Acknowledgements

This guide was written and prepared by Michel Lieben (CEO) and the team at ColdIQ.

It results from 5 years of cold outreach experimentations, hundreds of campaigns launched, millions of cold emails sent and constant iterations.

The processes, workflows, and tool stack described in the guide are the closest representation of internal ColdIQ’s workflows.Don’t hesitate to share if it is helpful. If you wish to work with us, you can learn more about our services via our homepage.

Introduction

Outbound Prospecting as an acquisition channel

There are many ways to find new customers. Among these, outbound often gets a bad reputation. Our prospects are bombarded with messages daily (your inbox probably is, too!)... do we want to contribute to this?

Yet, outbound has many advantages over other acquisition methods:
- Unlike digital ads, it does not require a large budget.
- Unlike inbound strategies, results (and feedback) are quick to arrive.
- Unlike word of mouth, you don't need an extensive network of contacts or to have served many clients (that will refer you).

The problem with outbound sales today

Very few companies manage to make outbound sales work for them. Why is that?
Take a moment to think about the messages flooding your inbox.
Most of the time, they are impersonal, irrelevant, poorly written and far too long.

Do you like reading long, irrelevant messages? No one does.

Now, picture this:
[1] You’re struggling with an issue in your business.
[2] Someone reaches out to you.
‍
The message is short.
The sender did their research.
Their message is straight to the point.
It is showing (or teasing) how to solve your problem.
‍
How would you feel if every outreach you were getting was an answer to your problems?
Would you like that more? I bet you would.

While we can’t change most organizations’ outbound practices, we can contribute to making the space a bit better.

The biggest problem with outbound is that most sellers don’t know why they’re reaching out to the person they’re reaching out to. You shouldn’t know for sure — but you should at least have an opinion about why contacts have a place on your list.

This should serve as the basis of your outbound efforts 👇
‍You want to identify people and companies struggling with a problem you can solve.

The first goal of this document is to show you how to identify problems at scale and reach out to companies most likely to need your help. Then, we’ll show you how to make this process more efficient by leveraging sales tech and copywriting best practices.

Ingredients of successful cold email campaigns

The best cold email campaigns include most of these elements:
‍
- A segmented list of prospects who could genuinely benefit from your solution.
- Short but punchy copywriting that highlights our value proposition.
- Personalised and relevant messages tailored to each individual.
- Proof of being able to solve the prospect’s problem.
- Top-notch deliverability to land in inboxes.
- Valuable, helpful assets.

Chapter 1 | Generate a prospect’s account list

Identifying companies with a problem

In an ideal world, you would snap your fingers and get a list of all the companies struggling with the issue you solve. Unfortunately, the best thing we can do is guess.

I heard some prominent figures in the outbound space mention the term “problem sniffing”. The idea is to derive a problem based on companies’ public activities. An efficient way to do this is by looking at what we call ‘trigger events’.

Here are a few examples for companies:
- change in the industry likely to impact businesses
- hiring trends and headcount growth/reduction
- opening of new office locations
- appointment of a new c-level
- launch of a new product
- increase in ad spend
- merger/acquisition
- a fundraising

There are many more, but you get the gist. All these events typically precede changing needs within new companies, needs that you might be able to solve.

If you’re looking for a more exhaustive list of triggers, we prepared one here.

From problem to targeting

To understand how to derive potential issues from triggers… let’s explore a couple of situations and how we think through these.

[1] Imagine you’re selling HR software.

‍One of the issues you solve is helping companies with a high churn rate (that is, employees leave after only a short tenure). Businesses would pay for such software because hiring and training new people is very costly. If the process has to be repeated more often because employees are leaving, the cost can be in the hundreds of thousands of $$$.

The business case here is pretty straightforward. Companies can implement software that helps decrease churn for a subscription that costs a few hundred $ monthly. This reduces employee churn, saving companies hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

‍Now, who should you go after?
Every company could benefit from your solution, right? So why not enrich the contact information of every CEO on the planet 🌎, ask them if they’re struggling with employee churn and pitch our features?

