How to Use Email for SaaS Lead Generation

Omer (00:11.920)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Delamon Rego, the COO of Thomas Tech, the first AI powered marketing intelligence platform for tour operators.
He's also the founder of SaaS Ops Factory and the creator of the Win Rates Bible, an online resource that helps SaaS companies to improve their sales win rates.
When Delamon was working as director of sales for a previous company, he, he was having a hard time figuring out how to close more sales.
So he decided to take a step back, identify all the reasons why they weren't closing more sales, and then come up with a comprehensive list of things they could do to improve their sales win rate.
And then he started testing all those ideas and it worked.
In the space of a year, his close rate increased from 20% to 45%.
He took everything he learned about improving rates close rates and created the Win Rates Bible.
In this episode, I asked Delamon to Show us how SaaS companies can generate more leads using email.
We talk about how to build an email list, how to clean that list, how to validate contact information, how to qualify leads, and how best to do outreach.
There's a ton of information in here, so be ready to take some notes and I hope you enjoy it.
Okay, Delamon, welcome to the show.

Guest (01:53.480)
Thank you, Omer.
Good to be here.

Omer (01:55.800)
Now just tell us a little bit about your background and kind of what you're doing at the moment.

Guest (02:02.440)
Yeah, so my name is Delamon Rego and currently I'm the COO at Thomas and Thomas stands for Tour Operator Marketing Intelligence Software.
Thomas aggregates and analyzes all the data from various data sources for any kind of company in the tourism business and then runs a lot of analysis on it and gives actionable insights that companies can use to drive growth.
We also have an AI and machine learning component where we can act on all of that data, understand it a little bit better, and provide good insights into the future.
So pretty exciting business.
Taking one of the industries that has, I would say the least penetration in terms of advanced technology and really driving some, you know, Some good new SaaS platforms to it and, and taking data that hasn't really been examined before and creating some, some important insights out of it.
I also on the side, actually, right before I started at Thomas, started the winrates Bible and the Win rates Bible.
It actually, it came out of my goal to back in my previous company, which was called Zola, it came out of my go at Zola, which was to.
To really put down on paper every possible way that we could increase our close rates at Zola because that was a problem that we were experiencing.
And, and so I did that and I marked everything down and split it into themes and sub themes and sub initiatives and branch it all out and really created something that gave me a good bird's eye view into the possibilities and then helped me prioritize the initiatives that would really matter to increase our win rates.
So those are the two things I'm working on right now, mostly Thomas, and then just having a little bit of fun with the win rates vibe on the side.

Omer (03:46.680)
Yeah, I mean, you share the win rates Bible with me.
And I was really impressed with that in terms of you've basically designed a very detailed and thorough almost decision tree which people can just follow in terms of, okay, is this the problem you're facing or this?
And follow that down and then basically end up with some very specific things that you can do to make an impact around your sales efforts.
So how long did it take you to put that together?

Guest (04:19.650)
It's a good question.
So a long time.
And it actually came about as a result of a little bit of frustration that I was having because I was having these challenges.
I was having these challenges of having a very low win rate and not really knowing what to do about it or whether I could do anything about it and, you know, wondering whether to blame the product or blame, you know, our sales team and our sales efforts.
And usually the answer is somewhere in the middle.
So I did a lot of Google searching and reading of books.
The problems that I was running into is Google searches tend to reveal blogs and light form content and that's helpful, but it doesn't really give you any actionable information in the context of something bigger.
Right.
So you get some tips and tricks, but where you struggle is you're not really sure if what you're working on is the right thing to be working on.
And typically it feels a little bit more like you're swatting flies rather than moving boulders.
So I didn't like that.
And I decided to spend a lot more time in books and at conferences and talking to people who've done it before and who knew exactly the challenges that I was facing and knew how to solve them.
So then what I wanted to do was get all out in front of me, right.
And just put everything down on paper, put all the ideas I was hearing down on paper, all the problems that needed to be solved and the initiatives that could solve them.
And then I've always enjoyed kind of shifting puzzle pieces around.
So spent some time thematically organizing and thematically chugging these ideas until I got to a point where I could actually have a very actionable stream of initiatives to support any broad theme.
That would be a big lever that I could pull to improve win rates.
And when you do that, it boils down to a few big moves that you can make that you want to make big, strong moves and put a lot of effort into each of them.
But each one, once successful, has a big impact.
And so overall, that whole process, probably a couple hundred hours, certainly more than that if you include the time it takes to read the books and go to the conferences.
But yeah, in terms of actually getting everything together, organizing it and creating the product itself, and then linking to the most actionable resources, that helped me.
That was, I would say, about a 250 hour project.

