How To Find & Get Dream Clients w/ AJ Cassata

what is up everybody happy friday to you it's so good to see you i hope you missed us a little bit we're back live i know you've been bombarded with short content youtube shorts and we appreciate you for watching those it's helped our channel to grow tremendously to put that in perspective what's happening with us on our channel it took us two years to get to 10 000 subscribers it took us about two years to get to 10 000 subscribers on average we do about 3 000 subscribers a day a day so we can do more we can grow the channel more in three days and it took us in two years and that's why you're seeing this so much but i miss you wanted to have this live stream longer content at last we're here and we're a little bit rusty so bear with us in case things don't work out perfectly i'm going to cut over to my deck here and we're going to be saying hello to our guests we're going to be talking about three steps to getting meetings with your dream clients yes aj is going to teach us how you can get a meeting with your dream client and it's something that people ask us about all the time so three steps he has a presentation to share with us i want to just say hello really quickly to the donation to the come on animation keep up with me to the future rest to the doers and the donuts you guys know who you are we love you thank you very much on today's show we're going to be welcome in aj casada he's going to be here he and i have been chatting for a little bit of time it's taken us a little bit to get this all scheduled and coordinated but here we are at long last a few things i know about aj he's the founder director of his own company called your next sales call and he's also a sales mentor and advisor and he's the co-founder and account manager for magic media marketing aj welcome to the show how you doing aj good to see you man thanks for having me let's go aj okay all right we were able to do this with the magic of the internet we're able to connect so aj tell us a little bit about you before we get into your presentation you look like a really young person how old are you where are you calling from what's happening in your life yeah for sure so dive into my story a little bit further later but um i'm 26 i'm calling from vietnam from new york originally but um after you know a few years of kind of running my company remote i decided to just travel and live in a new place um so here i am and um yeah i'm a young guy i actually got started in business early i dropped out of school when i was 19 because i had a sales opportunity that i was just super um super passionate about and a full-time offer so i've been um just kind of grinding at that and along the way uh started this company are you a millennial digital nomad uh yeah i kind of hate like both of those terms but that's that's exactly what i am we're starting to show off on the right foot you're saying i'm throwing right at you okay because you're a very young person and you're living and working wherever you want of all the places you can live in the world why did you pick vietnam my home country yeah i know that so um it was kind of totally random i actually just i was originally planning to just go travel for a month and then come back to the states but um came here stayed here for a week loved the city of da nang met my now wife in the first like two weeks so that also kept me here um but yeah it was totally random i just kind of found a place i liked and realized that i didn't have to do my work from from new york and it's also a lot a lot cheaper out here um which is really helpful when i was getting my company started so totally just organic but um just took the opportunity wonderful did you marry an expat or did you marry a local girl a local girl vietnamese woman okay and how is your vietnamese right now zero i can order a couple couple couple things for food but hard language man you know it it is a hard language uh speaking as one who struggles through the language itself i i can totally back you up so maybe in a couple years you'll be able to be uh fully fluent who knows we'll see what happens we'll see what happens hopefully yeah okay why don't we do this why don't we jump into your presentation i know you've prepared a slide presentation for us uh and we're we're gonna learn from you about how to set up uh to get a meeting with our dream clients right 100 so let's dive in and yeah just feel free to stop me at any point if you have questions and yeah for everyone watching we'll do some more q a after so stick around um okay but without further ado i'm super excited for today's training again guys thanks for having me and thanks for everyone for watching so this is three steps to getting meetings with your dream clients a complete guide to outbound prospecting we'll get into more a little bit what that means but getting leads and filling your calendar with opportunities so just before we get started i want to say that this is not going to be another video or training that leaves you feeling pumped up and then in 10 minutes you just completely forget about it this is like you know as actionable as it could possibly get so i'm just going to really walk through it step by step and also share a resource with you all that can help you help you implement so i really really encourage you just to you know keep keep distractions aside sit here focus take note this is helpful uh for some this can like transform your business and put you a whole different place i'm gonna really hone in on one way you can use to consistently grow your pipeline so again for a lot of you this might be a marginal improvement but for some of you like this is this is transform everything for me so i'm super pumped to get into it but really the problem that we're going to be talking about today is i'm not getting as many clients as i like and or i'm not getting the types of clients i really want which i know for a lot of people watching that are just starting out it's clients that just don't have the budget and we tend to undervalue our work when we are only getting those types of clients right so a lot of times we think we have a sales problem we think we need to get better at closing but we really need to get better at is talking to the right people and um and marketing right so this little quote below this is what i hear a lot you know it's hey i just don't know how i just don't know how to go out and get work it usually just comes to me randomly whether that's referral whether that's you know whatever presence you have online what i really want to harp on today is an active approach to sales so there's passive and then there's active and yeah i'm just super passionate about active and that's exactly what we're going to be talking about today because i know a lot of people like especially for me when i first started out you know it's like you could be so motivated you just want to go get clients you want to go do sales the motivation the drive the work i think is there but when you just don't know what to do and you just don't know where to start it just gets it kind of just gets um confusing right and then again if you're taking a passive approach to sales if you just wait for work to show up at your door it's kind of like this right so this is your current situation then we're going to help get you out of that so it's always important for me i always try to think when i'm having a problem like what is the cause of that problem what is the specific thing i need to actually change like what is the root of it right so the macro problem is i'm not getting as many clients as i like but the real problem is i'm not having enough conversations with prospects right that is that is the micro problem and that specific part of the sales process is what we're going to dive into today because again you could be amazing at closing but if you're not actually having conversations with people if you're not having enough meetings with people you want to work with what does it matter how good you are closing right so a question for everyone watching how many sales calls have you completed in the last 30 days if you don't know this number first issue is something that you should be tracking and i highly recommend just keep it on the whiteboard journal spreadsheet whatever crm but if this number is like one or two a week or even less than that then you better stay and watch this whole thing because i'm going to show you exactly how to break out of that but even if you're happy with the number of sales calls you completed maybe it's been five ten a week you know maybe things are going well but you want more then again that's what we're going to focus on uh but again if you're not tracking this number the first thing you can do is start tracking it because as peter drucker says whatever gets measured gets made right and really just to focus on that metric like we don't always want to think about the outputs so thinking about the calls you make or the amount of emails you send that's an input right that's that's kind of what i like to think of as an effort goal or a process goal so those are the things that we want to focus on because we can't always guarantee how many clients are going to come in each month but if we know i'm having this many conversations like if you just focus on getting that number up everything else falls into place so it's kind of like like domino's right if you focus on having enough meetings with potential clients the rest of your business will fall into place you'll get clients you'll close deals you'll serve them you'll retain them right so focus on this metric that's a little bit higher up the funnel and just see how you can make this number go higher each week each month um because it's really true like sales is a numbers game anyway if you're having this problem you might be in a few situations this might result that you're maybe still stuck in a job that you're not totally passionate about and you want to break out if that's the case what i'm going to show you is the key to breaking out because that's what it was for me maybe you're already running a business or an agency but you're not making enough money you're not making enough profit maybe you just hired a team and now you're making less money than you were when you had a job right but overall if you're feeling stuck confused or overwhelmed with the amount of information and options on how to get clients then you're gonna love this and when i do a quick google search on how to get clients these are all of the articles that come up it's 33 ways to get more clients 15 effective ways to get more clients right but to me it's like i don't need 33 i just need one i just need one that works right i mean imagine like imagine you talk to one of your friends and you're having an issue you're like hey i'm having this problem with my wife or husband we've been disagreeing over this for the last week and we just can't we just can't get through it and you're really struggling and you're just trying to get advice from a friend and your friend's like oh that's not a problem here i have 80 different ideas of how you can solve that that's not the answer you need right you sometimes you just need one one or two ways to solve the problem i mean ultimately just one so there's so much information overload and it has a lot of us feeling like this i mean this this is just a ways to get clients that i could fit on top of one slide there's plenty more and i've done like over 75 percent of this list just because it's my business is helping others you know with their client acquisition so i'm always experimenting but like in my own business it's it's just two i focus on and we're thinking of adding a third but i'm i'm really hesitant about that anyway so this list is you know if i look at my facebook feed or if i look at the emails i get like the email marketing the cold emails i'm gonna find all of these people all of these different businesses all of these different influencers trying to pitch me on why speaking is the best or why blogging is the best or why networking groups and strategic partnerships are the best so it gets even more confusing when everybody is telling us linkedin is dead don't do linkedin or facebook ads are dead right so that's kind of what makes this even more overwhelming is we just don't know who to listen to it's kind of the cool thing about the internet is that we have so much information but it's also the the hard thing is how do we discern so the goal of today is to get you from this on the left to that woman on the right to get you from feeling struggling and stressed out to having full clarity peace of mind and just to be like waking up with inquiries in your inbox leads meetings on your calendar and just to know that you're headed in the right direction so i'm going to help you get unstuck and create a consistent flow of ideal clients for your business the key is consistent if your revenue looks like a roller coaster if you get clients here and there then you really want to focus on that consistency and then really you know how to 2 to 3x your profit and income fast by following what i'll show you today so fast is in literally just a few months time you could have a totally different business so i'll get into my story a little bit later throughout the presentation but just a quick point here i was in the construction business first for five years i was in a marketing agency after and now what i'm mainly focused on is consulting sales coaching and consulting all of those business