How to Make Cold Outreach Work for You

Cold outreach has had a bad rep in modern marketing, but this reputation has not stopped it from being highly utilized and highly successful… when it’s done right.

Let’s review what you can do to make your cold outreach efforts more successful.

What is Cold Outreach?

Cold outreach is the process of reaching out to clients and customers who have not interacted with your brand before through communications like email or telephone calls. As such, it is a direct means of forming business relationships with those you wish to work with.

There’s a pretty simple process to follow as you design effective outreach efforts:

• Prospecting for new potential clients via Google Searches and by reviewing business directories
• Identifying who to contact within prospect organizations
• Crafting compelling and engaging messages to send to these contacts

Let’s discuss a few ways to make your outreach as impactful as possible within these steps.

How to Optimize Your Cold Outreach Efforts

Prospecting

As you seek out businesses to reach out to, focus on a specific set of criteria, as this will help you personalize your messaging even more and ultimately get a higher response rate. Be sure to pay attention to details like the company's size and how many employees it has, who is likely the one with the influence you need to communicate with within a prospect company, and what approach is most likely to resonate with your point of contact.

It can also help to add a bit of personality into your prospecting efforts, establishing a differentiator between you and any competitors who are also reaching out to a contact.

Contacts

Speaking of your contacts, you need to identify who in each of your prospect companies is the most promising person to communicate with. Various tools and databases can help you do this effectively, and we’ve done this plenty of times for the managed service providers we assist with their marketing efforts.

You also need to identify who these contacts are to personalize your messaging to them and their needs directly.

Messaging

Of course, any cold outreach you engage in needs a compelling message to prompt your contacts to respond and engage. Every aspect of it needs to be written strategically. Take the time to polish your subject lines to be communicative and straightforward while ensuring your messages are personalized and unique.

Make sure you catch the attention with your subject line and quickly establish that you understand the position that your contact is in to open a rapport. At that point, you can pitch what you have to offer and why it is relevant to their business.

Your outreach also shouldn’t necessarily stop at one email, either. Make sure you have a few follow-ups prepared to provide more evidence of your value or give your recipient another CTA that isn’t as big a commitment. 

What to Avoid in Your Cold Outreach

You also need to ensure your cold messaging doesn’t miss the mark. Avoiding the following mistakes will help:

• Neglecting to do the proper research - If you short-change your information gathering and list building, it will not be possible to target and communicate effectively with the right businesses or contacts within them. This means that your efforts will start at a disadvantage.
• Missing the target - On a related note, you need to ensure that your targets are the right ones for your business and its offering… and that you’re communicating the right points to them. Sharing a message that the recipient simply doesn’t care about will do you no good.
• Making it too generic - A key element of cold outreach is personalizing your communications as much as you can. Otherwise, you might alienate your audience by making it seem as though you’re sending out just another mass email. Identifying what your prospects share and touching on these points helps to mitigate this.
• Being too salesy - There’s a reason that sales and marketing are seen as two separate, if related, processes. If you push the sale before your marketing can build trust with your contact, you can alienate them and make them less likely to work with you.

Want Help With Your Outreach? Lean On Us!

We can help managed IT firms find promising business opportunities and craft lists for them to pursue. Give us a call at 888-546-4384 to learn more!