like the, the best way to do this if you don’t know exactly what the challenge is, like we can just ask your current clients, okay, what are your biggest challenges related to like how we work with you and how we help you guys right now?
Speaker 1: And if you can use their language specifically and plug that into an email, um, they’re, they’re just going to feel like you understand where they’re coming from. [00:32:30] It’s, it’s, it’s empathy, right? This person understands me, they understand my job, they understand what I’m going through and they’re connecting how they can help me to my, so one of the other big things here too that I recommend is when you writing an email, this is a really basic tip, but read the email out loud as well. And one of the things that’s going to do is like really make sure that it sounds human and it’s conversational. So that’s, that’s the empathy piece, the p and replies for personalization. [00:33:00] Really the big thing here is you either need to include a video that’s personalized or personalized. The first two sentences of the email and it can be anything related to that trigger events that you found and the reason why you’re reaching out to them.
Speaker 1: Or it could be related to something that you saw them. Like, you know, if these, if these are vps that you know, fortunately thousands for examples they might be putting up content, you know they might be contributing to a blog or have some sort of personal brand or has stuff that they post or share on linkedin. So that is something [00:33:30] that you could talk about as well, but it needs to be personalized and clearly shown to them that you put some sort of work into the outreach that you did some research up front. The L is for laser focus and essentially what you need to do there are, there’s just a couple of general roles. Like one of the big things I see people doing is their emails are just way too long. So a good rule of thumb is keep your email between three and five sentences and less than 120 words.
Speaker 1: So it needs to be easily read on mobile. [00:34:00] So if you have to scroll on your phone, if you send it to yourself, you have just, if you have to scroll to read the entire email, it’s a little bit too long. So essentially what you can do here is music, couple tools I recommend. Grammarly is a free one. And then Hemingway app is another one. These are two free tools that are going to help you sort of be more concise in your writing so that you can get it down to three to five sentences so that it’s really easy to read and skim. Okay. So show results, be empathetic, personalize it, but keep it to [00:34:30] 120 words or less. Yup. Okay. And then lastly, the y stands for you. So what you want to do here, and again, another rule here that we found works really effectively is oftentimes people say Aye.
Speaker 1: And we wait too many times in the email. And if you can use you and your more times than you use ion, wait, you’re going to be in pretty good shape. So instead of saying stuff like, uh, I’m reaching out because of this, I was hoping we could [00:35:00] hop on a call. Uh, we help with this, et Cetera, et cetera. Um, you, you want to use words like you and your, so like with personalization for example, instead of saying I was reaching out because of this, you could say was reaching out and just kind of cut that [inaudible] out of it. And it’s not like necessarily grammatically correct, um, to do a lot of that. But cutting that out and making it more conversational in tone, it’s going to be a just, it’s gonna feel like the email is about them versus [00:35:30] making it about you. So if you use your you and, excuse me, view and yours as much as possible and try to keep the eyes on these. I really use the word I in emails. I really try to keep it to two hour and we and then use you and yours as much as possible.
Speaker 2: Hmm. Okay. All right. So that is reply. And um, so that is a kind of, wow, that was a whirlwind tour of how to target and then message folks. And one thing you didn’t mention is [00:36:00] what sort of call to action do you find works best? Is it, do you want to set up a call or you know, are you the right person to talk to or what sort of the kind of calls to action to talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you definitely want to test test this for sure. But the ones that we found worked best, um, just in our testing is to be as specific as possible. So if you’re sending four to six emails, like the first email, I keep a pretty casual, like I might say something like interested [00:36:30] in chatting or hey, is this a challenge that you’re having at this time or is this a priority of yours right now? And to keep it pretty open ended on the first email. And then as I start to send more emails, they get very specific. So I’ll say things like, what’s the best way to get 15 minutes of your time? Are you free for 15 minutes this Thursday or Friday after 1:00 PM to chat? Or what time after 3:00 PM this Wednesday or Thursday works to chat for 15 minutes? I’m like very, very specific and make it very easy for them to respond to.