in three different industries within the first either month or the first three months we crossed uh we crossed 15k a month and ultimately you only need 8 300 a month to be at a six figure to be at the six figure mark right but the point is within one to three months in all those different businesses we got there we passed uh we passed the six figure mark just by implementing this like very fast and not spending a dime on advertising not having anyone to do this for me so again you know there's a lot of different ways you can get clients and ultimately they all work like i'm not here to tell you that this way is the best but if you're looking for just kind of the simplest direct most you just fastest way to turn things around again one to three months time you could be in a whole different world so i'm really excited to help you all out with this so i want to cut through the noise and show you one method that works to get you five 10 to 15 meetings with decision makers every week not gatekeepers but decision makers and ultimately give you the control and the ability to grow your business with predictability because what i'm going to show you is very measurable and very scalable and ultimately help you take an active approach versus passive so what it is is it's outbound prospecting which can mean a lot of different things but we're going to really focus on direct outreach on linkedin and cold email so no matter what niche you target you know whether you sell to local businesses whether you sell to big companies software companies whatever you can find your target market on either email or linkedin cool thing about this is there's a is there's a very direct path to decision makers a lot of times if you call up a company you're talking to a gay keeper first but instead you can contact a marketing vp or the ceo of a company directly on linkedin and you can learn all about them you know it's a social it's just like facebook but it's for business right so it's an easy way to scale up and get bigger projects if you're again working with clients that are a little bit smaller than you like and you're not really able to unleash the full amount of value you can and you're looking to work with bigger bigger companies work on more exciting projects then linkedin is absolutely going to help you get there and it's much easier to make that shift than you think it's actually not even harder to sell a bigger company than smaller one i've usually found it to be easier because they don't have um they don't have the you know type of budget concerns that small businesses have and ultimately you know this method is low or no cost there's no no advertising budget needed uh no audience required if you're starting from zero and no complicated software or tech needed so again just about the simplest and fastest way to start getting more meetings really the point of that is just that anyone anywhere can do it i'll show you how to do this without spamming people maybe you're already sending you know emails or sending linkedin messages or even cold calling potential clients but you feel like you're spamming you feel like your messages are kind of annoying or you're just taking too long to actually get results right i'm going to show you how you can do this with one even two hours a day and if you already have a team and someone else handles your marketing still do this yourself so you can learn it but this is definitely something you can delegate to someone in your team so who can utilize this any any type of creative entrepreneur really anyone that sells services b2b you know again whether it's whether it's big companies public companies post ipo or small businesses brick and mortar whether you're a beginner trying to cross that 10k a month mark and maybe you're possibly still stuck in a job and you want to get out so you can do what you love or maybe you're established already and you just want to grow faster maybe you need new ways of generating leads or maybe you want to tap into new markets so again the cool thing about an active approach to sales with outbound marketing is that you can just go into any direction you want you know you really steer the ship of your company because if you're waiting for work to come to work for work to come to you it just comes from all directions and if you're getting a lot of clients and referrals in a niche that's not really what you want you kind of end up getting stuck in a loop because you keep getting more referrals and more work from that same area but if you want to again tap into new markets do something different it's just a matter of you know launching a new campaign so who am i um co-founder of revenue boost b2b sales coaching and consulting uh chris introduced earlier as a different name but we actually literally just just rebranded um and director of revenue for link building content agency and director revenue basically means i had the sales department but i also support the the account management team and also um also a little bit of the marketing team so kind of supporting with the whole revenue pipeline but really more importantly i've committed the last eight years to mastering client acquisition i've laser focused my career on this one thing in different areas you know b to c b b to b inbound and outbound but ultimately it's all been around the same problem and now for the last few years i've been helping other companies solve this problem but how i got started i didn't always know i wanted to do this i actually got started believe it or not in door-to-door sales i was that guy knocking on your door and this was really cool so i was totally lost when i got to school i was when i was 18 i went to a community college and i was a liberal arts major which basically means i had no idea what i wanted to do so it was a very broad major and i was again like totally lost i had no idea what i wanted to do but someone came into my classroom spoke about an opportunity to learn how to run a business you know do marketing and sales sounded awesome i signed up turns out i had to go door-to-door selling house painting services so if you lived in anywhere on the north shore of long island but especially king's park i probably asked you or your parents to get their house painted this was a cool experience it was a grind like i've done like 10 hours 12 hours a day of just going out neighborhoods knocking on doors getting door slammed in my face getting rejected so when i discovered that i could actually get clients through the internet you know by just learning about email marketing linkedin cold calling i was like all in right i didn't have to do that anymore but you know this taught me a couple of really interesting things first it got me over my fear of rejection which i think is one of the most important things in business especially at the start is just getting over that fear of being told no because i've probably been told no like thousands and thousands of times over those years and more importantly it taught me how to how to explain what i do in 10 to 15 seconds or less because if you're not gonna on someone's door and their babies crying in the background or their wife's you know yelling at them to come back for dinner you have 10 seconds to tell them why they should spend another minute or two there so i really got good at just pitching but also generating leads and it was a good experience of course i didn't want to do that forever but i took the opportunity i actually dropped out of school when i was 19 years old because ultimately i was not really clear on what i was doing in school and you know i was really passionate i always wanted to run a company and at this company i was given a lot of responsibility i was really loving what i was doing i was given a full-time offer i had great mentors as well so i was getting so much value from what i was actually doing that i decided to just take the leap and do it full-time so i was the top performer in my region in uh in the northeast took a full-time opportunity worked my way up kind of just went all into something that came my way out of the blue i got into sales management hiring sales reps doing tons of interviews i was leading a team of 18 at one point so building teams sales training all that good stuff after five years i was a little bit burned out and just went to go do it do it on my own to help others with the same but what i really believe is that like the driving factor for me is that sales makes the difference between the good companies and the great companies and it's not to say that sales is the only thing that matters obviously everything plays a part but if you have a good product a good team and you don't have a good sales process that's the missing link you're going to stay at good you're never going to be great right so it's not just about you're not just in the business of of the things of the thing that you offer you're in the business of selling that thing right if you're in if you you're in the design business or marketing or strategy or videos you're in the business of selling videos not just delivering videos so i really love sales i mean a lot of people tolerate it but i actually just i love it i mean it's not always fun sometimes it sucks right a prospect goes to you a deal falls through at the last minute but i really just value it i know how important it is and ultimately again it just makes a difference between the good and the great like the last two industries i was in you know so marketing agency and construction business both very much commoditized services and you know from being part of a 40 million dollar company and also you know working with companies that were doing like 500k or a million a year one thing i realized was a lot of the small businesses or even with agencies right a lot of small agencies can deliver the same quality of work that a huge one could so what is the difference it's the fact that they figured out a repeatable sales process so i'm super passionate about helping others with this because i just really believe it it's the key to unlocking your potential um and your company's potential right and you so ultimately i believe that you and your company's success is determined by how well you can sell again it's not the only factor but if you have the other things right then this is what it takes to get to the next level and ultimately yeah i just want to help more companies go from good to great this is why i'm a big fan of the future i love the mission of helping people do what they love and i've created a life that's that's just what i love and you know through my work this is what i get to help other people do i get to help other people make a living or really take their company to where they want to go so enough about me let's dive into it what's the difference between outbound prospecting inbound prospecting you might have heard those terms before you might have also heard push versus pull marketing the main difference is that with outbound you're finding you're going to prospects and you're starting the conversation with inbound prospects come to you so again inbound can be blogging youtube seo webinars books podcasts you're basically putting stuff out there and waiting for people to come to you and with outbound it's just you know you taking the initiative right cold calling door knocking like i did don't worry you don't have to do that email linkedin trade show direct mail and i don't want to say that either one of these is better than the other it's just really you know there's just different um different benefits to each right ultimately you should be doing both or you should be working towards having both incorporating your company but anytime i've ever started a company at the beginning i've always focused on outbound because it's been for me the fastest way to get uh get rolling so the benefits of outbound are it's easy to measure it's fast to show impact and you can be personalized and specific so when i say fast to show impact you know i've seen a lot of entrepreneurs start a new company and then they want to go through a bunch of money at facebook ads and a lot of times that doesn't work and the reason for that is you really when you start a company you really need to get your clear on your foundations you need to know your target audience you need to know the benefits of your product that actually matter you need to be clear on your messaging and if you don't know all those things and you just go do a let's say you go spend a bunch of money on paid ads you're gonna spend all that money to figure that out but with outbound marketing you can make a hundred cold calls or you can send a hundred emails and if you get no one to respond now you know that you need to change something about your messaging or your offer and you don't need to again you all you wasted was a few days but imagine you were trying to build um a youtube audience and then you found out after six months that you don't like that niche anymore that you were targeting through your videos or it just doesn't fit for you imagine how much time that's wasting right so again not to say that either one of these are better but i just want to help you understand the differences and how they come together and again the disadvantages of inbound is that it's it's hard to measure and it's slow to build traction so i do both but the focus has always been a majority outbound but now i'm shifting more into kind of having an even balance but again it's just about the different stages so most of the big companies i know or have worked