Most of these strategies below have helped me target key prospects across various projects and startups I have worked on. The key is to keep messaging personalised as no one likes spammy cold messages. Enjoy 🙂
Finding + reaching out to target prospects on LinkedIn is great, especially with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It's a great tool with lots of quality features to use to filter + save leads fast within the network. Have had lots of great success with it.
Tip: ensure you make your messaging personalised. I can tell you from someone who receives 5+ cold LinkedIn requests per day, it gets annoying of all the "templated" messages or those who aren't even relevant.
This is a strategy to consider and have tried before with decent success. It's definitely not something you can do at high volume otherwise you risk banning your accounts, but using Facebook + Instagram for wanting to connect with a potential prospect can be effective.
Just as you would with LinkedIn, make sure the messaging is personalised. Don't go for volume (or you risk your accounts anyway) and go for quality.
There are so many tools that can help with email outreach. Almost too many to be honest that it's hard to know which is the best solution. Just go onto Product Hunt and you will find plenty of options.
I'm big fans of Wiza and Hunter for finding emails. Then of course after some research into target prospects and building email templates (including video, gifs + other cool media) to help me do personalisation at scale, I then do use tools such as Lemlist or Mailshake to do my outreach.
Like I mentioned above, using personalisation in emails is key to make sure your email drive a desired action... whether that be booking calls, Calendly meeting invites, a response, etc.
Here are some tactics I suggest to include in cold emails that typically work for me personally:
- Make sure to address to the email with your target's name (hey there is too lazy).
- Include one line at least that is truly custom to them as an individual (something about their experience from LinkedIn as an example).
- Include a nice compliment
- Something about the company that's positive based on recency (e.g. if they were in the media, that might be worth congratulating for)
- Highlight a mutual connection or referral
- Use tools such as Apollo (or even LI Sale Nav) in regards to technologies
+ other strategies
Twitter is an amazing platform to connect with influencers + potential prospects. It's easy to reach out to those people you want to work with, however, only if they have their DM's "open". If they aren't open, reach out via their website.
However, this doesn't mean these people will be interested. How can you gain their interest? Interact with their content. It's super easy to do. Use the likes of Tweetdeck to help you manage your interactions.
I absolutely love Loom for multi-purposes (even used it for my content promotion/announcements + across this site), and I've even used it for outreach with pretty good success. Yes, it takes time to do but the reply rates were always high + resulted many times in meetings or further discussions.
This is a no brainer. Make sure to have pixels across your site and then do specific targeting based on user behaviour. Just because you reached out to a prospect via email and they replied, doesn't mean the journey ends there. Stay top of mind + show you're an authority in the space + why your product/service offering is a great solution. Run cheap FB/IG, Google or even LinkedIn remarketing ads.
If you've got a solid list of target prospects or companies, run a specific campaign of ads to them at least 14-30 days prior to reaching out to them. This is specifically for companies who are early stage.
Building a brand with credibility if you're in the early stages of your business is hard. Running ads to a targeted list of prospects with awesome content helps build trust fast, so when you reach out via email or LinkedIn, you're increasing your chances they would have seen your content or brand beforehand prior to you reaching out.
Facebook Groups and LinkedIn groups are great channels to build relationships with those who share the same interests as you (since they're in the same group as you). However, there's an art to using these groups to increase the chances of establishing more relationships at scale.
To help increase your chances of making sure your messages get read, or even get more people to reach out to you personally, here are some tips:
- Become a regular contributor in the community - share great content
- Message the admins to ask them to share the occasional promo
- Ask questions or do shoutouts
+ other ideas I'm sure you can come up with.
When people see you're an active member, then when you reach out members will know who you are, or at the very least your name will look familiar.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator I mentioned in checklist item #1 in terms of reaching out to prospects, however I bring it up again as a focus around one of it's key features... Lead Lists.
I personally think many startups/marketers/sales in the B2B space under- utilise this feature aligned with a solid engagement strategy. By engagement strategy, I mean using lead lists to engage with the content + posts of those targets. Once you engage with their content, they will know who you are and your name. Then, your chances of getting a successful connection increases.
I love Twitter lists. Personally one of my favourite features that Twitter has as it helps organise various profiles into different segments. Definitely recommend looking into for yourself especially if you're an indie maker, startup founder or marketer.
