How to Properly Cold Email Prospects as a SaaS Founder

Love it or hate it, cold emailing is extremely effective when done correctly. Introducing a business to your service through cold emailing can help you gain traction, whether that’s during the early stages of business or during a season of growth. Re-evaluating and planning a new approach to pick up speed and advertising your pain point solving service through cold emailing is an effective place to start.

You might be thinking ‘I hate receiving cold emails, so why would anyone want to hear from me?’. What you actually hate is receiving a generic sale driven email with no personality or regards to you or your business. Copy and paste mass emails are not the way. Taking the time to send a few targeted emails and personalizing them to a potential prospect is more effective.

Even at Churnkey we send out cold emails, but we have worked on our approach to this over time and built an effective method to turn prospects into clients. We’ve built our business on good practice and effort; we put time into acquiring every connection and ensure we provide a service that solves their pain point.

We are going to share with you our tailored approach and best practices that you can use as reference for your next cold emailing outreach.

Forget the Sales Pitch

Be social and personal. Remember that you're a person representing your business, not a sales pitch. Cold emailing has a bad reputation where people don’t feel any personal connection. If you say good morning to a stranger on the street, you might find half or more of the people you interact with will reply with a greeting.

Start the conversation with selling them something, and I bet there will be little to no response. See where this is going? Your initial email should attempt to start a conversation not close a sale. Not only is this polite but it invites them to casually reply.

The first step is to pique their interest, fish for pain, and invite them to look at what you have to offer. Fishing for pain is the major key here. If you can encourage a conversation around a pain point, a conversation will naturally unfold.

Look for a need for your solution. Your aim is to build trust between you and the prospect before you pitch your solution to their problems. Why waste time pitching if they don’t have a problem to solve.

Keep it short, time is valuable for everyone and emails are the last thing people want to be spending time on. Making the initial email a few sentences is optimal, remember you aren’t outlining your whole business model and providing a paragraph of generic sales pitch. If you are reaching out with a paragraph or two in a cold email then it's too long.

And don't forget: No one likes having things forced in their face. Provide a link without the sales pitch around it, let their curiosity do the work.

A Cold Email Doesn’t Have to be Cold

Find a way to make it warm and do your research., Be friendly and open. Put yourself forward and make it personal, make sure your name is on there and make a personal connection with the prospect. Show interest in them and mention something specific you noticed about their business. This can show them that you want to assist with a problem they are facing, simply saying ‘we do this’ just won't be of interest to them. Dropping in a link that could be of interest to them allows for them to make a choice and can relieve the pressure a sale driven cold email has on the prospect.

Find news, an aspect of your service or even a blog post from your business that could be interesting for the prospect. This is a good way to entice people as you are providing information that is of interest to them, this is why discovering their pain point is crucial.

Do They Need You?

You won't always know but there are some clear signs that a prospect could benefit from your service. If you are knowledgeable about your service you know the areas it can apply to, what difference it can make and if it’s a benefit to their business. It's better to spend less time researching a company and sending a personalized cold email with more potential of attracting the prospect than cold emailing hundreds of companies randomly.

Look into who they’ve worked with in the past, visit their website and find mentions or tags of other companies the prospects have worked with and used their services. This way, you can assess what they have already used — maybe it's similar to your service or completely different. If they already have a solution implemented, then you’ve not wasted time writing another email.

Identify the pain point, assess why you would be a good fit and explain why the prospect would benefit from your service.

Follow up the Right Way

While it's possible that you catch a prospect at the perfect time to evaluate your solution, it is more often the case that the timing isn't perfect. That's why following up is vital to outbound email success. Having a CRM in place can make things easier to help you keep track of your prospects, their stage, and your correspondence.

When you do follow up, keep it friendly and get the conversation going, don’t worry about pitching but provide a link and end with an open-ended question. Something like ‘When would be a good time to evaluate this’ or ‘Have you given any thought to [product name] as a solution to [product pain point]’. These are non-pushy and leave them the option to decide. Try to end every email with a question as this helps keep a conversation going.

Be Authentic, Be Helpful

Make sure you focus on prospects that you can provide value to (don't spray and pray!). A good salesperson understands that providing a helpful service drives a business forward. It's then when you begin to find that prospects turn into clients.

Most importantly, be authentic and be yourself. Prospects want to hear from you as a person, not as a script from a business. In addition, work on how you socialize with prospects. A friendly demeanor can often lead to at least a response and acknowledgement.

A service where you understand what your prospects want and presenting yourself in an approachable way through your cold email strategy will set you apart from all others, this ensures that more of the prospects you reach out to will become the clients you sought after.

Here at Churnkey we like to provide and build useful SaaS applications for others like us, we want to solve your problems and help focus on growth. If you’re interested in what was outlined in this article or want to have a chat about what we do, get in contact with us, our live chat ensures we are always available.