Improve your cold sales messaging. 🥶

YouTube for business, cold calling and emailing, and how to create more targeted content. The March round up.

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Over the last few weeks we’ve covered: 👇

💭 Why your business should be on YouTube and how to get started

💭 Getting a call back from an out of office decision-maker

💭 How to write cold emails people can’t ignore

💭 Creating better content by deciding who you’re not posting for and defining your target enemy

📺 And episode 5 is here. On it, Mike, Dan, and several guests give their views on all the above subjects we’ve spoken about in the last month. There’s a bit of disagreement in this one, but that’s what happens when you’ve got a marketer and a salesman in a room together. 👀

As we always say, you don’t need to put into action every newsletter. But, if you do, over the course of a year you’ll have tried 52 extra things to improve your sales and marketing and make your business less shit.

This week’s newsletter is going out to everyone in the community, both free and paid. 

Paid, if you want to head over to watch the latest episode then click here. 👇

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💭 Why your business should be on YouTube - final thoughts:

❝ Comment from the community: 

Took on the Youtube channel and even hired someone from Fiverr to help change up video titles and getting their view on the channel as a whole

Looks a lot better and also the welcome video is 🔥

I just joined the YouTube partner program a month ago and it’s now generating around £100 a month in revenue, which is epic.

👉 YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world and it’s owned by the first, Google.

And the most searched word on Google is YouTube.

That should be enough of a reason to want your business on there, but not everyone has the knowledge (or enough motivation) to start posting decent enough video content that people will want to watch, and sometimes the thought of a new platform strategy can make the whole process off-putting enough to not bother. 

It’s great for brand awareness and discovery, and it won’t cost you anything to get going nor will you need an agency to do it for you. 

Plus any videos that rank on YouTube have the potential to rank on Google, so it’s great for SEO. 

Over the last few weeks, some of our private community have been giving YT a go. 🎯

We spoke with a few YouTube creators to get their views on the platform - if it’s really a space that works for everyone and how to get started for people who wanted to give it a try. 

Here’s what Paddy Galloway (a YouTube consultant with over 12 years of experience who helps build the world’s biggest channels, worked on videos with a combined 1 billion views, and has a personal channel of 360k+ subscribers) said 💭

When it comes to deciding what kind of content you’re going to put out on YT, it makes sense for business owners to be creating search-based content.

Content creators who make videos for the platform (vloggers etc) and build a YouTube business are better off posting browser suggested content - the videos on your home page and the suggested feed beside the video you’re watching.

Those videos are based on your viewing interests and frequently visited channels, usually on interesting or evergreen topics that can appear to anyone at any time.

Whereas search-based content is just that. Content you search to find. 

The search algorithm on YouTube is much more focused on relevancy and how targeted a video is to what you’ve searched.

Say you’re someone looking for free help and advice about accounting and want to hear someone sit and talk through it quickly, rather than scour pages of Google, searching on YouTube ‘how to do my taxes’ is a pretty good place to start, and you’re going to want to be one of those people who get seen. 

Niche down and trust the algorithm will bring the right people to you with your work on tags and titles. 

Paddy’s accountant’s main source of income and leads come through YouTube. 

Not Google, Facebook, or word of mouth - YouTube. 

For that, you’d expect he had a big channel, but he has around 1000 subscribers he’s built up over time and the answers to very specific search queries which bring the audience to him, which works.

❝With business content, you don’t need big viewership to justify doing it. 

If you want the full newsletter and you’re keen to start a channel, you can read the full newsletter here 👇

Do this if you want leads from YouTube. 👀

We also chat over the advice from the YouTubers and channel consultants in episode 5. 📺

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💭 Getting a call back from an oOo decision-maker - final thoughts:

❝ Comment from the community: 

So I tried the cold call and acted like I belonged. Result. The hiring manager sent me a text last night at 7 30 pm and today called me and I've got a call booked in to take a job on... Will be at least 7k fee. Woo defo doing this more.

👉 Gatekeepers will put cold calls through if the salesman doesn't sound like one.

We had a few of you say recently that you’re struggling to get through to anyone because the gatekeeper isn’t able to transfer you through to the decision-maker. 

Makes sense, the majority still spend a lot of time working from home or out of the office and are hard to get in contact with - if you don't have a direct mobile number for them, all you've got is the office number. 

