Happy Friday Morning!
The weather is quite perfect in Lucas, TX this week and for that I'm grateful. I came down with a nasty bout of Covid but I'm about 90% back to normal today. I had just about forgotten that that dang thing even existed.
My most popular newsletter to date has been the one on cold emailing, so I thought I'd do a part 2 and include some frameworks I have around other types of cold outreach as well. Similarly to how Michael Scott starts a sentence, not fully knowing where he's going with it, that's often how these emails go as well. Let's chat about lead scarcity and standing out.
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Lead Scarcity
Imagine for a moment that your loved one had a rare terminal illness, and there was one lone scientist in Papua New Guinea that had a single vial of the only cure. Just one scientist. And you knew that he was willing to give it away to someone with the disease, you just needed to ask. But, the caveat being that he was famously hard to reach. What would you do?
Would you cold email him once? Of course not! You may start with that, but you'd quickly try calling, texting, faxing, Tweeting, LinkedIn DMing, WUPH-ing and writing him letters. You might even reach out to other locals to get his attention. If all else fails, you'd probably hop on a plane to go knock on his door yourself. And why? Scarcity.
Sure, the medicine is life or death, but that's not the reason you're exhausting all of these methods. The reason is because your target audience is exactly one. You would do everything possible to get that man's attention and secure the medicine. If thousands of doctors had the medicine you'd cold email them all and have several responses within minutes.
Sales leads are an asset with a finite quantity, and what happens to a scarce asset when demand is steady or rising? The value increases, therefore the level of effort (or cost) needed to acquire the asset must increase proportionally as well.
I was on a consulting call this summer with a real estate investor named Jeff in rural Georgia. He was looking to level up from single family homes to his first mobile home park. Unlike my lazy self, he is a very hands-on investor, and wanted to find something within an hour's drive from home, give or take. The only problem was that only around 50,000 people live within an hour's drive of him! That's a pretty sparsely populated county, and you can count all the mobile home parks on 2-3 hands.
When I look for MHPs, I make an L on the US map, from Kansas down to Texas and then all the way out east to Georgia. Last I checked there are about 100,000,000 people in those states. So my outreach strategy looks completely different than Jeff's. And in case you're wondering, my net is so wide because I like to buy parks that are small enough to not need an onsite manager, so they are able to be managed remotely. I'd rather buy a killer deal further away than a good deal closer to home. Free cash flow covereth all sins, after all.
Anyway, it was a useful thought experiment for me to help Jeff find a park with limited supply. First, I trained him how to find each and every park within his radius and create a small database of them. And then, I simply instructed him to get a hold of every single owner via any method he could, much like with the doctor in New Guinea! Once you find a willing seller, that's when the real work begins. He ended up meeting several of them in person, out of necessity.
The 2 cold outreach laws of the universe state:
But let’s switch gears and talk about 4 specific ways you can stand out in your cold outreach:
Standing Out with Your Messaging
You’ve gotta stand out, man. And by you, I mean your copywriting. I don’t care what the medium is, you just can’t afford to not be different. My best performing opening line in one cold email campaign was “Put down your $13 avocado toast and read this dumb pitch already.” You want an opening line that grabs your reader by the lapels and violently shakes them until their bobblehead breaks off the spring.
I’m not trying to toot my own horn, but take a pause and go read the copywriting on the homepage of nogreezy.com. There’s only about 400 words on the whole homepage, so it won’t take long.
This is a project I helped a friend with last year. He was struggling to stand out in a sea of boring industrial cleaner competitors. Having worked in restaurants for years in college, I wrote some copy that I thought would appeal to the irreverent restaurant crowd, and it did! It helps that his degreaser is the best product on the market. But until someone tries it, no one knows!
At the conference I went to last week, I’m pretty sure 100% of attendees were 36 year old white men that were 6’3” and weighed 200 pounds, and hey, that was me, too! How to stand out?
Well, there was an app for the conference with all attendees listed. I put my Twitter handle before my first name, so every time any attendee opened the app, they’d see me at the very top. Out of over 1,000 attendees, no one else did that!
I also asked to moderate a session. Why? Free surface area. More people to see and hear from me for the same price of admission. Had I been more proactive, I’d have asked to speak as well, for the same reason. But alas, I’m a procrastinator and didn’t ask until a week before the conference, so all the slots were filled.
The thing is, I didn’t even go to the conference with anything to sell or pitch. I just wanted more surface area. (The real reason is because I'm cheap and wanted to better justify the 4 figure conference price tag.)
Standing Out with Your Medium
If everyone is hitting up your clients via cold email, then hit them up via text. If it's cold calls, then try letters. You get the idea. Change the medium to the one with fewer or no competitors. My #1 marketing channel in one of our companies that I’ll probably never write about is one where I compete with no one. Response rates are routinely 60% and the close rate is outstanding as well.
