How To Book A Sales Meeting Using Cold Email In 6 Steps

How To Book A Sales Meeting Using Cold Email In 6 Steps

Cold email is a superpower for B2B brands that want to reach specific prospects in their target market, contact them with a specific message, and get them interested in chatting with you about your product or service.

If you ask me, that’s pretty gold!

In the last 2-3 years, I’ve sent tens of thousands of cold emails in my own business and on behalf of client’s businesses, and booked hundreds of sales calls so I’ll be dishing out from my own experience the main things to get right if you want to book a sales meeting using cold email in 2022.

Has cold email changed?

Cold email itself has gone through many changes since when I first experimented with it back in 2014!

There was once upon a time you could blast out hundreds of emails per day without a problem. Do that now, and you’re likely to have your email accounts suspended and domain reputation burned very quickly.?

Today, cold email requires more specificity. Requires more granularity. It requires you to be more thoughtful and segmented in the way you approach your target prospects and the message you put in front of them.?

However, in saying all that. The principles of effective cold email have not changed and that’s what I’ll be divulging in the rest of this article in A-Z for optimum results.

1) Focus on the right prospect

Go deep with this. It’s not about plugging in a niche keyword + geographic location in a lead finder tool anymore.?

Think about who are the perfect types of ideal clients for you? Actually, get super clear on this and document it.

Think about the types of actual decision-makers you need to be having conversations with. Think about company size. Annual revenues. The tech stack they use if relevant. The specific niche and industry they operate in.?

The deeper and more specific you get with nailing down who the perfect prospects are for you, the better you’ll be able to make sure that your messaging speaks specifically to this group of prospects and comes across as relevant to them.?

And it’s not just messaging either because the deeper and more specific you get, the easier it will be to identify and source the exact kinds of prospects you need to contact from B2B databases, LinkedIn, or other list building methods you use.

And it’s not just the list building either, because the deeper and more specific you get with this, the better you’ll be able to make sure that your messaging speaks specifically to this group of prospects and comes across as relevant to them.

2) Personalise your messaging

You can approach this in two ways.

One is writing a hyper-personalised email that is specifically for every single prospect you reach out to via cold email so every email is largely going to be completely different. Whilst this is effective, it’s very time consuming and very difficult to do at a scalable level.?

The other is to focus on making your messaging personalised to a specific group of target prospects so that it still looks relevant and specific to that person. So let’s say you’re targeting spirits distilleries that are expanding into more than one state. So in your messaging, you might write something like the following:

‘Hey NAME, noticed that COMPANY is currently expanding their range of handcrafted American whiskeys into STATE and STATE'

A simple sentence like this does not apply to every prospect. It’s only going to make sense to a certain group of prospects. In this way, you can make your message seem like it’s written just for them but whilst it’s written for a specific group of distilleries that are looking to expand their product range.?

This kind of personalisation is more time-efficient whilst also allowing you to perform your cold email outreach in a way that is more scalable that still gets results.?

Personally, this is my preferred method of personalising cold email outreach messaging.

3) Offer value in your messaging

If you want to maximise your positive response rates from cold email then you need to be able to demonstrate some value to them in the form of benefits of your offer and even better, specific and tangible results and outcomes your offer achieves.

Now there are two questions people are subconsciously asking when they get cold emails that will help you with this part of creating cold emails:

1. What do you do?
2. What should I care?

Make sure you answer those two questions specifically as possible, not in generic terms if you want to get the maximum effect from this.?

For example, following the above with the spirits distillery…

‘We’ve helped other spirits distilleries that are expanding into other states achieve targeted local and statewide press and media exposure. For example, COMPANY, achieved coverage in NAME, NAME, and NAME resulting in an increase of RESULT for their range of canned cocktails allowing them to expand into STATE more profitably.’

You’re essentially demonstrating your value proposition in a single paragraph that is also backed up by some form of proof and credibility, and answering the two important questions that prospects who receive cold emails are asking.

4) Keep your emails short and sweet

A big mistake I often see is waffling and essay length kinds of emails. Especially in today's day and age, people have the attention spans of a goldfish.?

So your emails need to be short and sheet. I honestly recommend 2-3 sentences ideally, and max up to 4 but certainly no more than 4. If you’re clear on your ideal client profile, your offer and its benefits and results then this is easily doable.?

Also, consider that many people will read cold emails on their phones and other mobile devices so if you're waffling with an essay-length email, it’s highly unlikely it will get read.

5) A clear CTA

A call to action should only have one aim, and that is to get a yes or no answer.?

The specific type of CTA you use will depend on what your immediate goal is.

Is your immediate goal to get a sales meeting booked? Or is it to first engage the prospect to get an interested response?

Here is how you might structure a simple CTA to get a sales meeting booked:

‘Can I send over a couple times to chat this week?’

And to engage with the prospect to get an interested response:

‘Can I send you over a short video explainer about how this works?’

As you can see, both CTAs are designed to get a yes or no response. Once you get a YES response, the foot is in the door and you can engage further to move the prospect to get a sales meeting booked.?

You’ll need to test both of these out to see what will get the best results for you.

6) Sending follow ups

Many people won’t respond to your first cold email. People are busy. People forget. People get distracted by the latest fads.?

In general, I typically recommend an entire cold email sequence that is around 4-5 emails in length. This is what I’ve found to be optimal. The only exceptions to this may be if you’re contacting enterprise accounts and have a very small target market size, in which case you’d logically look at making the sequence longer.?

With follow-ups, you don’t just want to always send the same thing. You can vary these a lot. You may have the first follow up as a simple CTA bump in the same thread. Then you might have the next follow up as a simple recap of your original first cold email.

Then the next follow up might even be sharing a case study or something else.?

There are many things you can do with follow up emails and much of this will be determined by the specific group of target prospects you’re reaching out to and how you can customise this to them accordingly.?

The bottom line is that you need to follow up if you want to maximise lead opportunities.

Cold email has changed a lot over the years but those are tried and proven principles of cold email that will last a lifetime.

Got any thoughts on this? Would love to hear below in the comments.

And if you want more detailed 1:1 help with this, send me a message directly to my inbox here on LinkedIn.?

Thanks for reading and good luck!