So we had a chat with Callum Beecroft about how you can do that.

People hire Callum when they need someone to pick up the phone and prospect for new business and they’re not able to do it themselves. 

He’s a freelance SDR who knows a bunch of ways to get through to the person he needs to and to secure an appointment with his client’s target clients. 

Anyone who’s ever made a sales call knows that when you leave your number, you’re probably not getting a callback, unless you’re a really good salesperson. 

That’s because the gatekeeper has two functions:

👉 1. Never put through the wrong call. 

👉 2. Always put through the right call. 

A couple of things Calum says to bear in mind:

You want to sound like you belong. So you need to sound like the person you're trying to get hold of. 

Now if that's a CEO or an MD then typically they're going to be direct, to the point, and they're also very busy. 

Now the second thing to bear in mind is that you don't want to give too much information away. 

All you want to give away is your name and your number, any more than that and the decision-maker is probably going to look at it and think “I know I don't know this person, so I'm not going to call them back”. 

You get those two things right and you should have some success with this.

We broke down the conversation principles in the full newsletter with some more tips on how to get through. 

👇

Stop wasting your time befriending the gatekeeper. 📞

This one caused a bit of disagreement in episode 5. 

Dan’s a marketer and Mike’s a salesman. Based on that alone, we’re bound to get conflict in views at some point. 

Mike agrees with the points Callum makes and knows the value of a cold call to his previous business. 

Dan would put the phone down on someone if they tried it on him. 

WWYD?

Comment and let us know. 

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💭 Writing cold emails that people can’t ignore - final thoughts: 

❝ Comment from the community: 

This (the below template) sounded like me about a year ago. Major cringe.

If you ever write cold sales emails without any guidance then you know you’re unlikely to get a reply. 

❝You offend more people by sending boring, formulaic emails. That’s more insulting – you’re not even trying at that point.

But you need to be able to open up your own opportunities for your business and know that if inbound leads dry up, you can go out there and win over a new client. 

You’ll have received sales emails before. How many have actually stood out to you?

They usually all sound the same and follow the same pattern. 👇

Hi, I’m so and so. 

I work for a business that can do XYZ for you and we’re so great! 

We’ve worked with X and we’re the best ever at Y. 

Do you have this problem?

I’d love to be able to talk to you about what it is we do that is so great and hopefully you can apply it to your own business. 

Can we book a call?

Kind regards

Person who didn’t read the room

It’s painful to read, isn’t it?

There are a few things people get wrong when it comes to their cold emailing. We go into them in detail in the full newsletter, but here’s an overview:

👉 Ego ego ego. 

👉 They try to impress and persuade with jargon. 

👉 They’re presumptuous. 

👉The rhythm of the email is boring and there’s no story.

We studied a famed cold sales email, along with years of writing cold copy ourselves, and have a pretty decent hit rate now for getting a reply. 

The things to focus on:

👉 Impact (disarm and get their attention).

👉 Communication (introduce yourself and why you’re in their inbox).

👉 Persuasion (tell them what you’re trying to achieve in the least hard-sell way as you find possible).

You need to stop trying to persuade people to do things before you’ve got their attention. 

It’s like telling someone to make your dinner before you’ve softened them up to the thought of it.

Why would they do that just because you want them to?  

You don’t go in all guns blazing to tell them it’s their turn. You need to counter it and you need to make a compelling argument as to why they should make it, and what’s in it for them. 

❝Tom, I’m about to ask you something you won’t want to do. But you made such a nice cobbler last week, how about you make the dinner tonight and I’ll do the washing up?

Tom’s way more likely to say yes than if you went in with 👇

❝Tom, I’m hungry. I’d love for you to make me dinner, what time will you start cooking?

The dinner here is the meeting you’re trying to bag, if that wasn’t clear. 

How to do it yourself👇

👉 Step one: Make an impact - disarm them and get their attention.

The only job of this email is to get someone to have a meeting with you. To make them think that 30 minutes of their time with you isn’t going to be a total bore and they’re going to get some value from it. You don’t need to give every single detail on you and your service at the very beginning. Warm them up a little first, disarm them. 

Most cold approaches go wrong because you nip right in with persuasion.

