Cold mail and b2b prospecting: how i closed a deal in less than 2 hours

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A cold B2B outreach strategy via email, or Cold Mail , is a practical, scalable and fast way to reach your prospect.

Furthermore, Email is more efficient than a Cold Call for B2B prospecting.

If you're not using a Cold Mail strategy , you should be.

In this article I will show you Cold Mail in practical B2B prospecting :
What is B2B prospecting and how does cold mail fit in?
What is not Cold Mail and how can not understanding it destroy your B2B prospecting ?
The best practices for efficient Cold Mail that opens doors in B2B prospecting ;
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The exact 5 steps to build a Cold Mail and templates to boost ROI ;
B2B Prospecting Case Study : How I Closed a Deal Investing Just 2 Hours and $19.

Let's now dive into the B2B prospecting strategy that I use and recommend the most: Cold Mail.

1 – What is B2B prospecting in practice and how does Cold Mail fit in?
Cold mailing prospecting , also known as cold email, gained job seekers database popularity after the release of the book Predictable Revenue , a book by author and long-time head of sales at Salesforce , Aaron Ross, which presents a set of Cold Calling 2.0 techniques , which is a prospecting method that replaced Cold Calling (traditional telemarketing calls).

This book became a mantra for me after I started working with SaaS StartUps.

Looking back at 2014 and 2016, inbound marketing was seen as a miracle solution.

The other nearly 20 existing Marketing and Sales channels were sidelined in the process.

“Once an e-commerce client asked me how he applied Inbound to his business, and I said NO!” – Rafael Rez .

And now we are experiencing a rise in Outbound Marketing and direct sales strategies.

According to Aaron Ross, active prospecting in practice is the best and most profitable way to scale a marketing and sales team .

With that in mind, let's move on to Cold Mail.

A Cold Mail strategy is nothing more than a form of active sales prospecting that has been used since email existed.

Basically, Cold Mail is like Cold Calling , but a thousand times more scalable.
However, many people use the Cold Mail strategy incorrectly , causing some startups to be viewed negatively by the lead.

This is because most people end up confusing cold mail with spam .

Remember:

Cold mail should NEVER be considered Spam. Oh, and Cold Mail is not email marketing either, but we'll get to that.

The main objective of cold mail in active prospecting in practice is to open a channel of conversation with the prospect, while Spam goes straight to the point of sale, without caring about the recipient of the message.

An offer is SPAM. A message that asks “Who is the best person to talk about {your product topic} at your company?” is a basic cold mailing action .

2 – What Cold Mail is not and how not understanding it can destroy your strategy :
Cold Mail is not SPAM or Email Marketing.

SPAM is a marketing email sent to a specific recipient who is not expecting to receive that message and will probably feel uncomfortable with that approach. Most of the time it is on a large scale as well.

Email Marketing itself is based on sending an email to a lead who is already aware that they will receive your messages, that is, who has already accessed some digital bait and become a potential customer.

A Cold Mail is usually a personal, personalized message that arrives in your prospect's inbox with the intention of opening a conversation.

Read also: What you should do to take advantage of the visits your website receives: Conversion, the second phase of Inbound Marketing
I'll show you the difference.

This is email marketing:

email marketing example

This is a cold mail:

cold mail example for b2b prospecting

Is it clearer to you?

3 – Best practices for efficient Cold Mail that opens doors in B2B prospecting
I'm going to address some mistakes my clients often make and explain how to get around them.

1. Be very careful with high volume shooting
In Cold Mail , you cannot have such a high volume of firing.

Remember that you are running something personalized and targeted to your target customer, or you will end up in their SPAM.

To help you have a more qualified volume of leads for B2B cold mail prospecting, you can use tools such as:

Ramper ;
Resultys ;
Sales Navigator ;
Email Hunter .
In addition to qualifying your leads in smaller quantities, you can go deeper and really understand your prospect, studying them on LinkedIn, for example.

PS: You can download your contact list from LinkedIn and create a beautiful B2B prospecting format in practice using it.

2. Don't have an unsubscribe link
Unlike cold mail prospecting , in the email marketing technique, your content is sent to a database in which the recipient has chosen to participate (the good old “optin”).

Therefore, he has the choice to remain in this database or not.

Unlike Cold Mail, since you got this prospect's contact information somewhere on the internet and are contacting them directly, you are sending a friendly message and not an email to a base.

3. Be as personalized as possible in your prospecting
Always remember that in a B2B prospecting process you are being almost invasive when sending this type of email, so always try to be talking to your recipient, and what's more, always try to keep everything focused on them.

This lead's information will not be provided by the lead itself, as in a newsletter registration. Here, you will need to be as active as possible in searching for this information.

Go after and get to know your lead.

For this, Sales Navigator combined with good Social Selling on LinkedIn will save your life.

I recommend checking out the eBook with 64 LinkedIn optimizations from LinkedYou .

4. And most importantly, you must always GENERATE VALUE in your prospecting!
You know that your lead is very busy, always jumping from meeting to meeting, so your time is worth its weight in gold.

If you want them to take a few minutes to read what you have to say, your content has to be interesting and generate value or interest for that lead while prospecting them .

Remember if he stops to read your email, but what's in it doesn't interest him, and he thinks he wasted his time with your text.

You run a high risk of being rejected by him in future meetings or relationships, breaking your B2B prospecting wheel.

Your chance is unique, generate value for him even in the first contact, because if you are successful in the first, other contacts will happen.

The best way to do this is by using case studies that your company has already generated, as I did in the Cold Mail example I mentioned above.

You can just send a text transcribing your result with a similar company or use a video testimonial of yours (always as a link, never attached!).