with do both it's just about knowing the different parts they play and how they work together and ultimately determining what makes sense for you with where you are right now so first going to get into aj's laws of prospecting so i want to get make this as actionable as possible but i can't dive right into that without getting into some of the some of the mindset or how to actually think about this stuff so first things first it's not a ha it's a habit not a tactic you know what i'm going to show you outbound prospecting it's not something you just do like once in a while and you know you just send out 100 emails to 100 cold calls like once a month it's not gonna work it's not just another tactic i want you to look at it and adopt it as a habit look at it as part of your identity something that you just do consistently if you can just do this even for 30 to 60 minutes a day again your world can change so look at it as a habit and carve out time in your schedule if it doesn't get scheduled it's not going to get done don't look at it as something where oh whatever i have time i'll go send some emails i've made that mistake before and it just doesn't work you need to prioritize it best thing is you can just do it first thing in the morning especially because you might have some resistance around sending emails or or making cold calls but if that's the case remember it could always be worse you could be knocking on thousands of doors in a day law number two is that it works if you work so again we're in an age where everybody's trying to sell us on the best way to to get clients or to get leads you know i see ads all the time linkedin is dead and then the next day i see an ad for someone promoting a linkedin course or hey you know facebook ads are dead you need to get onto tick tock you need to get onto youtube whatever it is so just know that this works like this is probably one of the this is yeah pretty much is one of the oldest ways of digital digital marketing people still check their email people are still on linkedin linkedin is still growing so again this works the reason i say that is because a lot of people they might try something new and if it doesn't work right away they're oh it doesn't work it's not that it didn't work it just it didn't work the way you did it right but again it works and you just have to put in the work so don't try this for a week don't try this for two weeks stick with it if you can do this for the next 30 to 60 days you will for sure see results but you have to put in the work again it's a numbers game you can't just send five great looking emails to five companies and then be pissed that they didn't respond so you just gotta keep putting in the consistency number three is quality first so the average reply on a cold email is less than one percent now and that's because a lot of people have kind of done that like the mass blast but what i'm going to show you today is to actually send emails that your prospects love that it's not annoying them and they're not marking you into spam i'm going to really show you how to focus on quality in your messaging over quantity of course you want to get quantity because like we said before you got to get those numbers up but really taking a quality first approach so that it doesn't feel like spam you're actually providing value and you're actually getting the result so we're gonna talk about that balance number four is start a conversation don't advertise so if you look in your email inbox and you look at like most people do cold emails so bad and i'm going to show you some examples today i have some people with the names blurred out of some emails i've gotten but most people their emails look like a flyer or it looks like an advertisement that's not what you want to do your email should look like a conversation even if you are sending it out with an automated tool it should look like you wrote it as a person to that person intentionally this one thing will make all the difference if you just change that one thing it'll make a huge difference so again you're not really you're not trying to advertise your service most of the emails i get most of the linkedin messages i get they're all people just giving a wall of a giant pitch but you're not trying to advertise your service you're just trying to start the conversation so don't be thinking don't be thinking about you need to sell your service so number five sell the next step another place i've seen a lot of people go wrong with uh with outreach is they try to sell their product or service especially if you sell something i mean anything really anything where there's a cert when there's when there's a relationship involved but especially if you sell something that's like 5k or 10k or 3k a month or even much higher nobody's going to make that decision over an email nobody so you have to realize you're not trying to sell you're not trying to sell your service or your product in an email you're trying to sell the next step which is a conversation so again back to when i first got into sales and i was doing door-to-door i when i would ask people and try to talk to them and getting their house painted it never worked they would slam the door on me but when i said hey like would you be willing to meet with me next week for an hour and i could tell you more about what i think about your project how much it would cost and you know if you should even do it this year they were much more open so i was basically scheduling appointments so again your emails should not be pitching all of the benefits and features of what you do you're just trying to get them on a conversation because that's where you can really build a relationship and go through the proper sales process so again sell the next step and number six is don't give up i don't just mean in general with trying this i mean don't send someone one email i've had clients that have come back to me after four years people that have reached out to me out of the blue that have somehow kept my information or people that i've reached out to you know just once a quarter once a year so the thing is a lot of times we send an email someone doesn't reply we get disappointed and we think ah they weren't interested 90 of the time they were interested they just didn't see your email or they saw it on their phone but they didn't have a chance to respond so you have to have to follow up because again people's inboxes are flooded i saw a study i think it was from harvard and it said that uh the average executive gets like 300 plus emails a day it's probably even more now since i last saw that but again people just haven't seen your email i usually get more responses on the second and third and fourth follow-up than i do on the first one so it always amazes me every time and it's really just people that again they're just busy they're running a company you know they're not sitting by their phone waiting for your email so you need to follow up and number seven we'll talk more about the messaging later but keep it short keep it relevant and keep it about them huge mistake is number one people are just sending super long emails if i'm on my phone like you got to think when are most people reading their links in our other email when are most people even taking a call when they're in the middle of something else i mean i check my email when i'm like when i'm traveling when um you know i have a few minutes at the end of the day a few minutes at the beginning of the day when i'm in line like whenever i have downtime so your email should be so quick that they can read it in like maximum 30 to 45 seconds keep it short because again the only reason you're making a super long email is because you're trying to pitch all your you know everything about what you do so keep it as short as possible it just makes it easier for people to actually read and reply keep it relevant to them you know use examples that are relevant to them talk about their problems their goals and overall you know keep it about them this is one of the biggest things that you know makes a huge difference in the amount of replies you get is again most people they send emails they send calls they make calls and they're talking about hey i'm this is my name from this company and i do this and i got assigned to your account and we do this and we helped our client do this and they received this result and here here's our process here's that works nobody wants to hear any of that they want to hear about themselves if you can actually strike a nerve if you can actually point out a problem that you saw they're dealing with or other people in their field are dealing with something about the industry that's relevant point out their goals they're way more likely to read because why i mean it's psychology we all love to talk about ourselves but ultimately nobody cares about you they don't care about you until they know that you can help them until they know that there's a reason to to care then they're going to care so again people do care about you but only after they know you can help them in the beginning you're literally just a stranger in their inbox and if you're pitching your services if you're even mentioning prices in the first email it just comes off like way way too forward there's a time for that but it's not in the first contact i mean think about it in a different example you know sales is sales is very much like dating you wouldn't go up to a girl in a bar and just be like hey you know my name's this and i'm from here and i just bought this really you know awesome car and i just got this house too and you got to come check it out it's so cool and i'm amazing that girl would leave before you even finished your sentence so a lot of times you know it's really helpful just to think about like before sending an email or a message think about how it would sound in real life if you approach somebody at a networking event or even just think about it in you know in a dating example so again keep it about them so here are the three steps to getting meetings number one is identify find and organize your targets number two is reach out and the outcome of that is getting a lead number three is convert which is get a meeting so the cool thing is if you're doing some emails you're doing some linkedin and you're not getting results there's only one of three things that could be going wrong and really i would say number two and number three are grouped into the same category of messaging so there's really just the targeting and the messaging so if your emails aren't working who could i should i be targeting differently or should i change my messaging it can only really be one of those two things before we dive into the three steps we have to first go back a minute and look at the strategy so before you actually start going out blasting emails think about the goal because when you have a prospect that's interested what path are you going to take them down what service do you do you know do you do you tend to sell are you going to have a call first is that going to be a discovery call is that going to be a call where you also you know make a pitch like what is that so first define the goal and you can also really get specific around you know the numbers you know i want to get five clients this month or even start with the inputs i want to send 100 emails a week so start with you know what you're trying to achieve and by when then define the who so if you aren't super clear on who you're going after then don't even go don't even start messaging people because if you just search business owners on linkedin you're going to find like millions tens of millions probably hundreds of millions of results so really get clear on who you're who you're um who your ideal client is because again if you're sitting there and you're like man i'm not working with my dream clients but you haven't actually thought about and written down what a dream client looks like then how do you expect to find that person you know what i mean so define the who and i don't just mean their job title or their industry that's a good start but really get clear on like what what is their day to day look like what are the problems what are their daily frustrations what are their aspirations what are their personal goals behind their company goals really really get clear on just them you know at an emotional level and you know you can download a buyer persona or a customer avatar template from the internet anywhere and that's super super useful exercise to go after not only does it make it you more clear on who you actually want to work with but it really informs it really informs your messaging when you're really clear on who you're going after then you can actually write messages that are um they're receptive to then to find the way where is it email is it linkedin is it both i recommend both and we'll talk about how to implement that is it cold calling just to be clear we're not going to be going over cold calling today we're just going to be diving deep on messaging but you can take the messaging sequences that you build for email and just repurpose that into a cold call it's it's really the same thing and i highly recommend doing cold calling because a lot of people a lot of people just want to um a lot of people are afraid of it too but if that's the case then you should definitely do it because it's a great skill to build and then fourth thing is to find the what so what do i want this conversation to result in is it a meeting am i going to start by just maybe sharing