Omer (06:40.300)
Wow.
And what kind of results has it helped you to kind of achieve or maybe helped others?

Guest (06:49.020)
Yeah.
So the big result, and I'll start with what we saw at Zolla, which was my Franken version V1 of the product and what we did there.
The big impact that it had is that we switched from.
Well, I switched from really prioritizing things, fixes and activities on my end and things that I would do.
And the way I used to do this was I would hear about a problem from somebody on my team and I'd just jump right into gear and try to solve it.
And that feels like you're doing a lot and you feel very busy and there's a lot of motion and activity.
The problem is you're not actually going anywhere.
You're moving with speed, but you're not moving with velocity.
And velocity has to take into account that direction component.
The big change is once I created my own version of the Win Rates Bible, I could see right in front of me the landscape of things that I had to do.
Instead of just responding to the flavor of the month problem, I could create a very comprehensive strategic plan to get me from point A to point B.
And point B was a place where I had all these major initiatives in place.
So what I would do after creating that is I would plan out my quarter on my end and for my team and we would pick a major theme that we wanted to focus on and we would do that by identifying the biggest problems that we were facing and Then we would drop the initiatives that would best support that theme and then we would just execute on those all quarter.
So it was focused, it had a clear and a goal and helped us move from, from really reactive work to proactive prioritization and execution.
And the result was pretty amazing.
We were struggling around a 20%, 18, 19, 20% of the deals that we engaged were closing before the Win Rates Bible.
And then after a year of putting those initiatives into place, we actually got up to about 45%.
So it had a really big, significant and long lasting impact.

Omer (08:48.280)
Nice.
So the reason I invited you onto the podcast was really to kind of tap into those hundreds of hours of research and thinking that you've done to put together the Win Rates Bible and then kind of how you've gone out there in the trenches and applied this to kind of really help people who are listening to this show who could do with some help around sales.
And you know, I think the, the sort of scenario that I'm thinking of is a, an early stage SaaS founder who has a product, you know, it's in market, maybe they've got their, you know, they've got a handful of customers already.
They've, you know, by just going out hustling, you know, trying to find a friend of a friend or whatever, just people who would, anybody who would listen and then get those first, you know, four or five customers.
And so they've got a product, they've, they've validated it in terms of, you know, there's demand and that people are willing to pay for it, but they're kind of at a point now where, okay, where do I go next?
How do I, how do I start generating a steady stream of leads?
What's the best way for me to do that?
And then once I'm doing that, what should my sales process look like?
So it's really thinking about, okay, how can I start to build this kind of machine for generating leads and sales instead of kind of waking up every day and just thinking, you know, crap, what should I do now?
So that's kind of really the conversation that I want to have with you.
Does that sound good?

Guest (10:41.010)
That sounds perfect.

Omer (10:42.010)
Great.
So let's start with kind of lead generation.
So kind of if we're thinking about somebody who I just described, what's a good process for them to sort of go about, start thinking about how to generate leads?

Guest (10:56.810)
Yeah, so fantastic question.
And it really depends at a very high level on what your strength is and what your product is.
So, so there are a few Options for where you're even going to find your leads.
The big branch is whether you're going to pursue an inbound strategy at first.
And that's when leads come to you, they find out about you and then they actually contact you.
Or whether you're going to pursue an outbound strategy at first, which is just the opposite when you reach out to the leads.
And it depends a little bit on your strengths in your product.
So for instance, if your product is something that you're selling to marketing teams, well, it probably makes sense to pursue an inbound approach because by doing so and by very virtue of attracting those leads, you're going to prove that whatever you're doing works.
Same thing with if you're selling to sales teams and salespeople.
Well, it makes sense to have a solid outbound focus as well, especially if you're selling to people who are running outbound sales teams.
So those are kind of the two obvious ones at either end of the spectrum.
If you're selling to product people or engineering teams, or if you're selling a vertical solution, then you're really going to want to go with where your own personal particular strength is and ask yourself, do I love producing excellent, top rated content that's going to be best in the world for that particular subject and distributing it, or do I like reaching out to people, hitting the phones, you know, going, going out to conferences, meeting people in person and engaging leads that way.
And it's a little bit different for each person.
It also depends just what you're good at.
You might not, you might not love doing the, the cold calls, but you might actually be very good at it.
So that's step one is just to identify first whether you want to go outbound or inbound.
I recommend starting with just one of those as a main focus because you're still going to be a small team.
Now as you scale and as you grow, most big SaaS companies are going to be pursuing both of these, at least to some extent.
But for now, to make your first move from an unpredictable ad hoc lead generation to a predictable one, it's going to be best to focus on one of these two.
One of these two grand styles.