There’s no one size fits all, it depends entirely on your market, channel and offer.
I had a call last month with a fine gentleman named Jefferson who sells tech talent to a very specific type of tech company. His total pool of customers worldwide is in the hundreds, not millions. He has an amazing business, so he’s never had to market, but with tech facing a slowdown, he called me asking for help on getting creative so he can keep growing through the downturn.
His customer’s lifetime value is around $220,000, and that’s mostly profit. So cold email would be an absolute waste of a valuable lead. His plan? He’s going to have a VA assemble a master database of every single potential customer, and to go deeeeep.
The fewer the customers, and the more valuable the customers, the more data you need on them. I’m talking:
Stalkerish? Yes. Effective? Absolutely.
Now let’s be clear, he isn’t going to show up on their doorstep with a bottle of wine, he’s a smart man. But send a few dozen Crumbl cookies to his office with a note? Absolutely.
Have you heard of Brex? They do corporate cards for startups, and their customers are worth 6-7 figures as well. Their growth stalled until they started getting creative and sending bottles of champagne to potential customers' offices in exchange for a sales call.
They also bought up every billboard in SF, their target market. On those two strategies alone they are now a billion dollar company.
They started with cold emails, sure, but once again, it’s a very valuable customer in very limited supply, so great creative and pull out the wallet, and your wallet will be rewarded 10 fold.
Standing Out with Your Personalization
Did you know that with Lemlist you can send customized memes and personalized videos at scale? That’s a bit different, no? Example below:
I had another call with an UpWork freelancer wanting to know how to get their pitches to stand out. I suggested they send a personalized 5 minute Loom video for each and every proposal.
Their job acceptance rate went from 3% to 18%! And it only took an extra 8 minutes per proposal. I got this idea when someone on Upwork pitched me with a personalized video. It works!
Standing Out with Your Authority
When I helped sell my friend's bread company, I did it purely as a favor for a friend, and for the love of the carbs. But that one Tweet has proven to be very fruitful, and in unexpected ways. Several business owners DMed me and asked “Can you Tweet like that to help me sell my business?” And yes, of course I can! For a small fee…
And why is this possible? Perceived authority. I have 39k high quality followers that are highly engaged, and that’s valuable. Would you rather have a boomer throw your business up on BizBuySell and wait 6 months, or would you rather me Tweet it out to a relevant audience with a detailed breakdown that generates dozens of DMs in minutes?
If I wanted to scale that endeavor, I would send cold emails to 7-9 figure business owners and just link to that Tweet and say “I can do this for you.” That’s something that most others aren’t able to claim.
So with whatever you’re selling, take some time to build an audience on a platform first to build some authority.
Although depressing, Zuckerberg’s law states that the amount of content humans consume online doubles every few years. This means that “influencer marketing" isn’t going anywhere. People trust people more than people trust brands, as they should.
But don't be an influencer just to be an influencer, build an engaged following to build authority, and point to that in your outreach just like Kyrie points to the scoreboard to yapping competitors, mid-game.
If you want to stand out whilst attempting to stand out by building some authority online, then build a following in a different, unique medium. Kat Norton makes 7 figures posting funny Excel tutorial videos to Tiktok. Why is she so successful? Because all of her competitors were both boring and only on LinkedIn and Twitter. She stood out in two different ways.
Conclusion
I hope this helps you brainstorm ways you can stand out. Everyone has something to market to the world, so whatever your thing is, I hope you’re better at it right now than you were 1,793 words ago.
What am I working on lately?
To be honest I’ve mostly been working on getting Covid out of my system. I tested negative today for the first time, and it’s been over 6 days since I got symptoms, so I am presently typing this from the passenger seat while my wife drives us all to Tuscaloosa to see back to back b-ball and football games. I’m very grateful no one else in my family got it, especially my daughter!
And yes, I'm about to take over driving once I hit send on this bad boy. I like driving.
We usually like to go to an all SEC game every year, but the schedules didn’t align this time around, so UT-Chattanooga will have to do. Will you be there?
I’ve also been helping a 22 year old buy his first MHP in East Tennessee so that’s been a blast. This kid is a stud!
Texas Snax is having a record month and the mining business is doing better as well.
Our AI newsletter has since pivoted to an AI SaaS for helping skilled nursing facilities save 5 figures/month and I am super, duper excited about that one. If you know of any SNF operators, please let me know. We are looking for feedback on our beta version and happy to pay.
Also, it’s been 9 weeks of this newsletter now. How are you liking the feel of it? I’d love for you to reply with 1 complaint. I always aim to make it better.
Thanks a ton for reading. I appreciate your valuable time and attention.
Chris Koerner