How I Generated $1.5M in New Revenue w/ Cold Email Lead Generation

okay gang today I'm going to talk about cold email lead generation specifically and I'm going to kind of clue you into to the secret of making this work is really striking out cold Al together right so um even though to some degree these will be cold unknown to you maybe you're introducing yourself for the first time um but we're going to do everything in our power to make this a warm email Outreach and I'm going to kind of take you through How I build this process so unlike your kind of typical um email cold email

tutorial um I don't think when you're starting this you need to kind of go down the route of registering a bunch of domains um setting up instantly and having kind of this just like carpet bombing type approach to cold email Outreach as you scale there may be reasons for more sophisticated emailing systems but as an early stage startup or a Founder um or just as a goto Market strategy for your B2B marketing um this particular approach is going to serve you very well um I personally do over a million and half in new Revenue using

a very similar system to this um so it doesn't it does not and that's just as an individual salesperson right so this can be really effective um again depending on who you are right founder early stage startup just initially kind of creating the format for your sales team or maybe you're actually um doing B2B sales uh and you're an individual contributor uh you can use this system uh just as effectively so let me take you through kind of what we got here like I said this is where most M Le generation type videos and tutorials

and courses will will concentrate and that is all about sort of building that email Outreach and and sales funnel but I like to back this all the way back to creating some form of marketing to build awareness around me as a personal brand as a as a salesperson or like I said a Founder early stage startup I want to create some familiarity some awareness of what I'm doing ideally before I start my email Outreach and I want it to be very specific to these individuals I want to Target down to the individual level if I

can um you may previously seen a video have kind of a a larger um lead generation for beginners in order to do some of this um it it' probably be interesting and I'll link up here to watch this video to to think about how you actually sort of build the campaigns and the content that are going to be necessary in like I said softening the battlefield so to speak um for your email Outreach all right so let's kind of go through this step by step um first and simplest is just LinkedIn marketing and when I

say LinkedIn marketing again a little bit related to this I've got some sort of idea that I'm trying to sell uh particularly if I'm a startup um or you know any sort of B2B marketing for the most part you're introducing an idea into the marketplace that is either a different way of doing things um or a replacement um or uh again a variety of you're introducing something new you're asking someone to make a change for um a value proposition right for something that will will make it better and so as a process you need to

kind of build up this ideation this system of building ideas and refining that message and that positioning and that value proposition um and there's a whole whole system for just doing that but we're going to assume here for a moment um that we've got that ideation we've got that content engine content operating system working and Linkedin is the first place we want to start for most B2B marketing uh for most B2B uh cold lead generation uh email generation what we're going to do here is we're just going to do our best to create and publish

daily so again bite-size pieces of content it can be video um LinkedIn is is obviously moving down the video uh route so they've got some of us have already seen this uh kind of Tik Tock style or YouTube shorts style uh of video interaction so if you going to swipe into a a video you can continue to just scroll through videos and so video is going to be become more and more important to that but you can simply start um with post and and images and those sorts of things try to make it creative uh

try to make it helpful you want to convey the value proposition you want to I often talk about content as being kind of that mvp that minimal viable product for whatever product and service that that you're building because you can test that as a piece of content um with with zero to no investment um and see if that's going to resonate and if people will inter act with you if they will follow you um if they will engage with you if they'll give you their email and those sorts of things so so that's what you're

doing here but as you're putting this stuff in your feed most of your network and and all of us have you know if you've been on LinkedIn for any amount of time you actually have a follower base you have people that are in your network and following you and it's probably pretty significant so just by you starting to feed content um into that system those people will become aware of you and by virtue of how we Network a lot of those people are probably your ICP so so that's going to jump start your whole marketing

process right is just start picking up your activity and introducing some some valuable content um into that system this is our whole goal right here is to warm up this audience and to create a sizable audience so people that are following you people that are aware of you people are committed to you people are starting to trust you and so this is one component of building out that audience and then ultimately that's what we're going to Target not just cold emails right we're going to Target our audience that we've developed so list building is still

an essential part of this right so when we're list building um the other component is LinkedIn sales Navigator marketing and so what we're doing in this particular case is we're going into LinkedIn sales Navigator if you don't have an account you should definitely get one this allows you to kind of go behind the scenes in LinkedIn and start to build list by very simply taking whatever your ideal client profile or ideal client Avatar you probably written that up but you can go into there and you can build a search with all of these different sort

