If you’re running a software development agency, it shouldn’t be too hard to grow welcome to managed coder podcast tune in every week to find out how to grow your software development agency and help you to solve your day-to-day problems with 20 plus years experience running an agency, please welcome your host Shahed Islam.
Shahed: Hi Andy, Welcome to our podcast. Can you introduce yourself?
Andy cabasso: Sure. Thanks for having me for I guess a little bit about me. My name is Andy cabasso and I’m a Founder at postaga which is a software platform and service that help with cold email Outreach for a variety of use cases for things like sales lead generation as well as Outreach for PR link building and things like that.
Shahed: And I was talking to you yesterday and you mentioned that you actually used to run an agency before right?
Andy cabasso: Yep.So before I started postaga, I started grew and then sold a digital agency and we were focused specifically on the legal vertical so doing web design and marketing services for law firms.
Shahed: A lot of our audience are actually on your position which you started five years or six years ago. So let me start with you know, I do talk to a lot of agency on our specially those who are growing and one of the things when I asked them they don’t have any outbound campaign.They are all getting referral or pretty much inbound sometime through different ways. Why outbound is important? Especially, you know if you haven’t started out.
Andy cabasso: So outbound is important because you know kind of like you mentioned like if people are doing are getting their leads from referrals.It can be maybe somewhat inconsistent and you have to like work your sources like people who are sending you business. You have to keep it. Keep in touch with them keep making sure that like that the people that could be sending you business are reminded about you and like that you’re gonna be top of mind that if they know someone if there’s an opportunity they get something your way and it can be Irregular, so but outbound can be much more predictable reliable and consistent. So if you get to a point, where you Know that if I send this many outbound emails, I can reliably get this many meetings and of this many meetings this many clients will sign and it could be much more predictable and also more scalable because referrals and word-of-mouth are going to come from your existing clients and there are a finite number of them but by doing something like doing like outbound is part of a strategy for your marketing there can be greater opportunities is and there are I guess I think some concerns that people can have about outbound is like they may have like tried it once and it didn’t work for them. Then it could just be that you didn’t work with a large enough sample size is your as your audience or it could be that like there are a few different particular things. That could have been maybe done poorly that you didn’t know if it was the first time you’ve ever done this before, but I know that like people can get discouraged if they’ve tried it in the past, but there are like tips I have in terms of What you could be doing better if you’re new to doing cold Outreach.
Shahed: One thing I have noticed Andy that lot of people come to me to ask for advice and they do realize it that when their pipeline is empty because they don’t control inbound most of the time they do certain extent but most of the time you don’t know what is going on in the industry and specially like let’s say summer time or December month. Your pipeline is almost empty and now you start doing outbound. So my next question is that if I have never done an outbound or just like you say it did a small sample. What are my three steps? What do you what do you suggest to any CEO what step they should take to do an outbound campaign successfully
Andy cabasso: So I guess first grab a pen and paper.
Shahed: I got a lot of things wrong with.Spamming people right when you’re outbound. They think that I’m going to send 50,000 or 1 million emails. No, it’s not that right.
