$500,000 Sales Pipeline in 10 days With Cold Email

Here is a brief summary of the key points from the transcript: - The transcript outlines a successful cold email campaign for a custom game development company. - The campaign was based on the advice to find hard-to-reach contacts, as they are less likely to receive outreach and will be more receptive. - The campaign involved scraping the Steam database to find relevant games, identifying the developers, and finding contact info for founders and lead developers. - Two tailored lead magnets were created to incentivize prospects to respond. One offered educational info, the other gave a preview of their paid service. - Contact info was enriched beyond what Apollo provided to get 3x more contacts. Emails were pulled from websites and LinkedIn. - Both a personalized email and a simple email offering the magnets generated positive responses, showing the importance of testing different approaches. - In total, the highly targeted campaign generated $500,000 in pipeline in just 10 days for this custom game development company.

We used Alex Hermosis number one piece of cold email advice to take a custom game development company from one to two leads, a quarter to $500,000 in pipeline in just ten days. I'm Mitchell Keller, founder of Leadgro, and I help b two b businesses win their markets. In this video, I'm going to go over exactly how we curated this campaign from list to copy the clay flow we used to make it hyper targeted, and how you can apply the same concepts to your own campaigns to build six figure cold email pipelines. Let's start with a top to bottom breakdown of the exact campaign we use to generate $500,000 in pipeline in ten days. And really, it was predicated on Alex Ramosi's number one rule for outreach, which sums up to this the harder a contact is to find, the better your outreach will perform. And really, if you critically think about this, it makes a ton of sense if someone is really hard to find or really hard to find in a relevant way, right? Because sometimes contact information exists on Apollo, but it's not actually filterable in the right way for you to send them a relevant message. So if it's hard to find, it means they're less likely to be reached out to on a regular basis, or they usually receive bad messaging. So if you can source the data in an intelligent way, right where it is relevant, where it does match your ICP and you truly know it, by using outside of the box methods, you're going to be able to contact someone that's not used to receiving relevant messaging or messaging at all. And you're going to be able to book way more sales calls, because they're just not, they're not a tapped lead source, they're not tired, they're not that lead that's worked with 40 agencies and has a bad taste in their mouth, for instance. And really, this campaign was done in an industry that I'd never targeted before, with an offer that was truly one of a kind. And we were still able to get incredible results by using this rule. And I think this is the most powerful rule you can apply to your outreach. Here's some of the ways you can do it. If you've ever found yourself with hard to find leads, which that's exactly what our client did, and here's how it was characterized. They're contacting games, but not just any game. They needed to meet certain criteria when they found games. The problem was that people don't work for the game, they work for the development studio. Then who at the development studio actually worked on that game because they make so many games. And then is it the publisher that's the decision maker, or is it the dev? Because sometimes they have malicious deal structures like record label labels where the artist has no control, the dev has no control. Then if they just found any old game studio on Apollo, the problem was that they'd have extremely irrelevant messaging because they needed to contact Unity games that were only single player. Good luck finding that on Apollo. And as you'll see later, a lot of that just didn't exist on Apollo. So we had to find creative ways to work around that which you can apply to your own campaigns. So the alternative, which is what they chose, was 100% manual lead sourcing. That was frying their brains. They were finding games, pulling them from databases. Then they had to find the developer of that game. Then they had to find the website or the LinkedIn or the Twitter or the disco of that developer and do 100% manual outreach. And they were tired of it. So we found a new way for them to do outreach that was scalable, automated and super targeted. It was finding all the data they needed. So here's what we did. This is the workflow. We scraped steam database using filters. Those filters were unity games, a certain number of reviews, making sure that the game costs money, and then that it was 100% single player and used exclusions. Thank goodness Steam DB existed. And remember to leverage external databases as much as you can. Then we had to do a second scrape and isolate the name of the developers and the publishers because it was on a different page, you actually had to click into the game to find this information. From there we were able to use those developer names to do boolean searches and Cladjin searches. Cladjin is an AI scraper. For those of you who don't know what this actually looks like, is basically saying to Google that these things have to exist in your search results. LinkedIn.com