Omer (13:12.740)
Okay, cool.
So I think most people are familiar with inbound, you know, in terms of it could be content marketing as an example, and outbound could be cold calling or sending cold emails as an example.

Guest (13:29.020)
That's exactly right.
Yep.

Omer (13:30.460)
Right.
And what I also heard was in order to make that decision about whether you go down inbound or outbound route you really need to start by first understanding your customer and get some clarity on how they operate or prefer to operate.
And you know, if we're talking about sales or marketing people, that's a little bit more clear cut than talking about an ops person or a product person who might not be thinking about sales or lead generation.
But in both scenarios you're trying to understand the customer as well as you can.
And then I guess it's also a question of how best to reach that customer, like where do they hang out?
And if somebody is looking for information, then inbound could be a good way to do that.
But in other cases, the only route you may have is just to be to go outbound and start picking up the phone or sending emails to try and reach out.

Guest (14:31.790)
And that brings up another interesting point too, which is the timescale does matter.
So inbound generation typically is going to take a little bit of ramping up time.
It's like building a snowball that's rolling downhill, where your first blog post, for instance, isn't going to attract 300 leads.
Outbound generation is nice for very early stage companies because it feels like you're a little bit more in control and you are a little bit more in control because you're able to create the list, reach out to that list and generate leads right away.
It might be a small trickle, but you're going to be able to feel the impact of everything that you're doing iterate quickly based on what's working and what isn't, and hopefully spin up a small lead funnel slightly faster than you would through inbound alone.

Omer (15:20.480)
I might be oversimplifying things here, but it kind of to me feels like if you're at an early stage and you haven't already been doing some work to build an inbound kind of marketing lead gen process, for example, you know, if you didn't start blogging a year before you launched your product, but you're starting out cold, then it seems like you're going to have to do some outbound in the early stages.
Otherwise you're going to be waiting a while, correct?

Guest (15:54.870)
No, I would, I would largely agree with that.
Unless if you already have a large following or you've already, you know, done it before or something, you have some advantage like that.
Then you're, you're going to have to do some outbound at some point just to get the ball rolling.
Even if it's, you know, even if it's just hitting the pavement and meeting people in person, going to a few conferences and walking up to people and saying hi.
I think it's.
I think it's a requirement as an early stage founder to at least do a little bit of that, because you're also going to start to feel the friction in those conversations and understand better what your customers need, what they don't need, and what they respond to.

Omer (16:32.150)
So we've kind of looked at Inbound and Outbound on that sort of step one.
And then where do we go next?
Should we focus on Outbound to start?

Guest (16:41.590)
That's the one that tends to be a little bit more confusing and scary for people who haven't done it before, probably because it is.
So.
So let's focus on Outbound.
There's actually some great rules and steps that you can follow to make this a heck of a lot easier for yourself and reduce your chance of failure at least somewhat up front.

Omer (17:02.240)
Okay, sounds good.

Guest (17:03.520)
Perfect.
So the first thing that you want to do with Outbound is to create a list.
And this can sound overwhelming, but it's actually something that can be kind of fun if you do it right.
What you want to do is if you have a couple customers, right?
1, 2, 3, 4, 10, 20 customers, whatever it is, identify the common themes.
So see who's buying this product.
What are the common themes, what are the big groupings here?
And then step two is to figure out where there is a giant repository of these similar customers.
So I'll give you some examples.
In the tourism space at Thomas, right, we work with tour providers and folks in the tourism industry, so there's a massive amount of these people on TripAdvisor.
Similarly, if you're selling to hotels, right, you might look@hotels.com or actually TripAdvisor as well.
If you're selling to SaaS companies, you might look through, you know, the list of SaaS directities.
So there are a lot of ways to do this.
It'll depend based on every single market.
But for the most part, every market does have a giant list of most of the companies that are going to be relevant customers to you.
So that's step one is to identify where that list is.
Step two is convert it into a database.
Now, the hard way of doing this is to do it all yourself and to sit there hour after hour in Excel and adding rows.
That's not fun.
So I recommend skipping that step entirely.
And there's two good ways to do that.
One, one is with a little bit of software.
So if you have a quick program and you can scrape that data into Excel or into Google Sheets, Then that can save you hours and hours and hours and hours, sometimes hundreds of hours, depending on how large of a data set you're going after.
The other way to do that is to use outsourcers.
And this is something that is a little bit of a buzzword and it's spoken about quite a bit, but what I find is that far fewer people actually set up a program with outsourced help than really should.
And it's actually quite easy to do.
So my recommendation for any new product that you're about to take a little bit more aggressively to market is to go to Upwork, and Upwork is a freelancing site and to post a job post for data entry.
And there are countless people who are doing this at very low prices around the world and are phenomenal.
And if you hire say one or two people full time today and they're working each 40 hours per week, well then at the end of the year, 200, 250 work days later, they're going to have each put in 1000 hours towards this task and you're going to have a database with just thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of rows.
So the trick with that is to start early.
It's very cost effective.
All of that might cost you a few thousand dollars.
And the earlier you start, the bigger list can grow within even just a few days, a few weeks, a few months and a year.
It's amazing what can happen.