some information to build a relationship and if it is a meeting is it a 15-minute meeting is it a 60-minute meeting what's the point of it so just get clear on the on the what that you're actually offering to these people and then the second thing before you start is make sure you look good make sure your linkedin is optimized and make sure your email is also looking good so starting with linkedin you want to have your profile optimized what i put in bold is kind of like the mvp so if you want to make your minimum viable linkedin without going to nuts because i know there's probably a lot of perfectionists here that might want to spend three weeks on their linkedin just focus on the top four your headline your cover photo your headshot and your bio reviews portfolio experience interest all good stuff too but if you just want to get going at least focus on those top four and build the rest over time and then for email really simple but just have a profile picture so you look like a person and have a signature and if you're selling um like if you're selling photo work video work anything that's visual you could also put your portfolio in your email not even a link but there's even apps where you can uh you can showcase it briefly down there and if not put a testimonial on your email that's my favorite thing to put in my email is a testimonial so again you're gonna have a lot more eyeballs checking you out on linkedin checking out your emails so it's good to just make sure that you're looking solid so diving into the three steps identify reach out convert so first you're going to want to find and organize targets so as long as you know who i'm going after what title they hold you can use linkedin sales navigator you can you can do the free version on linkedin but if you upgrade to sales navigator you get like a lot of data you can even you can search all of these different all of these different um all of these different data points you can find people at a specific job title people that have just changed jobs people in specific parts of the country people that are you know this industry with this keyword on their profile so you get like the supercharged way to to um reach out there that's why linkedin is awesome it's basically a directory of business owners it's the world's largest directory of business owners and the cool thing about it is people are there to network it's not like facebook where if you message somebody they're they're kind of there like for personal reasons usually on linkedin people are there because they want to meet people that can help them grow their business and remember when whatever you're selling you're ultimately helping someone so if you get too caught in thinking like i'm selling this person then that's how it's going to come off you know so linkedin sales navigator i'm going to show you a couple features inside there that help but ultimately that's where you go to find prospects on linkedin you can organize a list and then also for emails you can use tools like apollo which allow you to get emails from linkedin so it locates their business email and then you can also hit them up on email and then also there's services like lead hype and d7 lead finder which are databases so even if your target clients aren't on linkedin like let's say you're targeting local businesses there's other tools that you can find emails of of small businesses brick and mortar so second thing is reach out on linkedin you have to add them as a connection first and emails of course can be sent right away so emails you want to connect with them first don't pitch in this first message just say something like hey so we're working in the same industry looks like we're doing some great stuff would love to connect you can obviously make it sound better than that and see something specific but just the point is don't mention you know what you're what you're offering them that first one and the next thing is convert get a meeting qualify them show them that there's value in the meeting and set up a winnable meeting so first thing qualify you you want to know i mean sometimes it's good to get on the get on calls with a lot of people in the beginning if you're just trying to maybe practice you know presenting your offer and especially if you're new but ultimately you want to kind of have some criteria points and of course you can do a lot of this over the call but there's some people that you could have probably figured out in advance that you didn't need to jump on a call with them so just figure out what your main points of qualifying are and um ask those things before setting up a meeting you can even put those into a calendly link meaning you can use like an automated scheduling software and have them answer the questions there next thing is show that there's value in the meeting so a lot of times people just ask hey can i have 60 minutes of your time but that's what is that that's me me and me show them that there's actually something that they get um so whether it's hey i'm you know going to give you kind of a like some insights on your brand strategy or i'm going to give you an audit or i'm going to share some ideas of what's working well for other clients that are you know in the same position as you show them there's something that they get out of the meeting and that it's not just you going there to try to sell them and set up a winnable meeting again a lot of a lot of sales is preparation and we'll talk more on that later so identify you figured out your who create a list of high quality targets again you can organize them into a lead list you can uh another tool is hunter there's a ton of these if you just type you know lead scraper or email finder you'll find a bunch of tools but these are the two that i like and then also you can use the tool like neverbounds to make sure that the email is real it's accurate i recommend you do this completely so the reason i split up into three steps because really you could just go on linkedin find people and message them as you go but i find it's very helpful to separate the tasks um that's to me the challenge with running a business is sometimes like this week especially i feel like i have a million things flying at me so what i really try to practice is separating uh related tasks just so i can kind of be in that head space right i don't want to be doing creative work at the same time that i have to do admin work or get back to somebody on my team so i recommend you get your targets all ready to go before you start reaching out that way you can just focus on executing so what if i told you that you can reach out to owners or marketing managers at restaurant chains with five locations and 50 plus employees on the west coast or even in la or even in a specific county or city or you know town in l.a what if i told you that you could reach out to creative directors at ai sas companies in tel aviv that just received their second or third round of venture capital well you can linkedin gives you all of this data and there's other tools too like crunchbase and apollo that give you even more information you can even see what technologies they're using i work i help some e-commerce agencies with their own uh client acquisition as well and you know there's even tools that you can find out like what software's companies are using and see if you know there's a need for um you know like just see if there's a need for if there's a match for what you do so really great for really great for a lot of reasons but yeah you can find all kinds of technologies funding um company headcount all these things online and a lot of it most of it you can get from linkedin so here's a look at actually linkedin sales navigator interface you can type in keywords so you can just type in your niche there you can type in the industry you can type in the seniority level whether you want to speak to the owner or whether you want to speak to someone lower and honestly guys think big like you can reach out to the ceo it's it's actually much better if you start there and if he i mean it depends on the company right because if you're talking to a thousand person company the ceo is probably not the decision maker so you have to be wary of that but you can you know it's better that you start higher because then they can pass you off they can be like hey talk to my director of marketing and then you get an intro and that director of marketing is like oh man i got to talk to this guy because my boss just told me to so there's a lot more authority coming from that place years and current position honestly like 90 of the stuff in linkedin you don't really need to use but i would say some of the main things are keywords industry seniority title and then also you can do company headcount there's plenty more this is this is just some of the main ones here but play around with it another tip on linkedin is you can actually see who's been active in the last 30 days so before reaching out to someone make sure that they actually are active on their linkedin profile do they have a profile picture and a headshot because if not it's probably an account they made years ago but really if you scroll down and you go to their activity you can see their recent comments and posts so you can see if they're actually active on linkedin with linkedin you only get 100 connection requests a week now they just changed it and they limited it so you can only reach out to 100 people in a week which is plenty if you do it right and there's also workarounds to that but just make sure you're actually reaching out to people that are active so that you're not wasting on wasting your opportunity so after the identify stage and don't worry if there's anything you want to dive into further we can do some q a after but after the identify stage you should have a lead list inside of linkedin and or an email list inside of a spreadsheet or crm so you're ready to go you're ready to fire so yeah i mean some of the main questions that people ask me are how do i get them to read and reply to my message how do i stand out in a noisy world where the average executive gets 300 plus emails a day two things in short one by understanding your target customer and again really understanding like understand him at an emotional level what keeps him up at night what frustrates him what other solutions does is he using or thinking about compared to yours whether it's a direct or indirect alternative so understand your target customer i'm telling you if you just get super clear on your target customer and if you're not sure like go do some interviews go talk to your last few customers or if you're brand new go on linkedin and go set up like one of my clients he just he was trying to get into a new industry trying to get into the renewable energy industry so we just started setting up meetings with people saying hey i'm trying to get into the space i would just love to ask you some things and you know just kind of doing some market research and that's again people are like super receptive to that it's a lot easier than you think but you can do some interviews and ask your target customers or even ask your past customers why have they bought from you you know what were they afraid of what were they hoping to achieve you know all of those things and that's the stuff that writes your emails so when you really focus on getting that data and again if you're brand new you can go talk to people or you can even look at your competitors look at the reviews that your competitors have on their website on their google on facebook on reddit on linkedin so honestly the best copy comes from your market it comes from your customer's mouth because all the time you know we we as sales people or entrepreneurs we think we think in our own words right we think like i see this happen especially a lot in the software world we're like i have this amazing ai tool that does this this and this but that's not how our customers explain they say to themselves so it's really easy to talk in r words in our language and especially if you're selling something that's a little bit more on the technical side it's so easy to just get lost in the techno babble don't do that so you want to really talk in your customers customers words and meet them where they're at and the second thing is committing to get great at copywriting now guys everyone that's here live i'm going to share with you some email templates which is going to basically do like half the work for you to get started so i'm going to share with you all some some templates to help you just kind of just get off the ground but ultimately it's not about just copying and pasting templates like that'll help but you really just want to commit to getting great at copywriting written communication this is useful for all of you know business like you spend a lot of time sending people emails might as well get better at it so look at this as an opportunity just to get better at your written communication and that's a lot of sales sales isn't just you know taking phone calls closing deals taking checks or credit cards it's a lot of you know written communication follow-up back and forth and you can like win a deal or lose a deal over an email it's happened to me plenty of times so it's a great opportunity to get better at that especially in the world where everything's going more digital so again i shared um i shared that i have some templates to give you all so comment give me the templates below and i'll share a google doc actually for everyone's who's here live uh