company has to exist in your search result. It cannot just be LinkedIn.com anything. It must be a slash company to find the company. And then we also did collagen searches that also did Boolean searches where we said, hey, it has to include the title of the game on this website and the website must be just like the company name. Why not use Clearbit? Well, Clearbit doesn't get you Linkedins and LinkedIns can get you contact info. Number two, Clearbit is inaccurate. It doesn't do things like ensuring that a certain thing is mentioned on the website that characterizes that business correctly. What can happen is they end up pulling a company with the exact same name that's doing something totally different and has a website that could fit your prospect's website feasibly. So clear bit kind of sucks. You never want inaccurate data. Do this instead then we use clagent to check for company pr releases. Actually game pr releases specifically. Now why did we do that? Well, if you remember, it's hard to know who worked on the game, but if you check pr releases for names associated with the game, what we're able to do is actually get the lead developers, lead programmers, lead creatives and founders of these games so that we could contact the right person. Hard to find data, better results. This is going to hold true throughout this then names of founders, because a lot of these were small studios and founders end up being decision makers on these sorts of big things. Hence why the pipeline value is so high. These are 100k deal sizes in some cases. The second problem is that when they reached out to people, they didn't have an incentive for responding. One of the things you really, really have to do to generate interest is create incentive for responding. There needs to be something clear that your prospect gets out of responding. And in this case, the offer really required some level of education a lot of the time. So we had two options. They didn't have lead magnets, they didn't have case studies, and their website wasn't optimized to be a good place to send prospects. So what did we do? We actually made two lead magnets. One was written, which was more of an educational lead magnet. We thought of doing an ROI calculator, but that didn't seem the right fit for this industry, unfortunately. Then we settled on something that was actually a direct precursor to their paid service and put them directly in the pipeline. If they get this lead magnet, it's literally a no brainer for them to just continue and fully buy in to the prospect service. You can almost think of that as a free trial to a degree, but one that I can't go into too much more detail because I can't name names here. But basically they were stuck. It was like a moat. Their product moat was this lead magnet. And it's something people typically pay a lot of money for and spend a ton of time on. And this helped them stand out from some of their larger market competitors that were necessarily doing something like this or even a service in the first place. So this last quickly segment, who is interested in this particular service and who isn't? A and thankfully the lead magnet required a qualifying call. So they didn't have to give it up to everyone. They could actually hop on the call and qualify them beforehand, which was pretty sick, if I do say so myself. So what was the final problem that we had to solve for we want as much contact data as possible. This is something you can learn from. Apollo only had like 700 contacts for all these businesses we found. So instead we actually enriched the contact info of the founders and lead devs directly using waterfall enrichments. We took the leftovers and pulled tier one contacts from Apollo, merged, and then deduped those lists. We did a find function on LinkedIn directly as well, to find anyone that might have been newly hired or anyone that Apollo may have missed. Then we pulled more general emails from their websites as well, and personal emails from lead dev LinkedIn profiles due to the nature of this outreach. And what we ended up with was three times as many contacts as Apollo was able to find for this campaign. So that's kind of a lesson for you. It depends on who you're contacting, but if it's a business that is likely to have a general email, that is their main email, either because of the size of the business or the industry, you need to decide for yourself. In this case, I decided it did make a lot of sense just based on how little data I was seeing in terms of actual work emails. And we were able to source hard to find data that wasn't on Apollo, that wasn't on normal databases. And the results sort of speak for themselves. So how we contacted them can't go into too much detail here, but we tried a heavily personalized email paired with one that was just a one sentence email offering a lead magnet, and something strange happened. Both did all right. The one sentence email outperformed by two x, but both were getting positive responses. But one of my main rules for outreach is broken here. That first email actually ended up performing better as a second email, the one that was long and personalized, because, I don't know, I couldn't actually tell you the reason why. This kind of flipped my normal thinking about how you position your messaging and the sequencing of your messaging, but either way, it was successful. And the takeaway you can have from this is that you should always be testing