Omer (20:05.430)
So in terms of creating the list, I had like three ways that we can do this.
Number one is to basically go out and scrape the data yourself.
So get some software if you know where, where you know people are, you can kind of set it up to just go and scrape that information from different websites and kind of manually build it that way.
Number two is to buy a ready made.

Guest (20:42.040)
And that's an option as well.

Omer (20:43.120)
So there are plenty of companies out there.
Yeah.
Who will kind of, you know, sell you a list on whatever kind of target customer you know you're trying to reach.
And then the third option, which is kind of in between the last two, is this sort of outsourcing, which is you're kind of effectively building a list from scratch, but you're hiring people to do that for you.
And because in the nature of the work, that can often be as cost effective or maybe more cost effective than trying to do that with software.
Unless you're super clear about where this information is and how you're going to configure the software to go and get this data for you.

Guest (21:25.330)
Yep.
And again, it depends a little bit on.
On your skills, too, and on where the data is.
So if the data is in a place where there's, you know, structured URLs and structured data and you're an engineer, then it's probably not too difficult to scrape a relatively big online repository into a CSV format.
If that's not your strength, then you're definitely going to want to avoid that because then you're either hiring somebody to do that for you or using some program that most likely won't work.
So then you're looking at really buying a list or outsourcing the creation of the list yourself.
I would recommend outsourcing the creation of the list yourself, and there's a few reasons for that.
When you buy a list, the way that most of these folks have created the list is by outsourcing creation of the list themselves.
So there's a few problems with that.
The data is never going to be as up to date as it is when you do it yourself.
Second, the price is going to be typically higher because it's going to be a markup for that setup.
Third, it's actually not a very hard thing to do to get somebody on creating this list themselves.
And fourth, and perhaps most importantly, you get to dictate the fields that these folks add as they're going through and creating this list.
And that's where you can start to have some fun that will really impact the effectiveness of your outreach later on.
Where, for instance, if you include as one of your fields one key detail about the website or something that's interesting about the company or the person.
Right.
Or something on the LinkedIn profile, if you just include one piece of personalized information that will work with your product and work with your customer base, then when you start to reach out to these people, you can actually create this really relevant personalized email, or you can start a cold call off by mentioning a little something about them.
And you're not going to be able to find that with a purchase slice.

Omer (23:26.880)
Yeah, that's a good point.
So you were saying the next step is really to go about cleaning that list.
So how do we go about doing that?

Guest (23:35.200)
Yeah, so what you'll find is that anytime that you're taking lots of data and putting it somewhat sloppily into a spreadsheet, you're going to have a lot of irrelevant pieces of data.
So one of the most important areas to focus is going to be on what's called qualification.
And you can do qualification at any step of the funnel.
But it's going to be really critical here because let's say that you get a list, you have 10,000 possible leads.
Well, now you can reach out to 10,000 of them and get 9,000 no's, or you can reach out to 2,000 of them and get 1,000 no's and you still have your same 1,000 yeses.
So it's important to spend the time here to save yourself significant amount of time later.
And there's a few ways to do this again.
First of all, you're going to want to again look at your typical customers and find out a few similarities between them.
So let's say that your typical customers are product teams at SaaS companies.
Well, you're going to want to find out what size of SaaS company, what size of product team, what's the title of the person, maybe what are some of the systems that they use.
And then you're going to want to create a list of bullets of these qualification points and run through this list based on these bullets and you can send these to your outsourced team.
You can run through 100, 200 rows together to make sure that you're kind of thinking about it the same way.
It doesn't have to be perfect, you don't have to have 100% perfect qualification.
But the goal is as many of the ones that aren't very qualified for your product that you can catch early the better.
And that's where it's actually really helpful to go through this process yourself.
And then you can come up with guidelines.
And once you have good guidelines and you can just give it to either the people that you purchase the list from, they can maybe create some exclusionary criteria there, or you can just send it to the outsourcer that you hired and have them go through every single row.
Right, all 10,000 rows and just start to remove people based on these criteria.

Omer (25:42.050)
Got it.
Okay, can you quickly just give me some examples of what the qualification.

