Nail cold outreach with an irresistible offer

Hi ??

We were joined by B2B outbound consultant Mark Cann on our LinkedIn Live this week who shared some great guidance on cold outreach, with a specific focus on creating a really compelling offer.?

Whichever method of cold outreach you choose to focus on (email, LinkedIn, direct mail or even paid ads) you’ve got to work on your offer first, as this is likely to have the biggest impact on the effectiveness of your outreach strategy overall.

You can watch the session in full here, or catch up on the highlights below:

First things first, what is an offer?

When we talk about an ‘offer’ we don’t mean a discount.?

Your offer is simply how you package up and communicate what you’re going to deliver for a customer. A good B2B offer ultimately helps your audience understand why they should choose your product or service over a competitor.?

1, What does a great B2B offer look like??

A great offer needs to be compelling enough to make people take action. It should have a high perceived value, be unique to your business, and de-risk the purchase decision so it makes doing business with you an easy choice. E.g.?

Offer a guarantee. E.g. We’ll guarantee you [X] results within [X] days, or your money back. Or, No payment until you see results.

This is a great way to de-risk the purchase decision for people, and works well if you have tangible outcomes you can tie your product or service too. You’ll need to work out how long it will take you to achieve the milestones that you've promised in your guarantee. And make sure you choose something that is both realistic and compelling!?

Volume vs Quality. E.g. for service businesses: Unlimited interactions, vs Delivered within 7 days.

Over the last few years there’s been a big trend in offering ‘unlimited services’. For example, let’s take a design service. They might offer ‘unlimited revisions’ on any piece of design work they do with you. But the reality is - time is a restricting factor to that. You can only do as many revisions as the time you have to complete the work allows. Instead, the offer could be quality focused, playing into what the customer actually needs - “Designs delivered within 7 days”.?

Create a mini version of your offer to get people to trial the product / service first: e.g.

• Time based: 7-day free trial or a 30-day pilot?
• Volume based: Allow a certain amount of usage for free
• Limited access: Allow certain parts of the product / service to be used for free?

These are great strategies to get people using your product.

2, Add additional value?

Another way is to add ‘money can’t buy’ value to differentiate your offer. That could be by providing an additional tool, piece of content and service that helps your prospects in their day-to-day work and saves them valuable time.

This could be something you already own and have already created. E.g. if your audience are marketers it could be a budget planning sheet. Or it could be related to product integration and adoption, E.g. Free team training.?

Whatever it is, it shouldn’t require investment of their time. E.g. An hour-long recorded webinar might be seen as an added burden rather than additional value.

To be clear, this is different from content marketing where you might offer a free downloadable guide as a PDF in exchange for their contact details. It's got to be tangible, and either hard or lengthy for someone to do or achieve themselves for it to be valuable enough as an offer booster.

3, Make sure you’re really clear on your audience?

You need to really understand the problems your prospects have that your solution solves.?

Is it that they don't have enough time??

Is it that they've been let down by a previous supplier??

Is it that they need a solution that’s easy to implement within the business? You’ve got to do your research here!

4, Look at your competitors

Your prospects are likely going to be considering different options, so make sure you’re clear on how your offer differentiates from theirs. Mark recommends picking two competitors and analysing them side by side to understand their offer factors such as price, the time / cost commitment needed, etc.?

5, Test, test, test

Once you've formulated your offer, test it with your ideal customer before rolling it out to a wider audience. Ideally, you want to test it with people who are new to your business or offering, as existing customers are likely to be nice and only give you good feedback!?

Mark shared some great tips on how to get market feedback on your offer on Twitter here.

If you want to get live feedback on your offer, Mark is offering a free "Offer audit". Based on the information you share, he’ll record a short loom video with tips on how you could improve it!?

I hope you found this useful, I’d love to know if you implement any of the tips and please do connect with me on LinkedIn.

Lucy ??

PS. Our next LinkedIn Live is on Tuesday at 12pm and it’s all about knowing who to trust for marketing advice.