and split, testing multiple things. We actually split, tested five types of messaging on that opening campaign and then narrowed down to two winners over the course of about three days. So, yeah, that's basically how we went about creating the campaign top from bottom. Your key takeaways are this. You need to source hard to find data and you need to spend more time building your lead list because that will give you context that have not been outreach to before and or haven't been outreached to in a relevant way. And if you can outreach them in a relevant way with a great offer, you're going to win that contact. You're going to win leads that people otherwise won't be able to win. That's pretty sick. You're going to be able to perform much better in terms of your outreach. And finally, if you go the extra mile, you're going to end up with a more targeted list anyway and you can make your lead magnet super applicable. One thing I forgot to mention, this lead magnet was literally only applicable to this one ICP. It would not work if we did a general list and just fired it out. And if you did a general list in this case, you'd be pushing your campaign straight into spam. Because with a general list your offer has to become general. Or if it doesn't become general, it's irrelevant and people are going to be like, yo, what the heck? F you. One thing that was really interesting about this offer is that even people that didn't want it, like the not interested responses were always super pleasant. And we were able to turn not interested responses into potential event meetups to try out their actual software version of this and various other engaged lead opportunities that didn't directly relate to pipeline necessarily right now, which is super cool as well. So here's a quick look at the clay table and the exact workflow that we ended up using to get this information. We had initial scrape of this steam dB link of a steam dB link with those filters and we were left the steam db URL instead of setting up a custom scraper. In this case, we just scraped the website inside clay and you can see that all these enrichments aren't actually working. I accidentally deleted the entire list, but thankfully I exported it first so I just threw the data back in that we pulled. Be careful with deleting stuff, guys. I do not know how I did that. We were left with a ton of information from this website text extraction. Based on the extraction we were able to basically pull out some great personalized information such as the reviews, review score, cost per game, positive reviews, as well as the developer and publisher. From there we did that exact HTTP search I mentioned for finding the website. We were also able to pull in things like their LinkedIn snip and SEO data to verify that the business was in fact a game dev business during these searches because you never want to end up in a clear bid situation where you have this business and it may not be qualified. So this is a good way to do that. Make sure that certain keywords exist in their LinkedIn snippet that match your ICP to make sure the website makes sense. And then what we did is, like I said, we pulled contact emails, general emails. We used those general emails and verified them in campaigns. We pulled the studio LinkedIn as well, and all of that from Clagent. All of these columns are basically taking that data, checking it, and then making sure through formulas that it's formatted correctly for final columns like this developer LinkedIn final column, as well as a website final column. And then from there we ran a search to find company founders and company lead devs through news. We were able to find a ton of personal information through these PR releases based on the game titles. And then from there we went through the process of waterfall enriching that I mentioned on the last page of this document here. So yeah, that's the basic flow. This flow can involve a lot of writing to table or a lot of using GPT or formulas within Google sheets to connect the data, to merge the data, and to make sure that all of the data points are being carried over. Trust me, it's worth the time. Because with the correct data, you can do really, really cool and awesome outreach. When you input this into your campaigns, think about what it might look like. There's a few ways to source really, really high level data. There's external databases, ones that don't have websites. Especially there is taking the time to potentially pull personal emails or general emails and enriching them. In fact, yesterday for an SEO campaign for a local SEO client, two of the positive responses were directly from emails pulled right from the website and then validated. So yeah, think about these things. Think about how you can apply them to your campaigns. But remember back to that number one rule, which is the harder a lead is defined, the better your campaign is going to perform. And then mix that in with just making sure that your messaging is relevant to your list and only that. Listen, in this case, our lead magnet was only relevant to this list. And if you need something like this done for your business, if you would like something similar, book a call below and we can run through a full strategy session to see if it even makes sense for your business with myself. And then look at implementing some paper call outreach for you guys on a performance basis to get results just like this. Have a good one.