Guest (25:46.610)
Yeah, so I think some key examples would be size of company.
So oftentimes you might create a list like this and you're going to end up with Salesforce and a three person startup.
And usually at least very young companies aren't selling products to both.
So definitely size of company, which usually can go off of number of employees.
Easy to find on LinkedIn.
Right, a rough number of employees.
You can also go based off of size of team.
So size of team within that company.
You can also go with the title of the person that you might be reaching out to.
That's going to be, you know, if you're looking at VP level or director level, or maybe you're selling actually to the C suite, then that's another good qualification criteria.
And then depending too, if you're focused on more small businesses, there's a lot of fun tools there which can actually give you great information on these small businesses.
One example is builtwith.com so builtwith.com gives you a treasure trove of information around small businesses and the tools they use.
And you can even see things like the amount of online spend that they have or the rough spend per year that they have on digital tools.
And if you see that they're spending $200 a year on digital tools and you're selling a $10,000 a year solution, well, that might be an uphill battle.
Whereas if they're spending $25,000 a year on digital tools and you sell a $5,000 a year solution, then that's probably a company that's at least going to be interested in having a discussion with you.
So, yeah, it really comes down to finding out who's a good customer, who isn't a good customer, and then picking some metrics there.
And a good way to do this too is to look through the initial list that you get and then mark down everybody that you feel actually wouldn't be a good customer and mark down why.
And then you're going to want to identify one way to figure out, to figure this out in advance, or one way that you could communicate a better way to identify this bad fit to the people who are working with you to create that list.

Omer (27:52.320)
Okay, so when you said cleaning the list, a couple of other things that came to my mind were when you've got inevitably humans doing this kind of work, actually even with, with software, in many cases, you can easily end up with duplicate entries.
Maybe you've got the same prospect, but they, you know, because they had two different email addresses somewhere, they've kind of ended up as two different entries on your list.
And in terms of like verifying the contact information, like if you got a list of email addresses, you probably want to make sure that they're up to date or they're valid email addresses, right?

Guest (28:29.070)
Yeah, and that's quite important.
So first of all, there's a few tools to get the email addresses.
So these are tools that there's actually so many different, different ones these now.
And they all work slightly different ways.
Some kind of guess the person's email address based on their name, their company, and kind of what, what they've seen other verified email addresses from that company have as a structure.
So I'll give you an example.
It's kind of cool actually.
Let's say that you work at ExxonMobil and your name is Jeff Green.
And this system knows that employees at Exxon Mobile tend to be first name, dot, last name@exxonmobile.com well then they can guess that this person's email address is jeff greenexonmobile.com and it works pretty well, right.
So most companies tend to have some kind of merit naming paradigm for their emails.
However, of course it's going to get this wrong sometimes as well.
There are other companies that will actually every single one of their customers acts as a shared data source for an accurate email address.
So as you're getting emails from people or emailing with people, and let's say that you also use this program, it's kind of got this constantly up to date database of valid email addresses compared to names for all the different companies in the US now the problem there is it's a little bit different from guessing where you can guess everybody's email address.
But of course a system like this would rely on that person having emailed somebody who's also using this same email verification service.
So you're not going to necessarily have everybody.
But yeah, I mean there's, there's plenty of good options to look into just Google email identification services and honestly there's dozens.
But yeah, if you Google email identification services, sign up for a couple, find out what works for your list.
Right.
If you, if for instance, you don't have customers that are heavy users of LinkedIn, some of the LinkedIn verification services won't work as well if you have customers who aren't as heavy users of email or tools and some of those won't work as well.
But find something that works well for you and your audience and then you're going to want to go through and first find these email addresses and then put them through a second set of tools which is going to be to identify emails that could possibly bounce before you start to reach out to all these people.
One good tool for that is a tool called Never Bounce.
And what this company does, it's pretty cool, you can actually just upload your current list into there and then they'll automatically remove email addresses that have a high chance of bouncing.
And it's pretty amazing actually.
I've seen this tool neverbounce take a list from having a 20, 25% bounce rate, which is pretty typical for new Lists where you're guessing to some extent the email addresses and then reduce that all the way down to 1 to 3% and 3%, 2%, 1% bounce rate.
That's pretty typical for any kind of email system.
So you've taken yourself from having a huge problem of bounces to almost no bounces at all.
So I would definitely recommend neverbounce to ensure that your list is ready to go.

Omer (31:56.640)
Okay, great.
And so if we've kind of followed the steps that you've kind of walked us through by now, we should have a good understanding of our sort of ideal customer profile.
We didn't talk specifically about how to create a profile, but we kind of alluded to getting clarity on, you know, your ideal customer.
We should have created a list, cleaned that list, and we have verified at least the email addresses and excluded as many as we can that we think would bounce.
And we also went through and filtered it based on a qualification criteria to make sure that we're not, you know, wasting our time and resources going after prospects that just clearly are not the right fit for our business or product.