Andy cabasso: No, absolutely not.Yeah you and you know, if you send like if you try and send 50,000 a million emails, however, many like most of them are probably not going to be relevant to the people that you’re reaching out to they’re gonna Mark you a Spam and then you’ve wasteful at time and effort and you’ve upset a lot of people and you ever have nothing to show for it but doing outbound the right way involves, I guess a few different things in terms of setup. The first thing to do is Um one thing that I see that mistake that people make often is if they’re trying outbound, they’re gonna try like using their own email address and sending outbound emails from their email to a group of people or they might try using mail merge or something like that or or MailChimp or an email marketing software that they already have that isn’t really built for outbound. There are outbound tools and software out there and I strongly recommend using one of them rather than your own email in your own from your own inbox or using a mail merge or using email marketing software like a mailchimpers something like that because they’re just not built for that and they’ll they will ban you because it’s against their terms of service to use them for outbound. But first thing I would do is if I’m starting from scratch today, I would buy a new domain name in particular one that is sounds or looks similar to my domain like if I have my website.com, I would get my website dot net Because as a best practice the worst case scenario is you’ve sent a bunch of outbound cold mails and you are getting a lot of either bounce backs because you didn’t verify the email addresses or you’re getting marked as junk and then it’s going to tank your emails deliverability and if it hurts the email deliverability for that domain if you were using your regular work email your regular working emails are gonna start ending up in people’s Spam folders and that’s gonna be bad for your day to day business. So what I would do is I would set up another domain and then set up email addresses at that domain that would be specifically dedicated to used for outreach then. As a practical matter a part of the process we recommend is something called email warm-up which there are tools that help with this as well. But basically it slowly sends out a few emails a day and increases that over a period of a few weeks and it’s this process called email warm-up basically helps ensure you get good deliverability. So your emails reach people’s inboxes and don’t go to their their Spam folders then Once you have this done, you’re ready to send out the emails Then at that point. I’d make sure that you have a good list and this is where like the prospecting comes into play making sure that you are finding contact that are relevant to whatever it is. Your offer is your services are there are plenty of different ways to do prospecting from looking up manually people on LinkedIn and building a list or um, scraping databases or using like lead list databases or software things like that, but the more curated you are and the more relevant these contacts are to Whatever your offer is the better results you’re going to have one thing also to mention here is for all of the contacts that you find that you want to reach out to.It’s important to verify their email addresses. Their pieces of the tools that help with this as well, but basically making sure that when you email these people it’ll reach inboxes and it won’t bounce some databases that give you like contact information. Maybe outdated like the person may not work at that company anymore. And if you email that address it’ll bounce and too many bounced emails are bad. So now let’s say we’ve we’ve built our list we set up our emails how we need to email these People. The my biggest tip here is don’t be too wordy the goal of your outbound emails are not to sell people on the first email. It’s to start a conversation to see to not like bombard them with a wall of text because they have no idea who you are and no amount of text touting how great you are and what service are you provide are going to make people interested but If you have a simple question, which is like like let’s say you’re offering. I don’t know like software agency services and your pitch is hey, I saw that your your pet eCommerce brand uses something or whatever technology on your site. Do you are you looking to build an app or something for this whatever? I don’t know something. But if you’re if you’re ask of them is simple and tailored to And relevant to what they do, you’re gonna be much better off and you’re like pitch doesn’t need to be paragraphs and paragraphs that can be a few sentences if they reply. Well, maybe I don’t know who you are. But what do you do that’s relevant to our business then you Can You know move the conversation forward ultimately with the goal of getting someone on a phone call to give them our proposal sell them whatever but the goal of your cold emails shouldn’t be to sell them just keeping in mind. The goal is to start a conversation.
Shahed: That’s very good. Very good. I mean a lot of people forget to follow these steps and they always complain now, let’s go to the next step some of the people I talk to and what I realized that they actually started it, but they’re not getting any success. There’s very common you you’ve been building a product for outbound email and super impressive the product I saw so what are the areas? You see that who are more successful and what is the reason? One Quote I want to mention here. Like I was talking to someone else here that a lot of people want to build their muscle and they go to gym once a month and they expect result will happen. Do you see similar scenario? But what else do you see that? What are the problem those people who are not getting success. They’ve been doing outbound email.
Andy cabasso: So it I guess experience and time are probably the things that stand out to me the most. And by that I just mean the the people who actually have the most success the ones who’ve been doing it longer who’ve been iterating who have been testing things out I guarantee you the first Outreach campaign that you do will. not give you great results and you’re going to probably be discouraged, but it’s a learning experience and if you iterate from that if You Try out different copy if you build larger lists than like let’s say like a larger list than a few dozen or a hundred people or something like that Outreach can be like a numbers game and also the more data that you have about like what are my reply rates to these emails? And I’ve like if you’ve tried different variations on the emails and seeing how those Go as far as reply rates and things like that and trying different segments of audiences and like the list that you’re building you’re going to see differences and you can kind of go from there and make improvements. So I’d say like really the the biggest difference I see is that the the people have the most success are testing things out and iterating and and constantly looking to improve rather than Trying one thing and then hoping likethat. It improves and just gets better on its own which it won’t necessarily
Shahed: so it does sound like from agency perspective that even though we provide solution for our client, but sometime with outbound email they think it’s a software I buy it and let it run. I’ll get a result. It doesn’t sound like that at all.