The problem here is that most recipients won’t be receptive to your pitch. It’s not that your product isn’t helpful. It’s that they’re not experiencing the pain. They’re getting flooded by messages in their inbox. If your outreach isn’t relevant, it’s going to get ignored.

Who’s most likely to experience the pain?
In an ideal world, you already know what your ideal customer profile (ICP) is facing. The easiest way to uncover this data is to go through your existing client base (or prospects) and ask the following question:
- what made them want to reach out to you?
- what made them buy?

If you analyze enough deals or sales calls, it’s very likely that you’ll notice some patterns. In the case of our sales prospecting agency, we noticed that a good proportion of companies scheduling a call with us are suffering from low deliverability.

Not every sales team suffers from this issue, but for the ones who do, it’s almost impossible to get results via cold emails.

Once we know that, the question becomes ‘how do I find companies with bad deliverability?’
We can look at companies that:
- haven’t properly configured their email & domain infrastructure.
- are participating to a ‘email deliverability’ webinar
- are hiring for an email deliverability expert

If we manage to get this data, we know we will improve our conversion rates.

Now, in many cases, you don’t know for sure what is the trigger event that makes the pain deep enough to compel your ICP to react.

If you don’t know— it is the #1 question you should answer to. This is what we spend most of our time brainstorming with clients. We ask them to identify some patterns within companies that would make them a great fit. If they’re unsure, we think of situations where the pain is likely to be stronger. Based on these, we build hypotheses that we will try to validate (or invalidate).

‍In our previous ‘HR software’ example, here are some potential ‘buying signals’ we thought of:
‍
‍→ A company had bad employee reviews on Glassdoor 👇

‍If they’re getting too many bad reviews, they’re likely experiencing above-average churn. This makes it more likely that they’ll be in the market for software that helps fix that.

‍→ A company is partly or wholly remote 👇
‍
‍It’s more difficult to monitor employee well-being when you don’t see people face-to-face. Remote teams could benefit more from the solution than in-person teams.

‍→ The average tenure is shorter than 6 months 👇

Once you’ve built a few hypotheses, you want to confront them to the market.

It might be true that fully remote companies have more trouble monitoring employee well-being. But it might also be true that the c-level in these remote organizations care less because they haven’t ‘bonded’ as much with the employees.

There’s only one way to find out, and it’s by reaching out to these companies. The first step is finding the data.

Finding data on best-fit accounts

Now that we built the hypothesis that remote organizations are a great fit for us, the next question is how do we build a list with such companies?

There are several ways to do this. The best we found was to look at companies hiring remotely. We’ll go deeper into data sources, but in this case, we’ve done that with Clay. They have a few integrations that let you find information on open job data. We figured that every company that had ‘Remote’ in their job opening had—at least—part of their team working remotely.

‍If you identified a trigger event for which your current tool doesn’t have data, have a look at this extensive list of B2B Data Sources we compiled.

Identifying initiatives

Oftentimes, there isn’t any obvious problem to sell to. It often makes more sense to sell to companies’ current initiatives.

The same logic applies to problems. Observe what companies are going through and derive a hypothesis on their current priorities.

For example, if you’re selling an advertising tool that helps companies optimize their ad spend, you may want to be on the lookout for job openings for ‘media buyer’, ‘paid media specialist’ or ‘advertising manager’.

Companies hiring for these roles are likely going to ramp up their advertising efforts. If you’re selling a solution that will help them (or their new hire) improve results in that regard, it might be a good time to reach out.

Here are some tools I’d recommend to find out such data:

Chapter 2 | Target the right person within your target accounts

How to think about people targeting

The most straightforward way to find the right answer is to ask the right question. As cliché as it may sounds - there are a few questions I repeat to myself, over and over, when I need to decide on my targeting.

Here are 2 of my favourites:
“What 3-5 things must be true about a lead, that were true about your last 10 best customers, that made them an awesome fit?” by Jordan Crawford

‍Here are some criteria you can look at to decide on your targeting:
- What are the most common job titles of your inbound leads
- Which job titles have the highest close rate
- What’s the title of the typical buyerWho’s the individual user of your solution?
- What’s the size of their company/department?
- In what departments do they operate?
- In what industry?
- Where are they located?