Guest (32:54.910)
Correct.

Omer (32:56.030)
So from here I guess we're ready to actually start contacting these people.

Guest (33:00.420)
Yes.
Now we're ready for the, for the fun part, which is outreach.
The most important thing to remember with outreach is you're going to get a lot of no's, you're going to get a lot of rejection.
That's part of life when you're doing outbound sales.
Don't get discouraged.
Please, please, please don't get discouraged.
You might even hear some pretty nasty things.
Some people, you hit them when they're in a bad mood, had a bad day, and they might send you a very mean email or have a very nasty phone call with you.
So now that we have that disclaimer out of the way, it's certainly not, it's not personal.
Right.
Always good to remember and just have a thick skin.
Don't let it affect you.
It happens to everybody and you are not alone.
So now what you're going to want to do is to create what's called your sales cadence.
And a sales cadence is just the step, the set of steps that you're going to take to reach out to these companies.
And what most experts recommend is that you want to mix it up between phone calls and emails.
Some examples would be to have an 11 step cadence over a three week period where you have six emails and five phone calls.
And on three of those phone calls you leave voicemails, and on two of them you Don't.
And that's going to be over three weeks.
So it might be day one, day phone call, day two, email, day four, phone call with a voicemail, day seven, email, and so on and so forth.
Now, in creating your cadence, a few things to remember.
Number one, one of the mistakes that many founders make is they make these cadences too short.
So they might send one email or two emails and do one call or two calls, and then they give up.
And that's actually very.
It's a very important mistake to avoid.
The reason why is if you look at the data, there is tremendous amount of lead flow from what's called the long tail of touches.
So on those touches, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, you can actually get a significant amount of your leads.
And I forget the data, the exact numbers right now, but I believe that half of all leads can come from Touch7 and beyond.
So it can feel a little discouraging.
It feels like you're shouting down an elevator shaft and nobody's listening to you.
But the key to remember is you're reaching out to people who are very, very busy.
And if you're a person who's very, very busy, which I'm sure you are, well, it kind of makes sense that maybe one in ten times that somebody sends you an email just happens to hit you at the right time of the day and the right mood, and when you're currently actively experiencing the right problems to where you actually respond and say, hey, you know what?
I'm interested in that.
So don't get discouraged if you don't hear any responses quickly.
That's the name of the game.
And it makes quite a bit of sense because you're reaching out to people who are quite busy and you're not their priority.
So you're looking for the right combination of factors where you are temporarily their priority, and they can reach back out to you.

Omer (36:15.300)
Is there any.
What's your view on phone calls versus emails?
Can you just do an outbound campaign just using email?

Guest (36:23.700)
Yeah.

Omer (36:24.420)
Does it have to be phone calls as well?
Some people I know will only do phone calls once they get some kind of interest over email.
Like, what's your thought on that?

Guest (36:37.460)
Yeah.
So short answer is it definitely depends on.
And I would try anything and everything.
So until you find out what really works for your market, you're going to want to try a lot of different things.
Here's some ways that email and phone can benefit each other.
And it's been kind of fun to see because if you look at the year 2002.
Everything was phone calls.
And then Aaron Ross wrote his book Predictable Revenue, and things moved very heavily towards emails.
And then, of course, people started to get swamped with email.
So the sales teams who are doing phone calls started to see some success again, and email response rates started to go down, and it's kind of switched back again, and.
And now it's probably somewhere in the middle.
What I recommend is to use your emails and phone calls to help each other.
And the example of this is, let's say that you send an email and then you call on the phone.
Well, that's a much easier intro piece because you can say, hi, this is Delamon calling from Thomas, and I sent you an email on Thursday, and I'm calling to follow up on the details inside.
But you made it to see that email, and that's much easier than saying, hey, this is Delamon from Thomas.
Let's talk.
You've never heard from me.
And even if they haven't seen that email or remember it, it makes it a little bit easier for you on your calls and vice versa.
In your email, you can say as a subject line, follow up from my call.
And, well, that's a pretty juicy subject line that people are curious about, and it can help you start that email better.
So using both in a cadence in most cases is going to be better than just using one or the other.
Although you might find for your particular market that you can get away with just calls or just emails.

Omer (38:27.330)
Got it.
What about using social media as another sort of potential touch point?

Guest (38:35.010)
Yeah.