jonah you can share that google doc in there and there's no sign up required it's just a dock you can download and there's four of my favorite templates over there and if a lot of people take them i'll even go back and add like four more from our vault over the next few days but if you missed out and you didn't make it here live then just comment give me the templates as a youtube comment so comment below the video give me the templates and i'll get them to you i'll send you a message here on a youtube or comment with them so again if enough people respond with give me the templates below then um yeah we'll post them here on youtube and this will definitely help get you started also there's a link to our facebook community that i um that i run below in the description and if you want some help implementing this after today you can go and you can post the emails that you're sending you know there's a whole community there of agency owners freelancers to give you feedback so we can help support you with that as well but again you know use the templates but start out by just practicing at least practice writing it on your own at first now when someone reads your email these are the three questions that they're wondering in this order one how can you help me everybody like i just like to imagine that everybody has a banner over their head that says what's in it for me right because they don't know you they're a stranger they're not inclined to give you something to give you their time or their money they're first wondering can you help me so how can you help me that should be first second is who are you not who are you first the amount of times i get emails from somebody that's like hey my name's this i'm from this company i'm this i was assigned to your territory and it's like what why do i care about that i don't even i don't even know you dude so again who are you they do care about who you are but after they know that you can help them solve a problem or achieve a goal so again how can you help me who are you and what are you asking me for a lot of people i've seen write great emails but then they just end it with like a statement and it puts the work on the prospect to respond you have to have a clear ask at the end you have to you know you have to whether you're asking for a call whether you're asking a question don't just have this like pitch and then there's nothing after it because then you're putting it's work right the prospect is thinking what do i do or they might read it and just go oh that's cool and then forget about it so again you want to make it as one of the best things and this is for sales in general not just prospecting but make it as easy as possible for your customers to buy and move through your sales process you don't want to be creating friction it should be an easy seamless process that they're just kind of floating right through so again if you say hey i'd love to chat next friday for 15 minutes i'm free this time this time or this time now it's easy they're just like oh yeah that time works rather than them thinking like if they should respond or how they're going to respond so again don't put the work on your prospect make it easier for them so take a screenshot of this this is literally one of the best things you can you can learn about this this will help you with all your marketing activities and it's going to help you a lot in your sales calls too so eugene schwartz is a really famous copywriter one of the most like well-paid copywriters he has a book that's like 300 bucks on amazon um he's he's a older older copywriter and in his book breakthrough advertising he goes over the five stages of awareness and basically what these five stages are is these are the five potential places that any of your prospects could be at they're either unaware they have no knowledge of anything relating to what you offer or their the next step is problem aware your prospect knows he has a problem but they don't know there's a solution so if you're selling something related to marketing their problem usually is i don't have enough customers and i don't know what to do step number three solution aware i don't have enough customers and i think i need facebook ads or i think i need good video content on my website okay so now they know the solution so your prospect knows the result he wants but he doesn't know that your product provides it product aware is your prospect knows what you sell but he isn't sure it's right for him and then most aware is most prospects know your product and they just need to know the deal they're like ready to go so to explain this every single person moves through all five of these stages now you might talk to someone who's already at number four you might talk to someone who's already at number one but the point is is that they everyone moves through these to make a sale so like what i teach is i teach a sales framework a sales call framework and it's not a script you know because not every conversation is goes the same that's why scripts just don't really work but essentially like just know that when you're selling anything whether it's in an email whether you're having a call a meeting a second third meeting people have to go through all four all five of these stages and they might come to you farther at the bottom that's better right because you don't have to do a lot of education but wherever they are like you have to meet them where they're at and the reason i bring this up is because if you send emails that are all about you and your company and why your company is better than the competition you're assuming that they're all the way to number four like they know the problem they have they know the solution they want now they're evaluating choices that's not gonna be the case it's been said that there's only like three percent of the market is at that stage and they're like you know those are the people that are searching on google and they're trying to find they're looking at deals right now you know what i mean so if you just if you just go into pitch mode you're assuming that people are already knowing that they have a problem and needed a solution most people are in one and two they just know they have a problem or they don't know they have a problem so for example like if you were starting a company and it had like a really new innovative solution the challenge there is that you need to educate the market they're unaware of what you do and they're unaware of the problem that you're you know that your thing solves so if you're in like something completely groundbreaking the pro the challenge is you're educating the market if you're on something that's more common again you know like photo video work design marketing uh professional services something else financial services whatever something that's that's common then you know yeah there's plenty of the market that's problem aware solution aware and product aware but again this just think about this before you send your emails and again like study this look up eugene schwartz look this up because it'll just give you such an edge because again now you know in your sales calls why you know some people are just zoning out during your pitch because you haven't identified you haven't made them agree that there's a problem yet so not only is it going to help you with your emails but it's also going to help you with just your entire sales process because you can start to think like what stage of awareness is this person at and if they're not problem aware we probably got to spend most of that call helping them realize they have a problem before i even get into my solution so it's also providing a better experience for your buyers because what is the biggest thing we hate about getting sold to is that we have someone that's just selling us on all these things that don't even matter like how many times have you talked to a sales person and you're zoning out because the information they're saying isn't relevant you know so that's that's because of this so we're gonna go through some actual examples but here are the main points this would be another good thing to screenshot here are the main points of uh what makes a successful outreach so one is personalize it do your research quality versus quantity you can do an automated campaign and not personalize that much and if it's really good it'll still get results but i feel like you know from what i'm seeing the world is moving more and more towards quality where you're sending less emails but you're you're personalizing it and no i don't just mean typing in their name in their company i mean actually looking up something about their company actually finding something out about them that you can reference i mean if you like if you sell if you sell anything relating to digital marketing this is a lot easier because let's say you sell web web development you can see if their website is bonkers you know and then you can point that out in your email but it doesn't just have to be around your product or service it could be like again on linkedin there's so much information that's why it's so much easier than you think the the hard part is getting the messaging right but ultimately there's tools are there for you guys to do this on linkedin you can see what they comment on what groups they're apart of what charities they they support what their past job was maybe you worked at the same company you can use those things to build common ground so you want to personalize it one it's great just to build rapport i mean again always think about the sales process in stages they need to kind of build some connection with you first and some rapport but not only does it build report it's to me it's more about showing that this isn't a marketing message so personalizing it like for me i get cold emails all the time uh and i think it's because my email is like up on linkedin and but i keep it that way because i like just seeing what people send and you know i i store it and see you know make fun of the bad ones and keep the good ones but when you when you personalize it like when i'm looking at when i'm looking at a cold email my brain does this automatically i'm thinking is this a marketing message or did this person actually write it to me if the person if i could tell the person actually genuinely wrote it just for me no matter what i'll give them the time of day because i'm in sales too i know that takes time so a big part of personalizing it is if you can make your emails look like you wrote it to them that is a big win and people are getting inundated and inundated with marketing emails and automated you know sequences and pitches all day so just personalize it personalize the beginning it doesn't have to be the whole thing and you don't have to take hours i mean if your clients are worth like six figures and you sell something really expensive then yeah it makes sense to maybe take a few hours and or an hour and personalize it but for most people you know just doing five to ten minutes of research is fine keep it short and simple three to six sentences again most people are checking your emails online in a car in you know right before a meeting so if you have an essay it could have been a great email but they just didn't have time keep it short keep it simple if um yeah there's so there's been a lot of research done and it's a lot of research done that shows kind of what the perfect length is for a cold email a lot of um a lot of people say it's between 120 words which is yeah about four four to six sentences so the third thing is keep it conversational it shouldn't sound templated read it aloud to yourself or to a colleague spouse whatever beforehand it shouldn't sound like you just you downloaded it from the internet it should really look conversational so again if it sounds awkward when you read it out loud then you know you got to rewrite it so the more that i can just look conversational because the thing is a lot of sales is about pressure and buying resistance and when people feel like they're being sold their guard is up they freak out you know it's an unconscious thing but when your email is more conversational it's just like hey we're having a friendly conversation same as how it should feel in a sales call then it's a lot more received and people are just you know i mean again think about it that's what linkedin is for that's what email is for people check their email and they check their linkedin not to hear some long sales pitch they they go on those places to have like real human conversations so treat it like that again talk about them not yourself we talked about this before but like really i just want to stress this again this is a huge difference if you look go back if you've been already doing emails for a while and you're getting very few replies and i would say very few replies meaning less than like three people out of 100 or less than like even five people out of 100 are responding it's very low i would say that probably your emails are talking a lot about you and and not about them again they only care about you until they know that you can help them with something um i mean think about it like you know you go into new york city or las vegas or something and you have all these people on the streets like trying to sell you something or take a picture or whatever and it's it kind of just gets a little like annoying right just people coming up to you right away and asking you for something talking about themselves so it's the same as it's same as that same as you the same