Top 5 MOST Counterintuitive Email & Social Prospecting Methods

I) Revolutionary cold emailing programs that aren't cold at all will fire up your approach.

Reverse look-up prospects' email addresses with Rapportive (plug-in for Chrome acquired by LinkedIn) and send an insight driven email followed by a phone call (if calling a corporation hit the switch and triangulate in). Most executives can be reverse looked-up leveraging various naming conventions like firstname@ or [email protected] typed into the 'to' field. If you send this message to four executives at a time cross-referencing them, it can be powerful to crowbar open a first call. Nobody has taken this subject further than Bryan Kreuzberger: his course is worth it but you need to adapt his email template just enough because too many companies are using it now, IMHO. 

Scott Britton who lead business development efforts at SinglePlatform (acquired by ConstantContact for $100MM) wrote this email code cracking course which is also extremely valuable bristling with counterintuitive methods to revolutionize breaking through with emailing and less reliance on cold phone calling.

Rather than providing a litany of all the Fortune 500 clients they and their students have closed with these programs, I'll explain it like this. Bryan and Scott have both taken almost an 'engineering approach' to deconstructing email sequencing and analyzing how/why things get forwarded. Although the courses center on email, they have grown to be multi-channel and there is much psychological and influence analysis happening. Become a new business development by riffing on their methods and making them your own.

II) Why not do exactly the opposite of what millions are doing with messaging and inviting.

Perform a basic search on LinkedIn and add prospects from the search page by clicking 'connect', if you have a high degree of shared connections. Just like InMails can be spammy, personalized invites on LinkedIn can also backfire. That's controversial I know but it must be tested on a case by case basis despite the prevailing wisdom of the day. When they add back in, send a colloquial email. This is an email that reads like it could never be generated by a machine and is literally 3 sentences or less. Conversational like, "Hi Bill, I have some ideas [Konrath] for incrementally boosting revenue by creating efficiencies in your demand chain via marketing automation."

III) If you are going to play it safe with InMail, go wacky and test like crazy!

InMail is tricky. The feedback I've been getting from top sales executives in my extended network, is that it can look spammy and get ignored. Subject line A/B testing is the key here. Mentioning someone's name you know in common, a school you both went to [alumni accelerator] or a conference mutually attended, could get you in the door. A/B testing completely off-the-wall subject lines can also work. One to try is: "Written by a real genuine human." Humor can get you cut-through!

IV) We've all heard of ghost-writing, how about ghost-driving or jacking?

Ghostdriving is powerful. Imagine if your CEO would lend you their profile to send out some approved/tailored messages directly to other CEOs. This could build funnel 100 times faster than having individual reps reach out. If you have a list of impossible to penetrate accounts, considering forming an alliance with the SVP of Revenue or CXOs internally to either garner a referral or craft a message for them to tee up a meeting on your behalf.

V) The Selling to VITO [Anthony Parinello] envelope is the process of actually writing a one page letter to someone and hand deliver to their office in a plain envelope. Nobody does it, it's hyper-effective.

FedEx the CXO. Aim high and focus on outcomes and risk in the messaging. Speak CXO in the hand signed letter. You mail an unmarked manila envelope to VITO (the Very Important Top Officer). CEOs actually rarely get overnight mail, especially with an expository letter, teeing-up an appointment with cross-functional teams by someone that has applied rigorous business acumen to understanding their business challenges and tying your solution to a unique, value creation, insight they may have missed. It's such an obscure thing to do, they'll probably just open it to find out what on Earth it is. You better customize it to the hilt and bring them an insight that can't be found on Page One of Google. They read the trades, remember that! 'Tell me something I don't know about my industry, my business or a facet of any area of the value chain that can give me an incremental gain or improve efficiency.'

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