$400k Closed in 30 Days. Cold Email is Not Dead. #scottsthoughts

What's going on, Scott here? Welcome to another episode of the success story podcast today, how one agency owner closed $400,000 of revenue in 30 days with just cold email. We're going to break it down. It's a case study. All right, so we're going to get into a case study how Alex Burman who is the founder of x27 closed $400,000 in revenue in 30 days with cold email. So cold email isn't dead. Cold email isn't dead. Cold email isn't dead. But many people don't use it properly. Many people don't get how to use cold email to properly grow their business to sell their services. There's a lot of bad advice out there. And the stuff that I'm going to speak about that Alex did is not rocket science. It's not ground breaking. You can find similar strategies in other corners of the internet. But he just executed on something and he applied common sense to it and it closed $400,000. So let's break down this case study and what he did. And I want to obviously want to cite the source. So I actually got the idea to build this case study and sort of walk through what Alex did from a proposedify podcast. If you want to listen to the podcast where Alex sits down and speaks with Kyle Racky who is a CEO of Proposify, you can go check it out at proposify.com. podcast slash 0 0 2. But I'm going to break down and then I'm going to give a few additional take away. So Alex Berman founder of x27. He used cold email to close $400,000 of business in 30 days over the life of x27, which is a marketing agency basically. It's a marketing agency that provides outsourced marketing services for their clients. So when they go in, they're saying we're going to take care end to end of your marketing needs. You're hiring us. That's all you'll ever need. So that's basically what he's selling. And to just go over some of the financials, this story is about how he closed $400,000 in 30 days. But he charges $8,500 for an initial marketing review or audit of the target customer's complete website brand social you name it. He audits it for about $8,500. And after he's done the review or the audit, then they charge eight to $14,000 monthly as a retainer for fully outsourced marketing services. So this is the five step process that he uses to close these sales. And in the podcast, he speaks about how after he does the $8,500 audit, he has 100% close rate on the eight to $14,000 a month retainer, which is an incredible step. So step one, he builds a case study. So what Alex does is he gets a customer win and he builds a case study from that customer win. The example he uses, he's done multiple case studies for multiple customer wins. But he was hired on to work with the University of Oklahoma. When he worked with them, he spent a considerable amount of time throughout the process when he was actually delivering on what they were actually purchasing from him, as well as after the delivery on interviewing decision makers at the University people that he worked with at the University. So he was spending a ton of time on building at this case study from this one customer that that that was a great customer. So what did he get out of that? Well, he got about the pain, the reason why the University even jumped on a demo call with him in the first place. He was speaking about the actual scope of the project. So what the University required them to actually execute on. He spoke about how they actually implemented. So the day-to-day project management, the tasks, the duties, and then of course the the outcome, the final result. After you know that you brought this University into your sales funnel, you go through like you sell them, you close them, you actually have to execute on all the things you promised, then there's some results, some KPIs that you want to hit, what were those? How did you you know did you exceed those KPIs? He put down everything that he did with his university, but he also interviewed people from the University to make it more real. So he compiled the case study. He only worried about creating one case study for that one university, but he just made it super, super, super detailed. And he made it so that anybody who was actually reading this case study would know exactly like with intimate, intimate detail what he had accomplished with the University of Oklahoma. So now that he has a case study done, what does he do with it? Well, he has to figure out how he can use this case study as marketing collateral and sales collateral to go close more clients. So we remember he only has one case study focused on one university. So it's not like that's going to be incredibly useful for a huge amount of clients that aren't other universities. So now step two, he goes into targeting. So what he did is he compiled a list of 50 companies or 50 targets that would benefit from the case study, the super, super in depth case study that he just created, the more niche, the better, the more specific, the better, he only targeted universities. So what was the result from him targeting universities? Obviously similar potential customers to what, what he spoke about in the case study, he got a meeting with Yale with UCLA and with OSU. So main takeaway is the more niche down your case study is and the more similar your target, potential