Business founders get rejected everyday more than most people do in a year. But how much rejection you deal with isn’t relevant – how you deal with all that negativity is what defines you.
And the most successful founders refine negativity into little diamonds of positivity, because they know every situation has multiple outcomes that are, to a different degree, both positive and negative depending on your point of view.
When people don’t understand you, they might try to protect themselves and wait for all facts to come out until they make a decision.
It’s the same with potential clients that you call, meet or sent cold email to – they don’t need you at the moment.
…only because they’re too busy trying to decide whether your offer is good and whether you’re trustworthy.
Making the most of it – how to convince more clients with solid client communication
Working with software houses, we approach new clients with cold emails because it opens up a lot of possibilities:
personalisation of emails (which increases conversion rates)
sending an email chain, which is an introduction email followed by several follow-ups to add more information without cramming it in one email (no one likes big text blocks… except for Scandinavian people for some reason)
improving your offer and future emails in real time based on results from already sent emails
converting the most interested potential customers into a call/meeting – the most interested customers are those that respond to a cold email with questions about project details or valuations
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The number of responses that a cold email campaign generates depends on who you send it to and how you write it – if you get a lot of responses, that’s a cold email campaign well done.
But cold emailing is just a channel to send your offer directly to potential clients, and any information you get in return should not be misread or disregarded:
when you get a lot of positive responses, that is generally a good sign – you’re doing something right
you will always receive responses from cautious, distrustful, suspiscious people
but their caution or objection isn’t a signal for you to stop talking to them – you need to talk to them more than you need to talk to strongly interested people
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Some clients need a while to be convinced – so don’t panic whenever you hear “not now” or simply “no” when pitching your services.
One of our cold email campaigns for a software house generated over 200 responses. Around 50 potential clients responded with strong interest.
150 said they were either not interested at the moment, or not at all.
When this happens, founders without experience in cold emailing (marketing/sales) are usually disappointed. What you should do instead of being disappointed is:
start a discussion – ask general questions (start with “why not?” and take it from there depending on what you hear)
ask specific questions (about you, your company, your brand, your offer) to get feedback
give other type of value – if you can’t work with them, at least send a cool and useful blog post/video link or help them with a different problem they have
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There’s one more HUGE advantage that founders often miss here. Learning which customers don’t need you at all is awesome. Only when you gain that knowledge, you can start focusing on the customers that really want to buy from you.
Most potential clients that aren’t interested at the moment either need more information to change their minds, or more time to decide.
There’s no way of knowing what type of information they need or when they will decide – so you do your best to stay in contact until it happens.
Every potential client is a source of information – regardless of whether they end up paying you
You should talk to every person that’s interested in buying, as well as try to learn from those that can’t or won’t buy:
ask questions
discuss project details
exchange experiences
listen closely to what your client needs
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Solid client communication is a must, because it can help you optimise your business and sales for maximum efficiency. It starts with solving the core issues that all businesses have to solve (and most fail at it):
are you selling the right thing to the right people?
is your offer really valuable, or is it just your fantasy?
what objections do people have against buying from you? Can you overcome them?
what arguments can you use to convince potential customers to talk to you, give you feedback and eventually buy from you?
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These are hugely important issues, so don’t get caught up in just chasing cash because it will make you blind. Cashflow is the lifeblood of business, but real marketing, lead generation and sales aren’t mainly about getting cash from someone’s account into yours:
They are tools for staying in touch with your customers, learning about them…
…and determining the shortest pathways to build trust, a relationship and business with them. The deals that you close from cold emails are the pure financial value in this scenario.
But being able to talk to customers from all around the globe by sending a few emails is a killer advantage that founders about, say, 40 yrs ago would literally kill you to get.
Meanwhile I see a lot of founders that don’t use this advantage – and instead sit back and wait for customers to start calling and knocking on their doors.
You can look use any tool you want, work with any client generation company, look at all the analytics, heatmaps and data in the world. But you’re all forgetting that a simple conversation, just with the right person, can lead to a relationship, a deal or enlightenment.
As your company’s founder, you have to remember about the power of simple conversation – it’s the main tool of any business founder out there. Start talking to your customers more, and care about them. Really care about them. Cashflow will follow.
Discover profitable markets, define your advantage, build long term relationships, learn customer problems, generate cash from new deals
Generating cash from closing new deals is one thing, and it’s not that hard to do when your offer is really (truly and honestly) awesome.
But if you don’t have a big enough network and keep to yourself in life, the probability that you’ll create an awesome offer without customer feedback is really low. And your most successful competitors don’t get great ideas out of the blue – they listen to their clients and simply adapt to their needs.
You simply have to start talking with potential customers. The easiest way to start talking is to send cold emails to a lot of them around the globe to see who will respond. Then eventually find a group of customers that will start responding to you, who really need you – and whom you really want to work with.
Get direct customer feedback, find the customers most willing to buy from you, and build long-term relationships on new markets.
Even negative replies aren’t anything to worry about, because they’re a great signal:
the customers you initially picked might not be the right group – switch it, look for customers in other companies, industries or locations
whatever your offering isn’t good enough for your customers to pay for – improve your offer, pricing, scope of services, branding etc.
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If you don’t focus on getting to your customers quickly, they aren’t going to come knocking on your door. Start talking to them – start cold emailing. You can always do it with RightHello. 😉
