My Ultimate Guide to Cold Outreach

Cold Outreach alone got me my first $10K Month within my first year of business. Here is the system that got me there (and how you can build it for your service based business)

I personally love cold outreach because it’s a really fast way to get results. You send someone an email/Linkedin message, they respond, and you get them on a sales call. Simple.

For that reason, as much as I love content & communities, I’ll always have a big part of my growth strategy based on cold outreach. In fact, when someone is just starting their biz, cold outreach is the best tactic because it’s free, fast, and simple to execute.

However, from speaking with a ton of founders in this community, the general understanding is that most will “do it when I have time”, meaning it’s a bit inconsistent when it comes to actually landing clients.

For that reason, I wanted to quickly share how you can build a system to predictably gain a certain number of customers every month using cold outreach.

Before we begin, just a few housekeeping items to take care of. First off thanks to Andrew for creating this awesome community. I think I can speak for everyone here when I say he's done an awesome job of bringing synthesizers together to learn and share advice to each other. Reshaping the way I look at the world every day.

By the way, this will be long. I’m going super in depth, so if you don’t like to read details or specifics, best that you skip this.

BUT, for those of y’all who take the time, I’m pretty much revealing all my secrets that took me from 0 to my first $10K month using cold outreach alone.

First off, before we even send a single message, it’s important to understand your high-level goals, and what your daily activity will need to be

Selling with cold outreach is a numbers/volume game, meaning if you understand your input, conversion rates, and output, then you know exactly how much time and energy you need to put in to gain 1 client.

Let’s reverse engineer your goal to figure out exactly what you need to do to make it happen, pull out a pen and paper, we’ll make it easy.

Step 1: Define Goal ($XX in XX Months): write it down

Step 2: What is the value of each client?: Write it down (if you have retainers or recurring rev, write down how much your average client is worth.)

Step 3: Define your sales metrics: SUR / Show up rate (% chance of prospects showing up for a call), GFR / Good fit rate (% chance of prospects being a good fit on a call that you can pitch), SCR / Sales conversion rate (% chance of closing a sale if they’re a fit).

Write them down, If you don’t know your SCR,GFR & SUR, these are conservative benchmarks you can use below:

SCR: 15%

GFR: 70%

SUR: 70%

Step 4: Define Your Appointment Booking Metrics

List your method of outreach and your appointment booking rate, write it down. If you don’t know your Appointment booking rate (ABR), a conservative benchmark is 2.5%.

Example: LinkedIn Outreach, 2.5% ABR

Step 5: Reverse engineer your Goal

$ Goal ➗ Client value = Clients required

Clients required ➗ SCR = Good fit calls required

Good fit calls required ➗ GFR = Show ups required

Show ups required ➗ SUR = Bookings required

Bookings required ➗ ABR = Outreach volume required

Outreach volume required ➗ Days to achieve goal = Daily Activity Required

Here’s an example:

Goal = $360,000 in 12 months

Client value = $10,000

SCR = 25%

GFR = 85%

SUR = 90%

ABR = 3.5% (LinkedIn DMs for example)

$360,000 ➗ $10,000 = 36 clients required

36 ➗ 0.25 = 144 good fit calls required

144 ➗ 0.85 = 169 show ups required

169 ➗ 0.90 = 188 bookings required

188 ➗ 0.035 = 5,365 LinkedIn Cold DMs required

12 months = 365 days. - 104 days (weekends) = 261 days

5,365 ➗ 261 = 21, so 21 LinkedIn DMs per day is required.

21 LinkedIn DMs per day to make $360k. It’s that simple.

It’s again important to be conservative with your calculation!

Another factor is channel selection

Not every channel will work for you.

Who is your audience? Where do they spend their time?

If you sell to saxophone players, Instagram might be better. SaaS founders? Linkedin is perfect.

Don't always assume your chosen channel is the solution. No single channel is best. It depends on your market.

Keep in mind, different channels require a different strategy. The messaging, frequency, and calls to actions that work on email are different from LinkedIn.

Make sure to adjust depending on the channel.

The key to Cold Outreach success is CONSISTENCY

A big reason why most people fail using cold outreach is because they treat it like a hassle. You might find yourself making excuses to avoid doing it since it’s painful and tedious.

But the challenge is, cold outreach ONLY works if you are consistently doing it everyday.

Now, I’m not going to try to make you love cold outreach, because I KNOW doing it sucks. Your motivation is unreliable to rely on. It’ll never be enough to get you to do cold outreach every day.

Instead, what is more effective is to build habits and systems which make the act of doing cold outreach simple. If you have processes in place which make doing cold outreach mindless and part of your daily ritual (think brushing your teeth, making your bed, etc), then it’s easy.

So here are my 3 core pillars of making cold outreach a HABIT and a SYSTEM:

1. Cold outreach is a dedicated task that I put in my calendar EVERYDAY from 7:30 am to 9:30 am. It is closed off, no meetings can be booked in that time frame, that is what I do. When you do Cold Outreach only “when you feel like it”, you won’t do it. However, if it’s in your calendar and you do it everyday, it eventually becomes habitual. This is how you make sure you get your targeted number of reach outs done per day, which add up to your total needed within a full year.

2. Track your results using a CRM. Things will get confusing if you have 10 prospects you’re trying to win at any given time. It’s far too much for you to remember in your own head, or even in a janky spreadsheet. Invest in a cheap CRM like Hubspot so you can keep all your prospects and their notes. Staying organized helps you make more money. Not to mention, it’s super motivating when you can log in and see all the deals you’re about to win.

3. EVENTUALLY automate, so that you can ensure your outreach volume and frequency meets the minimum requirements for success. Don’t do this immediately, as that will kill your conversion. Do it manually, figure out how to make it work at a high rate, and only then do you use tech to offload the work. By the way, automating doesn’t mean replacing ALL personalization. You still need to personalize to get results. It’s just that automation can help with certain parts of the process that seem to be consistent across all your outreach.

So hopefully this has helped. Without these systems in place keeping me accountable and organized, I would’ve NEVER been successful winning business using cold outreach.

If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them in the thread below!

Looking forward to hearing from y’all. I’m always happy and open to connect and network.

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