customer is to your case study, the better. Be extremely specific. The more specific, the better, the better the chance that that case study is going to be useful for the person who you're trying to reach out to. Now how does he actually target? We kind of understand so what that can be equated to would be his ideal customer profile, right? His company that he wants to target now. So he's figured out that he wants to target universities. So how does he do this? To make sure he could properly target companies, he uses LinkedIn sales navigator. Last time I checked it costs roughly $60 a month plus minus, of course, with one deal you're going to pay that off. So it's not a big deal. It's not a huge expense. And the reason why he uses LinkedIn sales navigator is because LinkedIn sales navigator is one of the most useful tools for targeting for again, being extremely specific in who you target. So because the strategy, the core tenet of this strategy relies on you being specific. You need the filtering options that LinkedIn sales navigator can give you when you're trying to find your customers. What LinkedIn sales navigator allows you to do is to not just find, for example, a chief marketing officer or a CEO, it allows you to drill down into industry type, job function, geography, company size. There's a ton of different identifiers that LinkedIn sales navigator gives you so you can get hyper hyper hyper specific on who you want to target. After he has this list of people, he's throwing them into a Google Docs or a Google sheet. And then now he has this list of people that's hyper hyper specific, excuse me. So he has, they're all going to be, if we're going to use this example, all decision makers at universities similar to the University of Oklahoma. And then after he gets this list of people, he's going to put them into a Google Doc. Remember, he's just targeted them and pulled them, he doesn't have their emails yet, but he's going to put them into a Google Doc or a Google spreadsheets or a Google sheet, excuse me. And now he's going to use a tool like an email finder or he also used email hunter to find the emails of the people that he needs to reach out to. So these tools are again, they're relatively inexpensive. They have a pretty high success rate and you use them to just find mass groups of people. So now after he has, he's targeted on, he has his ideal customer profile, he's targeted on the universities that he wants to actually go after, he's found the people in the universities, he's found their email addresses and some of these email address finding tools you can also find, you can also find their phone numbers. And if you're looking for a good phone number research tool, use something called signal hire. He didn't mention that in this particular interview, but it's a really, really good tool for finding phone numbers after. Okay, so next step. Okay, so he has this list of people he wants to reach out to, you have to get your emails down, you have to get your copy, the stuff that's actually in your emails, you have to get it down. So Alex has some more ideas on what type of emails work, what type of emails get opened, get reply back to. So a few rules that he has for the copy and the content that goes into his emails. For a subject line, he uses something very simple. He says question about company. So that's a very simple, simple subject line. And for the body of his email, he says he uses this text, you know, you can massage it and use it as you will for whatever you're trying to accomplish, but this is sort of like the core that he tries to build his emails on. So hey, first name, big fan of company name and have been for a long time. We just built an app for competitor name that does XYZ. We think that your company could get some value out of it. I also have a few more ideas around app development design if you want to chat. Does that, excuse me, does that sound like something you'd be interested in? If so, I can send over some times to chat. Thanks, Alex. Very simple to the point. A couple additional email rules that he does follow. The cold email shouldn't be longer than what would fit into a phone screen. So, you know, if you have your phone, you open up an email, you can see the whole email in that screen on your on your phone. That means they don't have to scroll. Second rule, the more customized the better. This is also, again, this is standard standard stuff, but these are things that, you know, common senses and common. So the more customized the better. Now, a lot of people focus on customizing the email text, the subject line. That's important. But what Alex mentions, it's smart. He's saying that if you focus on customizing the case study, you don't have to focus as much on customizing your email. So because the case study that he created was so, so, so specific, he gets away a little bit with less customization in the actual email. And lastly, his, his tip for cold emails are cold outreach is give as much away for free as possible. So give additional information, give them free resources, give them like a high level, if you're selling, for example, marketing services, like he was a high level free audit, as much as you can give away for free, give it away for free, because it will always lead to more business in the