of drop- down list where you can literally replicate and create a dynamic database query database query into linkedin's database for exactly the people you want want to talk to so all of those characteristics you've divined within your ICP document you should be able to translate those into this save search and then from there um you can build a couple different list uh I suggest that you do this on a quarterly basis because that saved search itself that you just built will continue to refresh as people move in and out of roles uh or in and

out of companies they'll come in and out of your list they may may or may not be qualified because their characteristics of what they do and that's that's a good thing so you have essentially an endless list of targets um and then from that you can build a list for your quarter the people that you want to Target something again more defined uh you know more sort of manageable you can build that into a quarterly list of leads which are individuals and you can also create an account list which is a list of companies or

logos that you're going after and the combination of that will create interal to LinkedIn sales Navigator uh a feed a curated feed of just icps which is um even more powerful kind of than than just sort of your normal LinkedIn fee because it's very specific for who you're going after and ultimately the people that you're going to email so this becomes super important once you have those list um once you have that save search um you're going to want to create a follow Campaign which means you're going to go down through that saved list and

as you identify people that you want to Target or companies that you want to Target you want to follow those individuals you want to follow those companies and when you do that they'll actually see that you're engaging with them so that'll be the first impression right they're going to see hey Bill Rice he's a cro type um he does strategy so they're going to see all of that when I follow them um and that's going to come up in there hey these people viewed your profile and then that's going to get you a click they're

going to take a look um at everything that you're doing in your LinkedIn profile um and and that's going to start that familiarity right that's that's your first impression we're trying to get five six seven of these right the next thing that you want to do is you also want to introduce these folks into a connection campaign um and a connection campaign is just that I don't use inmail or any of that sort of thing I just try to connect with the people that seem uh to be the closest to my icps and I just

simply reach out um I have a two message script the first one um is just basically and I I think of all this through the lens of kind of you know working the floor at a conference right so my first message is just simply talking to them hey you know kind of this thing's going on in the market or whatever we think it would be you know it's a good time to connect right you're trying to give them some reason to think about connecting um and then the other thing that I do um and I

could share this script I've got it in some other videos um but the second part of that script which is really powerful is there's no sales fit to follow this connection right so I'm going to make a promise that I'm not going to pitch them and then of course we need to make sure that we actually honor that promise right that I don't turn around and Pitch them on the next you know as soon as they connect the very next message and then the next message I truly do an introduction so that's second message and

I only do two messages after that I stop but after that I I introduce myself I've got like five bullet points this is who I am I tried to put some stuff in there that's a little bit interesting or would spark conversation and then once that that message goes out usually it will start an Engaged conversation a lot of times you'll be surprised how many will give me a bulleted list back of kind of their comparables uh which is super interesting um and then within there that's when I try to do the personalization try to

have a personal conversation with them I don't try to do that before um you can you can dive into each one of the LinkedIn profiles and try to find something interesting but it almost seems disingenuous because a lot of times I'll get those messages and they'll pick out one thing and usually it's kind of arbitrary maybe they even got it out of context and so it comes off a little bit weird so I don't try to personalize too much in those first two messages but once I get the reply they're going to give me all

kinds of stuff to to personalize with right because I'm going to start a conversation which is really important I put a little note here that I like to use a virtual assistant to help me scale this process I still only do about 20 a day um so I'm not trying to do hundreds or thousands of these I'm trying to make it manageable because um and I think this is really important I personally respond to every reply so my virtual assistant just helps me scale the mechanical process of getting the messages out and and the targeting

that I've set up um but I do all of the interaction I personally engage in that conversation and that discussion and that's worked really well with um for me and then over time because you're having that discussion you sort of come together and through that discussion um often times you'll come together and and sort of mutually uh decide to to schedule an appointment right to actually connect and have a a phone call and so that's kind of neat I don't ever have to ask for uh a phone call I don't ever have to ask for

a meeting uh I never have to pitch um when we come to a meeting which I get a lot of meetings out of that um it's it's usually that person on the other end saying hey you know it might be interesting for us to connect so again all of this is contributing to building that audience now this list that I was referring to that I built out in sales Navigator I'm going to take this list and I'm going to move it over it's going to be the core of my um ICP list right and the

core of my email Outreach so while or or slightly after I've done this then I want to introduce them into my email Outreach campaign couple components are really important this is what a lot of people talk about you know building that list and sometimes they'll just dive into Apollo and do all their searches there I like to actually do sales Navigator and then take that list go into Apollo or rocket reach and then get the emails for the people that I've already identified I don't often do my targeting um inside of um Apollo or rocket