as why you can't just go to supermarket with a loudspeak with a megaphone and just start shouting about your business like you have to go engage them you want to have clear tangible and specific benefits to them so again make sure whatever you're offering is clear it's tangible like it provides them a specific benefit and ultimately it should make their world better and it should be in their words so when i say it should be it should make their world better focus on the end result your service provides and how that makes the world better and in a way that they themselves would explain it so you've probably heard before about the difference between features and benefits a feature is like something that your thing does and the benefit is what that actually means but you also want to go a layer deeper into why it matters that's a third layer so what my thing does what the benefit of that is to them and why it matters why it makes their world better it could be anything like let's take a different example imagine uh car sales imagine a car salesman comes up to you and you know let's say you have a you have three kids and you're buying a minivan because you want to transport them around safely your car salesman could tell you all about you know like oh we have this amazing xyz technology and we got rated 4.8 out of five stars because uh you know by this by this association and blah blah blah blah that's a feature a benefit is yeah and because of that we you know there's a 50 less chance you get an injury in an accident okay that's a little bit better you know so now you're getting to the to the so what so a great way to figure this out is to ask myself so what so say something good about your product and then ask yourself so what why does that matter so what so what that's my favorite trick to really get to the core of the value that um that i'm providing and then again don't just stop there that's only the benefit go a layer deeper into the deeper benefit go into why it matters so what that would look like is hey we have this technology and um it actually helps make sure that you have 50 less chance of an injury so that you can feel peaceful driving around your family knowing that if anything happens like you're waste safer than any other choice and that's where you want to be that's what good sales that's what good marketing is ultimately people buy things to either at the end of the day feel better or avoid feeling bad so if you can really understand the feeling of what you do they might be hard for some of you but just think about it customer avatar templates will help try to really understand like ask yourself what is the feeling that i provide you know even if you sell something that just maybe saves someone money or makes them more money that's still a feeling because what does that money do for them makes them feel important it makes them feel good it makes them feel like they have freedom right so again whatever you do it always leads to a feeling like we make decisions based on emotion we justify it with logic but we make our decisions based on emotion we're trying to either go more towards pleasure or away from pain so you have to if you can really get to understand like how so then that's that's what i mean by making how does it make their world better how does it make their day-to-day better and one really cool exercise i learned from from kevin dorsey awesome sales leader is it's like a visualization where you imagine your prospect at the end of a really really long day so let's say you're selling you know like brand um let's say you're selling you know brand videos and at the end of uh you know at the end of the day at the end of a long day your prospect just imagine they had a crazy day they come home they're sitting there they're like stressed out it's like 10 o'clock at night um what are they saying to themselves are they saying i need a compelling brand story video they're probably not saying that they're probably saying i need more customers or i need to work with the right people i'm keep getting these customers that are just frustrating me or i need to grow my business i need to hire some people to take care of this for me today was a super stressful day and i cannot do this anymore that's how they talk so if you can get your emails to the point where they're getting to that level not only is are they going to get way more replies but yeah the sale is going to be way easier too so again it's feature benefit and then why it matters last thing is you have a clear ask again don't end an email with a vague statement have a question have it easy for them to respond so i was just taking a look at my email the other day and as you can see like 70 of it is pitches or cold emails and what i did was i marked green the ones that are like kind of good marked red the ones that are really bad and then the two that are yellow are like okay but still kind of bad so let's take a look at the good ones at the top hannah says stress aj great subject line i think i was actually pretty stressed that day so that got my attention and it's also good like really in the subject line the point of the subject line is to get them to open the email the point of the first line is to get them to read the next line that's one of the best things i've learned about um about copywriting is just the step-by-step process so don't overthink it subject line just have to get them to open but that got me to open it and then she said hey aj here's a quick exercise to reduce sales stress so although this wasn't personalized it was still pretty good it still got it still got me to read it and then the next screen down below this is great hey aj quick question that's a great subject line um it's kind of common and kind of getting overused but it's a good curiosity hey aj i read janet buck's recommendation on linkedin and she mentioned boom now i know this person actually cares about me he actually took the time to research me i'm gonna give him the time of day and i'm also curious like what is he gonna say everything else it's general it's templated and they're asking for things let's look at the top alex magiclix agency available in the morning hi aj how's it going every business blah blah blah sales pitch norman lake literally look at this two in a row from different companies with the same exact subject line magiclix agency availability tomorrow hey aj how was your day i think i can help boom i um that's an f down below the next red to matt re aj meeting first of all that's pretty misleading because we didn't have an email thread and he just said re hey aj just quit quickly pinging this to the top of your inbox let me know what does that mean there's no there's no value there's no incentive there's no curiosity and the first three emails that i just mentioned the first three reads they're literally all asking me for a meeting why am i going to give my time to somebody if i don't like even know that there's value in it so you wouldn't start a relationship with someone just by asking them something right away you know it's better to start with giving um or at least to go in neutral and just get them to um yeah just get them to get them just open it that's all you should do in the subject line so yeah matt's was great the green one noah reconnect oh this is awful hey aj your account got assigned to me and i was trying to see if we might be able to re-engage what is that why are you talking about yourself again and then max at the bottom aj ai-based tool to raise efficiency of magiclix.net business yeah it's kind of confusing like is that i'm not thinking i'm not thinking in the middle of the night oh my god i need an ai-based tool to raise the efficiency of magic clicks business that's not how i'm talking to myself in my head you know and then he apologized he said hey um apologize for the cold email and then just went into his pitch why are you apologizing if you're gonna do it anyway so don't don't start off with um with an apology but anyway it's not to poke fun of these people i've sent emails like this too it's just to kind of show you the difference between good and bad and it's kind of fun go back and look at your own inbox and see how many of these are relevant so also a good point same thing on linkedin the first line matters a lot so that's how they determine if they're going to open it so it doesn't really matter what's in your body if they don't read the first line they're not going to open it so it the most important thing is that first line in that subject this one at the top it's it's okay i mean it's tougher on linkedin because you have like seven words but at least it's kind of drawing my curiosity this one below hey aj blank here from this company so again it's just not providing any any value or reason i should click so next personalized intro um don't worry guys we're getting to the end here so i know some of your nc for q a but this is a good framework to use personalized intro start out with something personalized problem the person the company the industry the problem or the goal next so again start off by talking about them how you found them then talk about their problem or their goal if you can identify a specific a specific problem they have like again if you're maybe seeing that oh i saw you just hired a bunch of employees and and you know that's we're able to help companies that are you know doing that with this whatever it is relating to your to whatever you offer but again if you're selling something that's visual like you can see on their website that they don't have videos or their website isn't good or you can see that they're not running google ads and you sell google ads if you can find out something that's an issue for them that's great or you can share a goal if you don't have something specific you can just share a common problem or a common goal that they have like hey a lot of people in your position that i work with are struggling with this and wanted to know if that's an issue for you third thing is solution and results so this again you shouldn't have too much of your email actually talking about yourself but of course you have to let them know you know why you're there so just to back up it's okay to have eyes in your email it's okay to talk about what you do it just shouldn't be the focus so this framework can work for anything personalized intro mention a problem that you noticed or mention a goal that they have solution or results and again that can just be like hey we helped a similar company as yours do this and you know they were able to achieve 30 revenue increase because of that so you can mention again a specific case study in just one line or you could mention a um just in general like hey you know we help our clients achieve this if you don't have anything specific then the last thing is to have a call to action so there has to be a clear ask at the end like we talked about it could be soft it could be hard or it could just be a conversation starter so you could say hey do you want to have a call interested in discussing this so that's what i would call a soft call to action um can i share something around this that's kind of more of a question you could start an email just by saying hey like i thought you might find this valuable you know i saw you were struggling with this and um i wrote this article or i recorded this video i think you might like it so you don't have to always ask for a meeting or ask for a conversation in the first email um and one of my favorites is asking a question about their problem so when i used to sell lead generation services i would ask hey can your sales team take more leads like are you guys growing right now awesome way to segue into a conversation without even having to to pitch anything really so just gonna breeze through these quick here's just two these are just two actual examples i just wrote right before this so first line is personalized hey john saw your linkedin post about hiring a closer for your marketing agency congrats on the growth so this is something i would send many agency owners experience problems when they're removing itself from the sales process i've seen hiring a team you can cause more headaches which can slow down or still growth what's important is to focus on these three things so now i'm providing value and alluding to the solution and now i'm talking about what i do um because i do consulting i've helped numerous agency owners successfully take themselves out of the day to day and build a sales team that sells better than they would curious if you'd like to discuss this would you be mad if you saw this email no it's conversational it's giving some value it's a very soft and casual um casual ask and like here's a video content example hey john found your company through this blog post have to say i love the site really great design and you could get more specific than that you could definitely say something specific but this is just something general notice there was no video content which is a huge help and it helps you make sure the investment pays off if you're like most restaurant owners you know that video content is important but you're swamped with managing the day-to-day and the cool thing is the reason i put that line in there is because it's really good to displace the blame so if you're pointing out a problem people can kind of get offended sometimes so it's good to have like a way to put the blame on somebody else so hey i know it's not your fault you're mad you're busy you're training the staff but i know you know