end. And also, it has the added bonus, not only are you being very useful and helpful, you're positioning yourself as a subject matter expert in your field, it's, you have the added bonus that you come across less, you come across as less needy when you're selling. So this is a psychological benefit when you're actually trying to sell something. Okay. And then step number four in his $400,000 strategy, get your email cadence down. And you have to have an email cadence. So Alex usually only gets a response by the third or fourth email. So we always set up cadences that are minimum three to four emails. Do not do less than that. If you, if you only send out one email, if he only sent out one email, he would have a grand total of $0 in sales. That's a little bit less than $400,000. He's a firm believer that there's really only two reasons why a customer wouldn't respond after four emails. Number one, they failed to understand what you're providing or the value that you offer. And if that's the case, then it's your fault. Or number two, they really are very busy. So if you send four emails, you're making sure that you're staying on top of the customer's mind. And then the last piece that he uses is he does use phone. But you can see that the majority of his strategy was called outbound email. But the fifth step is phone. He does a quick call. He does one call. He calls the people that have received his emails and opened his emails. And he's only calling after the fourth email to follow up with people. He doesn't even want to get them on the phone. He wants to leave them a voicemail saying, Hey, by the way, did you get my email? He's just checking to see if they've actually received and opened the email. And he can see who receives his emails. He can see who opens his emails. He uses a tool called Yes Wear for this. So it's a very simple quick call. You're not asking for a callback. That's a big ask for somebody you don't know. All you're doing is you're just saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you if you saw it or not, but I just sent you a quick email. Take a look and you can reply back via email if this is something that interests you. So you're just, you know, very simple. You're not asking a lot. You're not making a big request of the person you're reaching out to with just another way to reach them. And it just jogs the memory of the email that he had sent them. So if you, you know, if you, that's that's pretty much the strategy. That is a strategy. So if we go through it quickly again, we have a number one, create a really compelling niche case study. Number two, get your targeting right. Use tools to be able to target as much as possible. Super specific, super niche. Number three, get your email copy down. Short, you know, short and sweet to the point. You don't have to explain too much in your email copy. Number four, have a cadence. And number five, have a quick call. And that's it. That's what he did again and again and again to close $400,000 in sales. So let's just, let's just one more point because Alex really went into detailing gave a lot of really great information. And you can take that and you can apply it tomorrow. But a few takeaways. The reason why a lot of people don't get the results they want with email is not because cold email is dead or not because email is dead. It's because what happens is you pull a million contacts. You send email to all those contacts and you hope that, you know, one or two percent of them are going to respond back and purchase your product. It doesn't work. Throwing shit at the wall and hoping something sticks doesn't work. Be purposeful. Know who your customers are. Target. Personalize. All the things that require more effort. You know, the saying do things that don't scale. All the things that require more effort is what leads to long-term success. So please, if you are trying to sell a product or service, do not just spam and automate absolutely everything and try and reach everyone on planet earth to sell your product because it will not work. What will work is, is knowing who you're reaching out to, creating marketing assets, collateral, or just offering value that actually means something to them, and then you can actually reach out to them. You can, you know, put them into some sort of cadence, again, not automated, not just bombarding them, but a cadence that's thoughtful because you're providing value. You want to help them accomplish something that you truly believe that they should be able to, that they would want your help with accomplishing. And that's really the main secret to successful, effective email. What Alex did was one version of a very successful, well-thought-out, personalized email campaign. I really, really, really love the bit that he did at the beginning with the case study because that's something that I don't think a lot of people think of. But that's at the end of the day, the differentiator between $400,000 and $0. Anyways, I hope you enjoyed. I put these case studies in newsletters, so if video isn't your thing, go to newsletter.ruioverload.com, and you can check out all these types of case studies in a weekly newsletter format. I hope you enjoyed. If you liked this, share this with friends, family, peers, co-workers. We'll talk again soon. Bye now.