How to figure out Outbound Messaging
The founder’s guide to outbound, part 4
AUG 19, 2023
Hi all —
Reminder – all my B2B playbooks are available HERE, free, open-sourced! Enjoy.
This week, I saw the worst cold email template ever.
It was:
- Nearly a page long
- With dense paragraphs
- Many different links
- Basically no personalization
- Wildly formal language
Seriously, this email breaks nearly every rule that you find.
The crazy thing?
It works. ~10% booking rate, which is insanely good.
What I’ve learned: There are no *universal* truths about messaging. It all depends on your product and end-customer.
Most founders struggle figuring out cold email.
Even when you’re following all the “best practices” and templates, you can still get nothing.
When you don’t get any feedback, it’s hard to know what to change. You want SOME feedback – even if it’s people saying, “no”, they often indicate WHY they say no and you can adjust your messaging accordingly.
It’s a puzzle, and here’s three ways I’ve seen people solve the puzzle:
Approach #1: Cold calls
Cold calls are the fastest (and most painful) way to test your messaging.
My sales coach forced me to make 50 cold calls per day to figure out my messaging. It sucked, but it helped.
Here’s how to do this:
- When someone answers, say what problem you solve & what you do
- Prospect says no, clearly misunderstanding what you do
- Change messaging, repeat
Example:
You: “Hey we help benefit leaders like you improve employee retention with the first financial wellness benefit geared towards homebuying.”
Prospect: “Oh we don’t need that, most of our employees rent. Bye.”
You → change messaging to say, “financial wellness benefit geared towards home-related costs.”
Repeat indefinitely to build your messaging.
Approach #2: Do everything manually
Totally manual email + call sequences. No templates, nothing.
Do this for 2+ hours per day.
Adjust and test a bunch of different things on feel alone – when something works, lean into that a little more. See if it replicates.
Approach #3: Ludicrous volume
Blast out thousands of emails that shout your generic value prop to every corner of the business world – based on responses, you can tweak your messaging and targeting, and layer on more targeted outbound approaches once you know where the market “pull” is strongest and why.
For this, you’ll need some operational infrastructure and/or an agency to do it (here’s Instantly’s guide).