Another, simpler way, to think about people targeting is to simply ask:“Who’s most likely to get fired if the initiative doesn’t work” by Morgan Smith

‍You could also ask the opposite: “Who would get promoted if the initiative was a success?”.

Chapter 3 | Build your contact list

Example for a list of Talent Acquisitions directors, in companies currently hiring for 10+ roles

Building a list of people/companies hiring for 'many' jobs is a great way to find organizations likely to be interested in recruitment services.

I'll show step-by-step how to create such a list. Knowing the logic will allow you to adapt it to varying needs:
- You could chose to contact companies recruiting for specific positions (e.g: Marketing Manager - helpful if you specialize in certain roles).
- You could pick another geography, industry, size.
- You could enrich different people within the organization (in this case we went for the Head of TA/People/HR. You could go for the Head of Department for the open position)

If you need help building these contact lists... or to run your prospecting campaigns. You can book a time with us here.

STEP 1: Filter your target by Job Title, Industry, Geography, Company Size and more.

You can use a B2B Database such as Apollo to do the initial filtering.

As you'll see in the image below, we went a bit broad in the targeting. We used the following filters:

- Job Titles: Talent Acquisition Director, HR Director, Head of People, Head of Human Resources, Head of Talent Acquisition

- Location: Worldwide exluding India, Pakistan, Philippines, Nigeria & Brazil (80% of our list is US-based)

- # Employees: Companies of 100 to 1000

We also added a condition, inside of Apollo, that the company needed to have at least one open job in the US. Apollo's job data aren't very precise, thus we will use Clay to find the exact number of active jobs openings.

STEP 2: Export the results into a .csv file and import in Clay

Once you're done playing with filtering criteria inside of Apollo. You can export the list into a .CSV file. If you import it to Google Sheet, it should look like that:

STEP 3: Find number of active jobs opening

Clay's UI looks like most Spreadsheet tools. Once you import your .csv file into Clay, your initial list should like the below .GIF.

As you'll see, despite looking like most Spreadsheet tools, Clay has some unique capabilities that will allow us to find all the interesting data we're looking for. If you haven't heard about the tool before, I urge you check them out here: https://www.clay.com/

The next step is to find the number of active jobs openings inside of our target companies. Our initial file included information such as the company name and the website where each of our HR/TA/People director works. We will use one of Clay's built-in integration to look for active jobs openings.

As you can see below, you have the option to filter jobs openings by Job Title. In this case, I typed 'Sales Director' for the sake of the example. If I had ran the search with the specific keyword; we would only have gotten active jobs openings for 'Sales Director' roles.

On the file above, I didn't target by specific job title, so Clay's integration found all the jobs it could.

Because we're only interested in companies that are hiring a lot, I filtered my search to only include companies with 10+ open roles:

Once we've filtered down our Head of TA/HR in companies we want to go after, all is left is to find their email addresses.

For this we use Prospeo inside of Clay. If we want to find even more email addresses, we can use waterfall solutions such as:
- Clay
- FullEnrich

Chapter 4 | Contact prospects at scale

Contact lists can  be quite big... and consist of 1000s of contacts. The implications are that:
[1] you won't have the time to manually reach out to them
[2] there a lot of *potential* new clients to get!

Now, before you get any sales engagement platform and start automating your outreach at a massive scale, there a few things you need to consider:
- your potential new clients receive hundreds of messages every day
- they can sense when your approach is impersonal and automated

If you want to have a decent conversion rate, you need to stand out. We started doing this by targeting companies based on a need, and by going after the right person inside the company (and believe it or not, this is already better than 99% of the outreach out there).

But, we can push this a step further. For example by leveraging ChatGPT inside of Clay to personalize our outreach at scale.

The goal is for each of your outreach message to be unique. You want your recipient to think *there is no way this was for someone else*.

Here's an *easy* way to personalize your outreach at scale:

You can do, either by leveraging trigger events (such as the fact that they are hiring) or publicly available information on them (their LinkedIn bio or their company simmary).