Omer (38:35.570)
Like, if your prospects are on LinkedIn, could you be sharing something of value with them on there?
If they're on Twitter, could you be, you know, starting some kind of conversation or whatever?
It's like, is that kind of a good mix to also think about?

Guest (38:51.090)
Absolutely.
So all of these platforms are going to have a slightly different culture, I guess is the best word for it.
And anywhere that your customers are is a viable place to reach out to them.
The one that I don't recommend until you already have established context is text.
Text can be very effective once you have established context, but you want to avoid it as a cooled outreach tool.
But everything else.
Yeah, LinkedIn.
Absolutely.
Reach out on LinkedIn.
Twitter.
Absolutely.
Reach out on Twitter.
The important thing, though, is going to be to make sure that you've mapped out your sales cadence before you start it.
It's a little bit like a gym workout, or if you just go to the gym and say, what do I feel like doing today?
Well, you Might end up doing 10 minutes on the bike and then get off and go home.
And that's true with the sales cadence as well.
So you want to make sure that you've mapped out this set of touches.
LinkedIn, Twitter, email, phone, whatever it is beforehand, and the days on which each touch is going to take place, and then really stick to that and execute it.
And then you can vary that for your next attempt down the road.
You can make variations, but you want to make sure that you're following a structure because otherwise it's a hard thing to do and you'll lose focus and not be able to execute as well if you're changing at mid course.

Omer (40:11.610)
Yeah, I agree.
Don't do texts.
I don't know what it is like when it comes to email.
Getting cold email, I kind of see that as a way of life these days.
Even getting calls.
Yeah, you kind of get it, but there's something about getting an unsolicited text which really kind of pushes my hot button.
Yeah, I don't know when other people feel like that as well.
Okay, so we've kind of talked about these emails, but are there any resources that you can kind of recommend, like, people can look at for, like, what's the best way to write an email script?
Or if you're going to get on the phone, what's the best way to, you know, have start that phone call?
And I don't necessarily mean like, you know, here's a script that you can kind of read word for word because maybe that's going to sound too robotic.
But certainly in terms of, you know, a general guidance in terms of how to start that conversation, or some email scripts that they can look at.
Like, I know there's a bunch of stuff out there, but do you have any recommendations on resources?

Guest (41:12.140)
Absolutely.
So the best resources for this are Trish Bertuzzi.
Trish Bertuzzi has written an excellent book called the Sales Element Playbook.
And she's going to go into all kinds of different outreach methods and scripts and things like that.
Sales hacker.
So saleshacker.com is another excellent resource specifically for email.
My favorite for cold calling is Steli Efti.
And Steli Efti, he is the CEO of Close IO and he's got fantastic, highly actionable blog posts and podcasts and a YouTube channel as well, which goes specifically into a lot of the mechanisms of cold calling.
So those are a few good resources to.
To follow, to look into that.
Highly recommend all three of them as a few.
Just general pointers with Email, the shorter the better.
Founders and salespeople at early stage startups, they have a tendency to want to stuff in every single reason that their product is amazing that you would want to buy the product into an email.
And nobody reads that.
So you're going to want a very short email, very concise, use bullet points, two to three bullet points, keep everything short, have a very clear ask at the end and a subject line that drives a little bit of curiosity.
Your email is going to perform better if they don't know everything.
You want to drive a little bit of curiosity in them.
The second tip for emails is you want it to be about them and not about you.
So a good formula to follow is your customer doesn't care about you, they care about what you can do for them.
And when writing your emails, actually even very experienced salespeople will continue to make this mistake where they, they talk about their features or they talk about their product.
But what these same experienced salespeople will do is that they naturally have a habit of scanning any of these emails.
And then before they click send, convert the feature you just described to a problem that the customer is experiencing that can be solved or a benefit that can be attained by the customer.
And that's really important, is if you catch them with a challenge that they're currently living, feeling and breathing and a way to solve it, then they're going to want to respond to that email.
Especially if you can do it in two to three sentences.

Omer (43:45.660)
A couple of quick things.
Do you have any recommendations for tools that people can use to send out these emails?
You know, there, there are a bunch of tools out there and people have their, their favorites, but you know, are there any that you would recommend?
And then secondly, you know, as you, depending on the volume of emails you send out, you're also at risk of getting marked as spam quite a lot.
Or I'd say the risk is high.
And so one thing I've seen some people do is, you know, they won't use their primary email domain as the email address that they use to send out.
So they might set up a, you know, if you have a, you know.com domain, you might set up a.co version and use that as a way to send out those cold emails.
So if you are getting marked as spam, that's not necessarily going to ding your main domain or deliverability of your main emails.