Andy cabasso: Well, yeah, I think the the the thing is like if you this is your like first time doing outbound you may do some research and you may see like all right. Let me look up some email templates or ideas or read some articles about cold emailing and like that’s a good place to absolutely start and I would take everything with a grain of salt and test things out for yourself and evaluate the results see how they do make different tests and see how things compare and go off of the data and that I think is going to give you. Yeah, the best results really
Shahed: So you need to have dedicated people doing these job every day to get best results.
Andy cabasso: Yeah, so yes, I will say that like doing outbound Outreach is a job and one of the things I’ve seen that the businesses that are like least successful with this are the ones that kind of try and like dip their toe in the water and say like and like if it’s usually usually in the case, it’s like a CEO or see all a person who is like we haven’t really done outbound before let’s give it a try and let’s and it’s a very like half-hearted single sort of effort into it and then it doesn’t end up being successful and then they give up on it and they say well outbound doesn’t work for me and it maybe didn’t work for you, but maybe there was some particular reason that i didn’t work for you. And like yeah, we need to make changes try again and see how we can kind of improve from there, but it definitely takes dedication to to be able to yeah be able to get to see good results from it.
Shahed: So Yesterday Microsoft released their sales tool using their ChatGPT I was watching it and I mean it looks like this is a trend will continue right open Ai and I’m sure other AI tool come in which will give us a great Tool which we can connect with your tool or hubspot or Salesforce. Everybody will integrate it. How do you see that perspective that content now, we can generate using ChatGPT all of my own outbound, you know, people all four five of them actually most of their outbound email. They’re writing template. They used to hire someone and do it for 50 people. Now for five people they are creating a content and sending it. Do you see that? This will Trend will continue and how do you see this in coming weeks and months?
Andy cabasso: I I see ChatGPT as just another tool in the Arsenal of any any marketer or sales person or someone who’s looking to do outbound. It’s only going to be as good as those of us who can like utilize it effectively. I’ve it’s early stages and so I’m kind Of Cautiously curious to see how it’s going to go. Like I’ve tinkered with it to see like try and generate for me a cold email and it wasn’t the best but like as far as like things where I see that it might be most interesting and relevant are in personalization personalization in that the most effective cold emails have deeper personalization to them. They’re more relevant to the recipient and If you have a an AI tool that can effectively like see that like, okay. My contact is at this company it and then check It. Figures out like some some I don’t know some some sort of formula or something like that to make their contents more relevant to that audience. I think can be more effective to date. I’ve like I’ve seen like, you know GPT-3, I’ve seen lots of tools use gp3 for things like personalization and to be honest like being on the receiving end of a lot of emails that I’m like very clearly had gpt3 in them. Like they they’re kind of bad like it just it doesn’t like It. It looks like it was like built by a robot and it’s not all that effective and it’s like usually like off-putting but with chat gbt3, I’m chat gbt. I’m just I’m curious to see how it further develops. It’s going to get better and it kind of remains to be seen and it can definitely be helpful for people but I will say that. I think A lot of us have been on the receiving end of plenty of cold emails over the years and you can like recognize them right away and a lot of them are bad, you know, dear sir. Are you interested in Outsourcing your Software we charge X dollars an hour and we can do iPhone development Android development Etc like listing things and like I get that a lot and it’s still very common and it’s frustrating to get that kind of stuff. But like the most effective cold emails are the ones that are personalized that are different that stand out and have something compelling and relevant for the recipient and if Chat gbt could Help help make that easier then it’ll be great, but it just depends how people are able to use it in the future. I think.
Shahed: Thank you, Andy. Can you tell us how anybody wants to ask you a question? What is the best way to contact you and maybe a little bit more about your product what people can get the product you are offering.
Andy cabasso: Sure. So, yeah, if you want to find me online, I’m pretty easy. My name is Andy cabasso and I’m the founder at a postaga. That’s postsaga.com. We make a platform that helps with cold email Outreach. And if you want to try it out, I can give you a coupon code podcast50. We’ll give you 50% off for three months if you want to check it out and I’m pretty easy to find online. I’m Andy cabasso on Twitter and Andrew cabaso on LinkedIn. So yeah get in touch happy to talk.
Shahed: Thank you. Andy, very nice talking to you. Thank you.
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