You can also find some templates here in my Growth Hacker Survival Kit to speed up the process of putting together a cold email for B2B prospecting , which I will discuss later.

Read also: How much does a digital marketing professional earn?
4 – 5 steps to build a Cold Mail and templates to boost it
As I said, you can access more than 20 templates here .

Let's go:

Every Cold Mail for prospecting and approaching prospects has a structure that you will need to customize for each stage of your cadence flow.

In other words, if you are sending a first prospecting email, it can be more complete, bringing up your lead's pain points, the problems that you can solve for them with your startup's innovative ideas.

And how will you work on the structure of this email in each B2B prospecting case ?

That's why I made a checklist with 5 steps to boost your Cold Mail setup .
What your prospecting cold email should look like
Never, absolutely never, use design or layouts in a cold email .

Its appearance must be simple, VERY SIMPLE or your lead will have a lot of friction in responding if the content is long.

Make your prospecting email short or shorter than it appears , it needs to be easy to understand and easy to read.

To do this, you can use elements that help with this, such as topics that will show your reader where your thoughts begin and end.

The text divided into topics makes the reader think that he will only have to read a few sentences, and not that gigantic paragraph of three to four lines, where he may need to read and reread a few times to understand.

Your prospect doesn't have time to waste, so when actively prospecting, make sure that the time dedicated to you is worthwhile .

Subject line for your cold email prospecting
After defining the appearance of the active prospecting email, you need to choose the subject of the email.

The subject line is exactly what will make your lead open your email. It’s what will draw their attention to what your content is about.

It’s a good place to put your case study and social proof of your cold email .

You can say:

How I helped {company} achieve {result};
I think {prospect-company} will like this as much as {case-study-company}
And so it goes.

Remembering the templates here .

Briefing on a good cold email for active B2B prospecting
Some tools like Gmail allow you to add a few words next to the subject of your email.

This is used to know if the email contains important information.

TIP: If when sending your marketing emails these words that appear in the briefing are automatic texts such as:

“Subscribe”

Or

“Open this email in your browser”

This already means that your shooting tool is wrong, or that your shots are being made in the wrong way.

But going back to the previous reasoning, the Briefing is super important to ensure that your openings do not fall after the lead has read your subject.

Email body and call to action (CTA) for your B2B prospecting strategy

It's time for you to show what you've got!

The body of the email is where you should bring exactly the rich part of your business, why it cannot live without your Startup.

This is the soul of B2B prospecting: creating urgency!

It is at this stage that you will be able to speak to him directly and consequently generate value for your lead.

So speak directly to him when prospecting , list a pain point he has that you can solve, present a success story if you have one and finally call on the person to take action, ask him to respond to you so you can continue the dialogue.

Prioritize your Call-to-actions. In Cold Mail, I recommend that you use only one CTA, reducing your lead's decision-making options.

Read also: 5 reasons to invest in Digital Marketing for small businesses in Goiânia
Your B2B cold prospecting email signature
Last but not least, your signature.

This is where you reinforce to your lead who you are talking to. And this is where you give them more information about who you are and what you do.

It may be quite important to show him your position, the name of your startup, what idea/product/service you sell, etc.

All of this can be contained in a simple email signature, containing your company's visual identity, but without too many frills.

LESS IS MORE!

However, there are some hacks that can help you with this subscription.

If you sell or want to sell to very large companies, see…

Maybe it's not time for you to position yourself as CEO.

By positioning yourself this way, you may give the impression that there is no one working alongside you.

A possible hack to apply here is to position yourself as “Sales Manager” “Sales Director” for example.

The impression that there is a structure behind it helps a lot when making the connection.

After all, you won't be lying. lol

In my case, while I prospect my clients, I always put some kind of content in my signature.

See the example:

cold mail signature

Here's another tip?

5 – B2B Prospecting Case Study : How I Closed a Deal Investing Only 2 Hours and $19
There's something I haven't told you yet.

Prospecting with cold mail has one main point:

You have to know WHO you want to sell TO.

Shooting in all directions is a reprehensible practice and will make you think that B2B prospecting doesn't work .

That said, let's go: at the beginning of 2018 I wanted to prospect B2B StartUps.

And there is a beautiful StartUps base at ABStartups: https://startupbase.abstartups.com.br/startups

What I did was make a list of approximately 100 B2B StartUp websites from this database.

Having the sites in hand, I put them all into Email Hunter .

In the end I had about 75 emails to prospect.

The next step was to search for StartUps on LinkedIn and add the CEOs and even some other members of the company.

Only 45 of them had LinkedIn. Okay, no problem.

Hack: I also used LinkedIn Helper to send an automatic message when they accepted me.

Next, I created a sequence of emails for active prospecting , which are among the Templates I mentioned earlier.

But basically it was:

Day 01: An email
Day 03: a followUp
Day 05: A “breakup” message
Remembering that I did this because I wanted to have depth in the leads that I had separated.

I hired MailShake , a cold mail and B2B prospecting tool, to send the emails.

So far it's been 2 hours of $19 worth of the tool.

I started the mailings and got 24 responses and made 9 proposal presentations.

In the end, I closed a deal with EZ Travel , a StartUp from São Paulo in the Growth phase.

That's right, the same as the example cited above.

Let's look at conversion rates?

45 emails for 24 responses is 53% success rate.

24 responses to 9 presentations means 37.5% of opportunities accepted.

And having closed a client I achieved an Outbound closing rate of 11%.

Are you closing 11% of the sales you make using AdWords today? I don't think so.

Well, after all this, I hope you're eager to put all this into practice.