One l like to do is to use the job description for open roles as an [Input]. Based on the text inside of the job description, you can prompt ChatGPT to read everything, and summarize the key needs for the hire. You can then ask it to complete a sentence such as: "I saw you were hiring a {job title} that specialize in... {AI-personalization}"

I described in a post below how the process works:

Following the above steps we now have:
- a list of companies potentially interested in our solution
- the contact information of the relevant people inside the company
- a personalize snippet that adresses the specific needs of each company

With these, we can now reach out at scale, in a way that will feel personalized to each of our recipient.
‍
At ColdIQ, we use:
- Instantly to automate our outreach by email.
- HeyReach or Lemlist to automate our outreach via LinkedIn.

Lemlist also has the advantage of doing multichannel outreach. They let you reach our to your contacts via email and LinkedIn. Plus, they let you send voice notes at scale.

‍Lemlist is also very strong integration-wise, so it’s ideal for sales teams that:
- need a platform with strong Hubspot or Salesforce integrations or
- a native integration with a phone dialing option.

You read this far?

Hey - if you read this far… I’m guessing you’re really interested in cracking your outbound sales system.

I left out quite a few details in this guide. I didn’t do that purposefully. It is just *very* complicated to get my point across while being comprehensive without writing a whole book...

In the next sections, I will cover sales copywriting best practices and rules to build an email infrastructure that lands your emails outside of SPAM.
‍
That being said, if you want to discuss how to implement a prospecting system to sell your products or services... I invite you to book a time in our calendar right below 👇

Chapter 5 | Write high-converting messages

How to write a sales cadence that converts

Now that we covered:
- finding companies demonstrating buying intent
- finding contact information of relevant people within these companies
- personalizing part of our messages using AI
- software for automating our outreach

The question is... how are we going to write convincing messages so that our prospects want to meet with us?
‍
Here are a few best practices to follow when writing your messages. Both to make sure they’re read by your recipient and they don’t land in the SPAM folder:

- Write messages as short as possible.
- Avoid adding links, images &/or documents.
- Individually personalize them for your recipients.
- Include several touchpoints, and follow-up a few times.
- Reach out across several platforms using various formats
(send videos, reach out on LinkedIn, via Email...)

To help this process - you can use tools such as Lavender that rates your cold emails in real time. 

If you're not sure what to write, worry not... I got your back ;)

I compiled some of my favourite email copywriting frameworks, and you can find them in the below post 👇

Chapter 6 | Deliverability Infrastructure

Set up the infrastructure to send 500+ emails a day...
while keeping open rates above 80%

The last, yet essential steup is to set up an email infrastructure that will allow you to send emails at scale without landing in the SPAM folder.

Half of the battle is to avoid triggering email platforms' spam filters by avoiding links, images & documents in your cold emails. Another is to avoid sending too many emails from the same inbox.

The best practice is to send under 50 emails a day per domain. It is also recommended to avoid using your main domain for outreach. If too many people label you as spam, the consequences can be serious and impact other areas of your business. For example, most of your emails could land in the spam folder, even important communications with existing customers.

I wrote a post here that describes the infrastructure I set up for my own prospecting and for clients.

In summary, you need to:
- Create several domains & email accounts.
- Forward these new domains to your main domain (in case someone tries to look you up).
- Configure your SPF, DKIM & DMARC records for each of these domains.
- Limit your sending volume to 50 emails per domain per day.

And finally, you will want to use email warming software to improve the reputation of these new domains. 

Deliverability is a dense subject in itself. If you want to learn more about it, I recommend that you read this great article by Mailreach on how to prevent your emails from going to SPAM.

If you use several email inboxes - you’ll save a lot of money by using a sending solution that doesn’t charge per email profile. You can use Smartlead, which lets you use an unlimited number of email profiles.

Chapter 7 | Building your sales stack for prospecting campaigns

How to build a stales stack from scratch

Wrapping this up...

This is all for now. I hope you learn a thing or two by reading this guide.

If you want to connect, don't hesitate to send us an invite on LinkedIn:
-> Michel Lieben (Co-Founder & CEO): linkedin.com/in/michel-lieben/
-> Alex Vacca (Co-Founder & COO): linkedin.com/in/alex-vacca/