Speaker 2: Interesting. I, I, um, [00:37:00] that’s interesting that, that you’re finding that works. I, I kind of find that a little bit annoying sometimes when I get, I mean I get a ton of these right inbounds and people say like, you know, are you free Thursday at 1:00 PM? Like, no, no, no. You know, it’s just, but um, you know, I guess I’m not a good test case so, but you find it actually, rather than just saying, are you free to talk sometime in the next two weeks? You find it better to say, you know, hey, can you talk Friday afternoon after one o’clock? And you know,
Speaker 1: and the reason for that too is [00:37:30] if the person’s interested in what you have to, you know, what you have to help them with at that time doesn’t work. For vendors who say, you know, actually that time doesn’t work. And then you can respond back and be like, Hey, well what’s the best way to get 15 minutes of your time? And you could provide a calendar link if you want as well.
Speaker 2: [inaudible] okay. And Are you sending the sequence with a tool? Tell us about the tool that you use to initiate and then send the sequence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you definitely want to use a tool because it’s going to help you sort of automate the re the mundane parts of [00:38:00] this. So what you can’t automate is personalization. You’re going to want to personalize this stuff every time. But typically what we have as a sequence that you know works pretty well. And then we personalize that sequence. So it’s a templated email that has personalization in it. And then we have that good base of, uh, to work with. And we’re using a tool called mixmax. So like mixmax will allow you to set up that cadence so you can say, Hey, I want to send two emails, the third outreach I want to call, and then I want to hit them up on social. And then I want to email [00:38:30] them again and I want it to automatically send an email to this person. If they don’t follow up where I want it to create a task for me to call this person. If they don’t respond to the email, it’ll take all of that like mundane work that you would have to manually do if you were just doing this all one-to-one by yourself.
Speaker 2: Interesting. So, so with mixmax you can have it, you know, uh, be that multichannel of send out the emails, but then it creates a task for you to make a phone call and leave a voicemail and then you [00:39:00] would go in mixmax and tick it off and say it’s done. And then it reverts back to its email sequence.
Speaker 1: Yup. And then you can also, actually, you can make calls through mixmax too. So they have like a dialer where you can make the call through the phone, which is pretty cool. Cause then you, you have the entire workflow just on the computer.
Speaker 2: Okay. That makes sense. What have you found is the best kind of time between outbound emails? Uh, in terms of like number of days.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s really good question. So there’s a lot of questions that people [00:39:30] ask with cadences around, you know, how long should the cadence be and how many days apart should each touch me. So the answer to that is it varies, but there’s a couple general rules that you want to apply. Um, you don’t want to do touches closer than 48 hours apart and the touches should be further apart the longer into the sequence, the further into the sequence that you are. So for example, a lot of times when we’re doing stuff, it’s, the first week is an email on Tuesday and Thursday. And then that Thursday email will also need to be followed [00:40:00] up with a phone call. And then the week after we moved to two days a week again, but we might just be doing emails and then the week after that, it’s like a once a week touch, then a once a week and then I might go for four to six weeks.
Speaker 1: So the busier the person and the larger the organization, typically we spread the sequence out further. It might be like 45 days versus something that you’re selling. Like some of the people that we help sell stuff that’s really transactional, that’s going to be like a three week cadence with like 10 to 12 touches [00:40:30] in it. So just be mindful of who you’re reaching out to you. It sounds like for for people listening to this, the the best type of outreach. If you’re reaching out to vps at fairly large companies, it’s going to be kind of spread it out a little bit in input, not really pester the person too much and make sure that you’re adding value to them and sharing helpful content, your case studies, whatever it may be, like really focused on their pain points and helping them and providing some sort of value in your outreach so that they look at you as someone that could help them in via a partner, so [00:41:00] to speak, versus someone who’s trying to sell stuff to them.
Speaker 2: Would you incorporate in there like a touches on linkedin in that sequence?
Speaker 1: Definitely. Yep. Yeah, so like that. So that first week or for using as an example, email would go on on Tuesday and then we’d send a connection request on Linkedin that same day. And then Thursday would be an email and then a phone call. So that’s four touches right there in a week
Speaker 2: when then what tools you’re getting to get to get the email address. And the phone number.