reach I do that inside of sales Navigator so there's a couple other little components in here that are important um that I like to reinforce one become an expert um in your CRM whatever one you choose to use um and don't churn through CR RM they're they're they're really very similar um and if they are today they will in the future if you see some hot feature that you want guarantee you it'll it'll come along into yours what happens though when you're churning through crms is you're really essentially you know just losing the Integrity of

your database right because you're some you're moving list and it's not structured the same maybe it's not segmented and you're exporting um so that usually Jacks things up you get some records all messed up and the other thing that's really obvious is from your icp's perspective um all those sequences get like there's there's no you know consistency or congruency between those it's like we were on a sequence we're having sort of a conversation that you built out on automation that made a ton of sense all of a sudden you switch to another system and then

you got to restart those sequences um so it gives a really choppy weird experience so a couple suggestions a lot of my clients use HubSpot um I person personally use clothes I've always enjoyed uh that that's another good B2B you can do a lot of kind of interesting things there this is probably HubSpot is probably more for for those who are focused on content marketing and want to integrate that as part of the sales uh process and are doing more inbound type of leads Clos is probably better situated for those who are focusing more on

Outreach right so in this context cloth would probably be more effective whereas HubSpot You're Building content and you're using that to kind of Drive inbound so it's a little bit more closer this is a little bit closer to marketing automation probably than uh true SI area the other piece um that you're going to need is something to actually get the emails from right so Apollo's um one of the leaders in this space for B2B rocket reach I actually like to use because depending on who you're targeting sometimes these have a little bit better database one

way or another and then again this is more for scale um because if you get this initially you probably end up um sort of doing too much um and I like to always start small and kind of see how it works and then I want to scale up from there instantly is super powerful and so all of a sudden you could be emailing thousands of people a day and I think often scaling that early um can get you into a lot of trouble so just be careful U with instantly uh again a great tool gives

you a lot of power uh but you have to kind of use it uh you know carefully ultimately as doing this you're actually targeting this audience right like we said mentioned before we're targeting the same audience so as these emails land in inboxes hopefully um these people have seen enough from you that this is actually maybe the third or fourth impression that they've seen from you maybe even um like even more have been uh done in this process because maybe at this point they're following you and they kind of see you every single day right

so you've got so many Impressions built up so ideally that's what you're looking for right or you're hoping for is to build up a bunch of Impressions before that first email comes out and then of course I see a lot of people make this mistake if I'm sending out emails I want to ultimately have some sort of call to action I'm not I mean replies are nice but I'm not necessarily always playing for the reply I want to get them to my website I want them to go deeper um in understanding the product or service

I want them to be to to start to buy Into My Philosophy so this is where content really comes into these rabbit trails and rabbit holes that I talk about all the time um I want them to consume a little bit of content right it helps me pre-sell um the the product and service because these folks are starting to buy into my Approach uh and that way if they do react to one of my call to actions by you know that I when I drive them from email to a landing page in particular maybe to

a larger website when they actually react to this call to action um then I'm halfway there right they they bought into the philosophy they bought into the approach or they're very very curious so that's going to induce a high intent uh probably inbound lead which sometimes confuses people right I mean we're going outbound um and so this is outbound lead generation if you will but to some degree it's contributing to inbound lead generation and once you get this going this this really is a flywheel and you're just constantly sort of going around this circle reinforcing

everything around this audience and this I can't highlight this enough this is what we want to do we want to build an audience full of icps and then we want to work that we don't want to work just a cold list of icps um that is just so much harder than kind of doing this exercise come down here a lot of you will already have a WordPress website and that's fine uh just take a little bit of a deep dive into that to make sure it's optimized for lead generation meaning that on those landing page

you have a nice Progressive form that's capturing that lead you have your phone number if you're early stage or or a a solo founder or you know a small team you might want to start with something like gumroad or convert kit or even substack and so essentially those are a mechanism to to deliver something of value like a lead magnet in exchange for an email address and so that kind of starts that process of acquisition and creating leads and capturing leads all of those systems um will allow you to set up a lead form uh

to do a capture and so maybe early on that's just capturing an email um and then nurturing that with a a newsletter later it'll be an actual lead right with some extra information in there feed that directly into your CRM and and work against that so this is my system um for cold or really not so cold email Outreach and EMA you know cold email lead generation and so hopefully that will will help you um make your cold email lead generation so much more effective hey if you've enjoyed this uh I would love for you

to subscribe um like and follow and that will just help this channel grow and get it exposed to to more and more people like you and again hope this gave you some value today and I look forward to seeing you on the next video