One of the most difficult things in marketing is discovering the best cold outreach pitch for your product. Businesses can squeak by with a mediocre pitch for awhile but, when times get tight, it pays to have the right approach. So how do you know if your cold outreach pitch is on target?
Response Rate
Without a doubt, the most obvious indicator of success is your response rate. How many conversations are you booking in response to your email? But response can be in stages. If you are brand new or you are offering something unusual, any response that shows you are being taken seriously is a win. Long-term, of course, that’s not sufficient – but it can show you’ve established your branding enough to be seen as a player in your market.
With the right pitch, I’ve helped new businesses go from a barely 1% rate of scheduling meetings to over 10%. All I did was change the way the email presented how they could help.
Comprehensibility
One of the most obvious tells that your cold outreach landed with a thump is when they respond back – and clearly have no idea what you offer. Maybe they ask a question that shows they think you’re in a different industry. One healthcare IT company struggled with the fact their name made them sound like a locums agency. In fact, they worked with anesthesiology scheduling so that misunderstanding lost them business before they even got in the door.
To address this, I helped them develop a clear, simple tagline that removed all confusion from what they offered. This made all the difference in landing sales conversations.
Money talk
Another critical indicator that your cold outreach pitch is on target is whether your prospect is ready to talk money. Obviously, people rarely reach the negotiation stage after a single cold outreach effort. But they do let you know whether they see you as something worth investing in.
One issue I’ve encountered is when a content approach leans so heavily to education that the prospect fails to see the service being offered. In this situation, I’ve seen success by offering more introductory information up front and saving the deep-dive content for later in the sales conversation.
Cold Outreach Takes Time to Perfect
It is rare to create a cold outreach pitch that works perfectly on the first effort. Usually, it takes a few tweaks before it leads to substantial sales conversations. But if you track your response rate and pay attention to whether your prospects understand your offer, you will be able to find success with you cold outreach pitch.
Photo by Nicolas J Leclercq on Unsplash