it's important right i know you're not stupid um and the next thing is hey now the next section is relevant results or solution we created a killer video campaign for another you know company like yours and they saw a 25 increase in tables filled in revenue again speaking in their words right talking how they would talk and the 30 increase in conversions i had a few ideas on videos that would really work for your brand can we chat for 15 minutes next week so again that last line clear ask and also driving curiosity and showing them that there's a value in the meeting you know because again it's not just about asking for someone's time it's about showing that like worst comes to worst they at least get something if they show up you know this will also help with your show rates so again don't do this don't send long essays with links attachments picture product talk about yourself discuss features not benefits make it readable really shoot for like 30 seconds but 45 seconds max so don't do that on the right what you should have now is you should have people that have expressed interest so the goal of outreach is that somebody says yes i'd like to talk or yes when can i meet and they're asking questions where many go wrong here as they give too much information without answering too many questions um and they get the meeting but it's not winnable or with a qualified prospect so again at this point it's really just about it should be easy it's just about qualifying them and just getting them on a call if you've done your research you might already know that they're qualified but ultimately you don't want to give too much information and answer too many questions so a lot of times people will say hey that sounds awesome aj can you tell me more about your service what does it cost what is this best way to respond is if there's any quick questions you can answer answer it but always take control of the conversation and say hey honestly barbara um it's a great question but it's really hard for me to explain all that without knowing you know what like what you do so would it make sense that we could have a 15-minute call so i could learn more about what you're doing and then i can tell you if we can even help you so again just put it back on them and set up the meeting so even if you do want to answer something like i'm actually a big fan of letting pride like making prices aware up front you know just to kind of weed out the people that aren't a good fit but don't give an exact price you would the best thing to do here is what i like to do if you sell something that has more than one option is give a range be like hey honestly barbara like most of our projects are between two to fifteen thousand dollars it's hard to say without knowing more about your situation so can we chat next week for 15 minutes and i can get you a quote so that's a good answer because then you're at least giving them a little bit of like you're satisfying them that you that you answer their question but you're alluding to a call so again don't get in the trap of just answering questions because what the prospect will do is they'll be like okay great thanks i'll think about it and i'll let you know and you lost the chance to actually have a conversation qualify them ask for the meeting leave with value set up a winnable meeting get the lead to show up so by winnable meeting like set yourself up for success send them reminders so that they show up if you're using an automated scheduler this can do this for you get the lead to warm up pre-selling we can talk about this more in the in the q a um but ultimately it's just sending them something that so that they can learn more about you beforehand so you can make a loom uh like a video a screen share using a tool called loom if you have like a deck to show them it's not about selling a lot but people are wondering a little bit of you know hey what is this company about so if you can have something that shows them what you're about it makes them a little more warmed up before talking to you and that's good too they're more excited for the call and then also do your research be prepared for that call put this into practice just to summarize create your strategy make sure you look good execute the three steps research contact convert or we call that first one identify and the way you can do it is at the beginning of the week sunday or monday set up find your contacts for the week contact and convert daily split it up again it could be an hour two hours three hours a day if you have a team someone your team can do this for you but it's a great skill to learn yourself stay organized track your leads when you start getting a lot of leads it's gonna be awesome but you're gonna forget like once you start having more than five or six calls a week at least for me i start to forget the details so stay organized know who you need to follow up with and just written repeat scale up what works that's why it's good to track your numbers so you can see which campaigns actually got you the most meetings and the most clients and again prospecting is a habit you must carve out the time don't let this just be something that you just do when you get time if you are serious about growing your business make time for it what gets scheduled what gets done what gets scheduled is what gets done and i have a challenge for you for the next 30 days can you commit to doing this for two hours a day i'm not asking for you to do this all day long but if you can do this for two hours a day you can be in a totally different world and you can see again 2x 3x in your income your revenue it can happen a lot faster than you think so two hours a day can you do it and i know maybe some of you are thinking i don't have the time i have all these other responsibilities in my business you can make the time because what's more important than prospecting what's more important than filling your pipeline you know like sometimes again it's it's sometimes it's hard to get lost in all of the tasks that come at us into business but really at the end of the day i just try to remind myself like i just have to get clients and i have to serve them and keep them and obviously keep my team happy so if you're kind of feeling a little cluttered like you're probably doing a lot of things that aren't around those three things so just see what you can cut back do this more than two hours a day cut back as much as you can and just focus on getting business because this is the solution if your business is not where you want it to be if you're not making as much money as you want this is what you have to do right here and again to learn more and get more help you can get connected with me join our facebook group we have an awesome community there there's a link down below but the reason i say join us there is because if you want to get some support over the next 30 days if you want to you know like just check in and share with us how it's going have us look at your emails you know even talk about the calls you're having i'm definitely happy to help out in there i'm on there every day just answering people's questions and we have a lot of really successful people in there too so there's more content in there around this and then there's a free mini course inside so there's a free course on sales inside the group with further training also about call structure things like that so again if you want to implement this like don't let this be another video that you just watch you just think that's cool and you forget about implement this like it works it's amazing it might take some time but there's very minimal learning curve if you just follow what i showed you today and again there's lots more stuff in the group to help and i'm in there every day just you know chat with people giving advice all that so and again if you want the templates just comment um give me the templates and i'll share with you a couple of my favorite templates to help get you get you started anyway that's all i got all right are you literally gonna go back through the chat and dm people did yeah um no so um jonah was gonna share the google doc right cool so everybody who's watching this after the fact just comment on the actual youtube video so just comment below and i'll check this in a few days and just share um just send you the link yeah we'll probably also include it in the show notes and in detail so that we don't have to do that uh save you some trouble there cool yeah but sometimes sometimes people don't realize that there are notes that we do that uh the episodes get annotated and information about our speaker in this case it's aj or any resources that that you want to share with the community okay first um thank you for doing that presentation wow you just blasted through that uh impressive impressive young man there you got the stamina of a 27 year old well done i just want to give a quick shout out and thank you to everyone who super chat functioned to us especially nancy carson and mckinley there's some questions that are coming in here so if you want to ask aj a question i will sort them out but i'm sure aj can read them too just use the letter q in front of your question so i can quickly spot and scan it and we'll pick up part of the questions but carson wanted to know something do you use a software called zoom info to automate your workflows he's curious uh zoom info we said yeah so zoom info is a tool um by the way the screen should get messed up or no it's good now i don't know split screen okay screen sharing if that helps cool so zoom info is a tool that gives you the date that gives you data of um of decision makers at companies you can get their phone number their direct dial their email but for a lot it's actually an amazing tool but for a lot of people here it's not necessary it's like a few thousand a month so it's quite pricey but um yeah but a lot of people in like you know b2b sales and enterprise sales they it's really good return so but you can find plenty of information emails phone numbers through uh through linkedin and using tools like apollo so definitely go check out apollo and is apollo a paid service or software yeah there's a free version but there's also um there's also it's like 50 bucks a month so definitely not three grand a month and yeah the company zoom info they wanted me to pay for the year in advance so i was like i'm gonna stick with what i'm what i'm doing are you also a linkedin premium member to be able to access linkedin navigator yeah i am so linkedin sales navigator again you can do it with the free version but you can do a lot more with the paid version it's like 70 bucks a month so as long as you're using it as long as you're sending out messages every day you'll get a client from it soon enough so it'll pay for itself as long as you use it okay so if i have a hundred dollars to spend i say let's say i have 150 bucks a month to spend how am i spending that money to do what you're talking about aj you can call aj and see what he can do for 150 bucks i'm just kidding in terms of like the software and services linkedin sales navigator would i buy that yeah linkedin sales navigator 70 bucks apollo it's like i forget what the lowest version is either 30 or 50 bucks and then boom now you just save 30 bucks you're at 120 go boost a post on facebook or whatever else you're already doing but um yeah so so to clarify linkedin is how you can find contacts on linkedin and have more searches apollo can get you their email so you can reach out in multiple places and it also has a database so you can just search like whatever dentist and find a bunch of dentists if that's who you who you sell to could you find our email on apollo um probably i'll probably look it up later tonight you actually already have it let's see if it works yeah okay let's read some of the questions here i'm going to scan them but feel free to scan them as well uh here's a good question from koppel i hope you're saying i hope i'm saying your name correctly what is the fair response rate on cold emails and linkedin called outreaches what's the target yeah it's a good question so the again the average is one percent it doesn't mean you should be around one percent that's because a lot of people are sending like they're not doing it the way i showed you and they're just sending out mass blasts that talk about themselves but if you're taking the time to to do it right you know you can get like five to 25 percent i mean you can even get higher like some i've seen some people getting 40 50 response so if you really take the extra effort to personalize it that's possible but if as long as you're at least getting five percent of the people to respond then you know you have something that that works and you can just um pour some more fuel on that but yeah like 10 and up you're you're golden because what that means what that means is if you send 200 emails in a week which is really just 40 a day and 20 people respond and maybe 12 of them are interested and you get eight of them on a call like how many of you would love to have eight calls this week me too so you don't need that many right very good okay um magic marketing is asking this question how can you improve your mindset to just do this because for a lot of people this sounds terrible obviously you're hardwired a little differently a guy who goes door-to-door knocking to sell house painting services is wired a little differently so for us introverts us designer creative types how do we form that mindset like we got to do this if we want to get