Speaker 1: A photo was a really tough to get direct dials, but [00:41:30] the tool that we’re primarily using is called Apollo. And then you can also as very similar functionality, you can use sales navigator with lead IQ. And basically what that’s going to do is it’s lead a queue as a chrome extension that works when you have sales navigator open and it’ll allow you to like find people’s emails. And they have a lot of direct titles too. But in our experience, you know, a lot of people, most people don’t pick up the phone from numbers, they don’t recognize. So most of the time we’re leaving voicemails.
Speaker 2: [00:42:00] Okay. And where in that sequence typically would you suggest sending these video emails?
Speaker 1: Yeah. So what I like about tools like mixmax and that’s uh, they call the sales engagement platforms. So there’s, you know, outreach on Ios and other tools. Sales Loft is another tool that you could use. But with mixmax you can prioritize prospects based on engagement. So unless I’m doing something that’s like, yeah, so with podcast for example, does a very finite number of podcasts that are a good fit [00:42:30] for us to get on. So I send a video on the very first email. So if you’re like, hey, there’s only like maybe a pool of like maybe 50 companies that like that I can work with that really need what I have, he might include a video in the first email, but if you’re looking at something where there’s potentially hundreds or even thousands of companies out there that you could work with, I’ll typically send them a two or three emails first and then I’ll look and see who’s opening the emails. And these tools will tell you who’s opening it. And a lot of times what you’re going to find is that if you send a good email, [00:43:00] it might’ve gotten opened to half a dozen times. And what that means is it’s probably getting forwarded around to other people. So one thing that I saw today, actually right before this call was someone sent an email back to me, I think an accident saying, hey, can you look into this guy and see if, if we want to set up a time to chat with them.
Speaker 1: So like, I’m going to respond probably like with a video to that and it’d be like, Hey, you know, I’m, I’m definitely worth chatting to, you know. Um, but, uh, bottom line there is that spend the extra effort [00:43:30] on the people that are opening emails. If you’re really good at this, you’re going to get 50 plus percent of people to open emails focused your extra effort around calling and recording personalized videos that people that are actually engaging with what you’re sending them.
Speaker 2: Mm, okay. So, and you’re using mixmax to help, help track all that? Yup. Yeah. What are these called sales engagement platforms you said? Yep. And, uh, I think I’ve seen that mixmax is, works with, you know, the g suite. [00:44:00] Does it also work with outlook or are there other sales engagement platforms that work with outlook or that people should look into when deciding among them?
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll, it looks a little tougher because you know, there, there, there addins is what they call them. I think there’s just a little more picky with tools and how they interact with them. So outreach on io is probably the industry leader on the enterprise level. Uh, they just have a lot of, you know, widgets and stuff like that that I don’t personally find useful because you know, the worst of all company, [00:44:30] I do all the prospecting. You know, at our company we don’t have teams of people. So outreach is one that you can use that would work with outlook. The other one is persist IQ. That would be the one that I would probably look into. It’s not super expensive and you know, has the same kind of functionality where you can do calls and emails and that sort of stuff. Um, I would probably start with those two
Speaker 2: on the outlook side. Fantastic. Jason, this has been a fantastic discussion. Uh, where could people go to find more about your firm?
Speaker 1: Definitely. [00:45:00] So I, so a couple areas I put together a pdf for you guys on video prospecting@blissfulprospecting.com slash will. So what that will have in it is like in five to 10 minutes it’ll show you like what to say in videos, like the tools, like all the step by step stuff that I share today, but just in like a pdf that’s like much easier to work with and follow. So I definitely would check that out if videos sounds like something that you want to do otherwise, just go to our website, blissful prospecting.com there’s a couple [00:45:30] of really in depth guides there. We have a newsletter that we send out on a biweekly basis where we recommend tools and give best practices. You’ll be able to follow us on linkedin there. I try to post once or twice a week, you know, just everything from cold email breakdowns to helpful prospecting tips. And you can really just kind of for free, get a good idea of how we work with people, and this may be something that you want to talk about.
Speaker 2: Fantastic. So, uh, we’ll include those links in the show notes. Jason, this has been very informative [00:46:00] for me. Thank you so much for joining. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Well.