How To Cold Email People With Opportunities
This article is an important lesson for folks who are starting out with their SaaS platform, tool, course or otherwise business career.
Go on any online business forum and you’ll see tons of threads asking, “Does cold calling/cold emailing even work anymore?” threads.
In this article, I’m going to give you the big secret of how to successfully cold call or cold email anyone about anything.
Cold Email Isn’t About Cold Email
So I don’t know if I’ve been added to some sort of database or whether I’m just now a super-celebrity.
But for whatever reason, my email has been inundated with requests for stuff in the past couple of weeks.
“Hey Jamie… can you link to my product?”
“Hey Jamie, we’ve got this new tool you’ll be interested in.”
“Jamie, would you pimp our sweet infographic because it’s awesome?”
And here’s the thing…
I suspect you’ve read one of those, “How to get influencer attention” tutorials or you’ve got a new piece of outreach software that’s pulled me up as someone who talks about copywriting or online business or whatever…
… but if you think that your problems with outreach and marketing are going to be solved by pulling up a list of websites and just sending an email saying, “Hey man, help me out” then you’re going to be out of luck.
Here’s why.
I don’t know you. I don’t know if what you’re offering is worth it and I get dozens of people asking for this, that or the other over time. And I’m not exactly some celebrity figure. I’m just some guy with a website.
But more importantly, you haven’t made any attempt to build a relationship.
“Hey random dude… sure I’m going to replace the links of a product I’ve used myself, created by someone I’ve known for years and has given me and my readers great results for your product, which I’ve never heard of, never used and has been created by some dude who doesn’t even get my name right.”
Does this honestly sound like the likely scenario when you hit the send button?
Actual Advice
I have great success with cold emailing and cold calling. There are dozens of things I do and tricks of the trade I’ve learned from sending out hundreds of emails and other stuff over the years, but you don’t need those things.
Here’s what you need to do.
You need to break the process into two parts.
The first part is introducing yourself and helping someone out.
This is the key to successfully introducing yourself to a potential client, friend or buyer. If you don’t do this, you will fail.
And sorry, but sending an email with two lines at the beginning saying, “Hey James, I love your site and I built something for copywriters. Maybe you should share it with your audience” does not cut it.
On the other hand, if you do this, then you’re more likely to get success with the next part.
The second part is pitching.
If you haven’t done the first part, you’d best have the biggest and best deal ever seen on planet earth.
If someone came to you and said, “Hey… do you want some free bars of solid gold?” then you might be tempted.
But even then, you’re probably going to be suspicious, because who is this guy?
And if it’s not literally giving away solid gold bars, then you’d better forget it.
I had one guy on Twitter a couple of weeks back… Hey Jamie, can you check out my stuff? It’s important.
Who Is It Important For?
It’s not important for me, because I have a life to get on with. And you’ve no idea how many people on Twitter just message you saying, “Hey” or “Hi.”
I don’t know who you are, help me out a little. I’m not a dancing monkey waiting for you to talk to me.
One of the clearest, most obvious rules of business is to provide value. I don’t really say it a lot because I assume it’s a given.
But it’s clearly not, because people think they can just waltz into an inbox and say, “Hey, sell my stuff for me.”
You cannot do this and expect to succeed.
Put yourself in the other person’s position before you pitch to them.
Would you accept an offer from a random person who you’ve never heard of about a random thing you’ve never heard of that doesn’t benefit you in any way but clearly benefits them?
If the answer is, “no,” then what would you say yes to?
This is how to successfully approach anyone about anything.