business yeah it's an awesome question um and yeah also like i i didn't i didn't just go door door because it was like super fun you know although i am more extroverted and can do that um i still have to motivate myself to do it and honestly so much of sales is motivation i don't really believe sales is that hard there's a lot to it but at the end of the day like you're just talking to people you're just making calls sending emails you're not going out and like building houses and breaking your back you know so it really is a lot of just the mindset um so when when there is resistance that's why i said you know like hey you can do two hours a day great but if you can just do 30 minutes a day just start there um so i would say one start smaller two realize that it could be a lot worse you could actually have to call people or you could have to actually show up and do door knocking like i did like i remember i i broke my arm once at a ski trip in canada and the next day i had to come back and go knock on doors and it was like winter cold in new jersey so i was running around my broken arm and people are like what are you doing i'm like i'm trying to get leads so like just realize that you kind of got it easy i mean i empathize right i know there's resistance to doing the work um but just realize that it's a lot easier than it could be and just don't overthink it all you're doing is sending emails you know it doesn't cost you anything to send emails um and no one's no one's shooting a gun at you you know but ultimately like what i what i try to i try to do as much work as possible that i love but of course there's always the things that we don't like doing but what i try to do especially with sales is i try to not think about the work i'm doing i try not to think like oh i'm gonna go like i don't wake up in the morning and be like i can't wait to send 100 emails today but i think oh i can't wait to find some new opportunities i can't wait to find like my next dream client like i'm only one email away from landing that awesome meeting you know so when that when you visualize the outcome when you visualize what the work can get you it's a lot more easy to do the work so don't think you're sending emails don't think you're making cold calls think like i'm getting a client i'm doubling my company this month and also i think you know like a lot of motivation comes from results so if you can just use just enough discipline to get started and to get one client from doing this you're not going to have a problem doing this the second time because you're going to be like oh my god that was amazing i just sent some emails and then i got a 3 000 payment for whatever a video or a monthly retainer and then it's going to take care of itself from there so at least just you know get yourself to the point where you can get results and it'll start to uh build on itself super there's a couple of things that you mentioned i want to talk to everyone about if you're in any kind of fixed mindset versus a growth mindset i want you to think about this ryan holliday wrote this book called the obstacle is the way and in it he says something to the fact of obstacles or opportunities in disguise we have to learn to love doing the difficult things and if you hate doing sales and even aj who is the sales expert doesn't like wake up every day thinking i'm gonna just go crush the sales game i want you to think about the alternative so option one is you can follow the three steps in which aj has outlined you can do that and it may be tough you might get some rejection and you might think that this is not what i was meant to do this is not my gift i would just want to ask you this question what's the alternative because oftentimes we have a difficult time making a decision because we don't consider what the alternative is so go ahead make an alternative list and you're going to find out the alternative is nothing changes there are no new leads i'm just going to watch netflix i'm going to play video games and i'm going to chat with people online so the alternative is we don't grow our business stagnates we feel depressed we feel unaccomplished and we're not validated by the work that we need to be doing so what you need to do is if you hate sales or if you hate fill in the blank you hate exercise if you hate dieting if you hate working out whatever it is hate inertia more hate the current state of affairs more and then you'll get really motivated so if you if you're uh we sent out a poll earlier if you're tuning in live the the percentages came back in i asked people how many sales calls are you doing in a month and it was one to five five to ten or ten plus in a month i asked the question the majority by 77 percent said they're doing one to five sales call a month and so if you do five sales calls only a few of them are qualified let's say two of them are qualified you better close both those things because otherwise you're just going to have i was gonna use my middle finger i'm not gonna do that you're gonna have just one client that you're totally screwed right that's the problem you have to understand that you have to get a lot of prospects or generate a lot of leads convert to prospects who then ultimately are serious about doing something with you so one person asked here and i think this is the last question before we got to get out of here i have to take a break rita zaki is asking this question what do you think about sharing a calendly link in your email when asking prospects to schedule a meeting what are your thoughts about that yeah so some like i've done it and i i've kind of found that some people are a little bit put off by it so what i what the best thing you can do is just give your pro like as permission um and just be like hey would you like me to send a calendar link or do you have one or suggest sometimes sometimes in general when people see a link they're just a little put off or some people i mean again you can do it and it'll work but there are some people that are like oh this person is making me do work now you know so just back to removing removing friction that's what i would do and um to the last thing yeah always be prospecting abp um because honestly like if you have one sales call a week you're gonna be so nervous for it you're going to be like really trying to close and you shouldn't walk into a sales call without attitude you should be like you know detach from it you should be detached from the yes and it's really hard to do that if it's your only opportunity and like you're hoping that you got to get your bills paid so if you can uh if you can be full of opportunity and always be prospecting and then you're a little bit more detached a little bit more confident on the calls because you don't need it yeah i just want to clarify one thing before we get out of here um somebody is saying last week or in two days i sent 200 plus emails using a template and just switching out names i believe if you are paying attention to this live stream aj is asking you to do the opposite to really take time to craft the right email make it personal make it conversational and don't do this kind of bulk mass emailing type of thing which i think most of us would consider spam and find it to be terribly uninteresting and even annoying is that is that right aj yeah exactly i mean if you like you want to send an email that your prospect would enjoy to read even if they don't reply like it's not going to bother them they're going to be like oh this is cool you know and again if you want to get 30 of the people to reply to you then it's not really gonna gonna happen through uh through a template so yeah go for the quality first approach it makes uh makes a huge difference you don't even you could send out 50 emails a week um like we did a campaign recently and sent out maybe 50 55 messages and we got like 15 to 20 i think like yeah 20 calls in total which was insane and because we took the time okay wonderful uh there's one other quick thing here i think i can answer in case uh you're everybody's wondering this what is the business etiquette of sending emails outside of business hours this one's coming from carter fitzgerald i'm going to throw the answer that i've heard before i've read different sales books i don't do not profess myself as a sales professional but sometimes early risers and people who stay late in the office actually appreciate that you are also an early riser or someone who's sending an email out at the end of the day even late into the night and plus you avoid the the flood of emails that are coming in during office hours and so sometimes getting a message from someone me just speaking personally at 11 p.m i'm like okay cool as long as it's not annoying as long as you're being generous in in giving value and not stealing time i think that's totally fine and people actually do respect that uh your thoughts on that aj yeah 100 as long as you like a lot of the resistance in sales is because we think we're being annoying or we think we're like selling and it's like this greasy thing but we have that false belief because someone has sold something to us before that we didn't need or we've met some pushy salesman so just do it in the in the right way you know have it be valuable have it be something that is not gonna like be spam and of course people are happy to read it but i also really like what you said about people appreciating you're an early riser um or you're you're late you know you're working late at night it's also just a less crowded time you know everybody's sending emails while they're at work so it's a good way to a good way to stand out to cut through the clutter right okay yeah i i think oh i'm sorry go ahead no i was just saying 100 yep um i'm pretty sure we could sit here and answer um 200 more questions because they're flooding in still i i'm i'm a big fan of like leave them wanting a little bit more just maybe this is teeing you up to return or we just power through a lot of questions and we'll see what happens if you're enjoying this video i just want to remind you before we wrap up here to go ahead and like but more importantly than liking it is leaving a comment on the actual video once it is up because that helps the algorithm say like people are interested in this you don't have to say anything profound just say something aj how do people get in touch with you if they want to find out more about the programs and and and what services you offer yeah definitely so if you um well first thing if you have a question didn't get answered definitely just comment it i'll come back in the next few days and check them out but the best way to get in touch my linkedin and facebook are below you can add me on whichever those you use but i highly recommend you join our facebook group we have an awesome community we just talk about sales and marketing for people that sell to businesses and um like whatever questions you have that didn't get answered today you can just go make a post in the group a detailed post and um i take time every day to to to read all that and respond so um yeah just join the facebook group the links below it's b2b sales and marketing secrets awesome group there and if you want to give me a shout it's aj your nextsalescall.com wonderful and aj on that note thank you very much for doing this i'm going to play some outro music here all right so thank you everybody for tuning in it's been a long time since we've done live streams i'm tempted to continue to do this on a more regular basis versus just dropping shorts but as far as i can tell you guys are enjoying the shorts on behalf of everyone at the future i want to thank aj for putting that presentation together they're giving you a little heat that it wasn't like designed but i said everybody relax he's i don't necessarily want designers teaching us sales we want sales people teaching us sales so bear with it there was another question i'm going to ask this feel free to say no on this one aj which is are the slides going to be available um yeah sure you can say no by the way yeah that was me okay okay well done jonah so you yeah i'll join the facebook group and i'll post my uh my makeshift you know barely put together slides there and so that all you designers can make fun of them you know what i bet you there's a bunch of designers in this community who would be happy to do something with you maybe uh as trade give you a really beautiful template so that you can walk in the room and impress all the creative types uh maybe you guys can do something like that yeah yeah i would love that always a fan of uh of trades okay on that note everybody thank you very much for joining us on this program and thank you very much for being part of the 1 billion mission i see you i see you were up over 27 000 people who have raised their hand to say i want to be part of the 1 billion mission we are many many people away from this and hopefully before i expire on this planet on this in this world we're going to get close to reaching a billion people and helping them make a living doing what they love in case you don't know who i am my name is christelle i'm a loud introvert and i have this really big mission which is teaching billion people how to make a living doing what they love don't forget to like comment and subscribe hit the bell for notifications and on that note thank you very much everybody have an amazing rest of your day and weekend on behalf of jonah myself and the rest of the future team thank you we love you thank you for your support bye everybody we out