The person you’re sending that to will get endless emails that all look exactly like that. What makes yours any different?

The way people speak about their business and product leads consumers to instinctively believe that most marketing messages are exaggerated. Because they are. 

We then make the problem worse by claiming our services and products are the solutions to every problem someone could have when in reality they’re not. And by making those claims, even when they might be true, it makes them sound less believable. People dismiss and ignore things they don’t believe.

So people will read the first line of hyperbole in your email and will dismiss it. 

The best way to make an impact is with disarming honesty. 

“Tom, I’m about to ask you something you won’t want to do.”

By being completely honest (something people trying to secure a sale won’t often do) you’re already setting yourself apart from the majority in their inbox. 

It’s hard to be annoyed at someone if they’re open and honest with their intentions, especially if they do it with humour. 

✍️ Example:

Hi Mike, 

I found your email on LinkedIn. 

I’m sure it was followed by a line saying no cold pitches but by the time I’d processed that I’d already clicked CTRL C and was half way to clicking send, and now I’m here.

💭 Why it works: 

You’re being truthful and you’re not sugarcoating why you’re there, trying to persuade people straight away that they need your services. As we said, it’s hard to be annoyed at someone for cold pitching if they’re honest. 

If you want to read steps two and three along with the template examples, plus some extra tips, it’s all here:

Write cold emails people can't ignore. 📧

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💭 Creating better content and defining your target enemy - final thoughts: 

❝ Comment from the community: 

I’ve never thought about flipping it and I’ve always struggled to get past the basics of who I’m targeting so I’ve just ignored it and hoped for the best 😂 

Mike 👇

❝I used to say to myself "take money out of the equation, would you want to work with this person?" and if the answer was no, or you had a niggling feeling before hand, then go with your gut. 

Not all money is good money and not all customers are created equal, so if you can identify a particular person you've had problems with and the red flags they've got - it saves a lot of hassle, back and forth, anger.

If you proceed knowing it's not right, you'll often resent them further down the line. So be clear on who you don't want to work with or a group/idea/mindset of who you wouldn't want to work with too.

Kelsall, ep 2 👇

❝People go on about target audiences being really important. I think you should go one step further and identify your target enemy, and I think everyone should have one. 

Mine’s generally old white blokes, which is ironic because I will one day be an old while bloke, but when I write a piece of content I don’t just ask myself if it’s speaking to my target audience, I ask myself if it’s going to piss those guys off as well.

👉 You might have spent two hours five years ago trying to decide who you think your ‘ideal client’ is because everyone told you that’s what you do when you start a business. 

That’s great.

You need to know who you’re selling to and be sure the content you’re putting out reaches the right people so it doesn’t waste the time you’re spending to create it, and if you’re putting spend behind targeting, that it’s not wasting your cash.

You can go on Google and copy off the first ‘your ideal client’ sheet you find, but most will still leave you with a very vague idea of how you’re going to go about targeting them.

You’re an accountant and you’ve established that your avatar has 3 dogs, lives in a pretty big house on the outskirts of a city, and spends their weekends in the park. 💸

Brilliant, what are you going to do with that? Head to the park and hold up a “Free tax advice if you have a dog” sign? Sure it might work, but it’s not a long-term solution that’ll work for all platforms.

It’s hard to dig deep into buying patterns when you only have surface-level information about people. Yes, you can create a campaign around those few things, but is it going to be niche enough to get the ongoing results you want? Probably not.

In last week’s newsletter, we dropped how we identify our target enemy. 

It’s how you create an anti-target client that you can use to get a better understanding of the people who don’t fit into the category of your best customers, and by default, understand who you do need even more.

Your marketing team (or you) will be able to define their messaging while your sales team (also might just be you) can start to give examples of prospects that should be taken out of your pipeline and will cause you more pain than good.

If you want to read it:

Push people away with your marketing. 🎯

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As always, if you’re in it, please chuck any of your questions in our Slack, and let us know what your views on episode five are, or you can do so in the comments. 👇

If you’ve not joined the Slack yet, the link is in your paid subscription welcome email. Send us a DM or email if you’re having trouble with it. 🔗

And if you’re not in the private community and want a bit more info on it, you can head over and read our welcome newsletter here.

VAMO_ 📺