Guest (44:53.190)
Yeah, so it raises a good point.
The first step there is to determine a little bit about maybe the characteristics of your market.
So if you sell for instance to, let's say that you sell to security staff at big companies or something like that, then you're probably going to want to be very careful around being marked as spam.
If you sell to small retail shops in small towns across America, the tendency that they mark you as spam or report your IP address for instance, is going to be quite low.
So tailor your anti spam efforts a little bit based on the kind of product that you sell in the market that you sell it to.
And then yeah, there's definitely some things that you can do.
The most important in my opinion is to use something like Neverbounce that we were talking about before to reduce the bounce rate.
Second, you're going to want to immediately remove somebody from your list that requests to be removed from your list.
Third, there's actually something called the Can Spam act which basically if you have an opt out link that opts out of that lets somebody opt out of receiving future emails, you can actually send out these cold unsolicited emails.
So there shouldn't be anything to worry about as long as you are using the opt out links and as long as you have clean lists where you're not just riddled with bounces using the email server itself, that's you're using a separate email server rather.
I think that that's actually probably an indication of a deeper problem where you're reaching out to the wrong people.
Right.
So you're either reaching out to unqualified people or you're doing so in a manner that is exceptionally annoying.
Right.
So you're.
Yeah.
For most companies I wouldn't recommend necessarily having the separate email server.
I would recommend just doing everything through your own email addresses.
And then there's tools that provide all the rest.
Right.
So there's tools that provide the opt out link and all that good stuff.
Two that I would recommend looking into and they're competitors of each other so pick your favorite are outreach and then sales loft cadence.
So both of these programs, what they allow you to do is to set up these cadences that we've been talking about to remind you of each of these steps and then they're going to have all the tools and safety practices in place for you where you should have your basis covered from a spam perspective because they're going to have your opt out links and their entire business is based around mass cool emailing.
I would look into both of those tools.
I would avoid having your own a special server just for emails unless maybe you're selling to a Very, very finicky market.
And yeah, I would use a tool like sales loft cadence or outreach to help you save a lot of time in sending these emails.

Omer (48:06.770)
Okay, cool.
Yeah, there's a, there's a number of tools out there that, beyond these two that I just came off the top of my head, like, I think, you know, reply IO is another one, or mailshake or Lead Views, the list goes on.
There's quite a few.

Guest (48:21.880)
Yeah, Guessware is another one.
There are, I think there's probably dozens of these companies now, so depends on how lightweight of a solution that you'd like as well.
But if you look for a mass emailer, just Google sales mass emailer, you should get a lot of results.

Omer (48:36.360)
All right, Is there anything else that we haven't covered about this process?

Guest (48:41.640)
Yeah, just want to reiterate that definitely shouldn't get offended if people respond negatively or discouraged if people don't respond.
If you get a few responses out of the, out of your first wave, then that's fantastic.
And you can follow up with those leads and learn what worked with them, learned specifically why they did reach back out to you.
Or if people respond, they respond with a polite no, just ask them, hey, why was this not interesting to you?
Most won't reply, but some will and you'll get good information to improve your next outreach cadence.

Omer (49:15.570)
Yeah, that's awesome.
And I think in terms of what we talked about, the spam piece, if you've kind of gone through the process of understanding your target customer well and you've done a good job in terms of building a list, which you have highly qualified prospects on that list and you've kind of gone through in terms of doing all the right things to clean up, I'd say you're going to be in better shape than most of the emails that I get.

Guest (49:48.780)
Correct.
Yeah.
Where you run into trouble is if you're selling database infrastructure software and you send an email to a dog walker in New York City or vice versa.
So, yeah, if you're sending relevant emails to relevant people, then they might opt out and decline, but typically you're not going to run any spam problems.

Omer (50:11.610)
Awesome.
Okay, that's been great, Delamin.
I know we could talk about this for much more time and I've kind of had you sort of cram in as much of your knowledge and experience into this time here, and I appreciate you, you doing that.
If people want to check out the, the Win Rates Bible that you, you created, I'll include a link into it in the show notes.
But the easiest way to kind of get to it, I guess, is if they just go to sasops factory dot com.

Guest (50:50.300)
Correct.

Omer (50:51.100)
And then at the bottom of that, they'll see a link to see the Win Rates Bible, and they can kind of get to it from there.
All right, great.
And if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Guest (51:03.750)
Yes, the best is to email Delamon, and that's D E L A M o n@sassopsfactory.com.

Omer (51:13.749)
awesome.
Thank you, my friend.
I appreciate you taking the time and kind of going through a lot of content in a very short amount of time, and I wish you all the best.

Guest (51:22.390)
Yeah, my pleasure.
Thanks, Homer.

Omer (51:24.070)
Okay, take care.
Cheers.