{"id":5054,"date":"2020-06-23T11:02:47","date_gmt":"2020-06-23T16:02:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kmbrian.com\/blog\/?p=5054"},"modified":"2020-12-04T18:54:07","modified_gmt":"2020-12-05T00:54:07","slug":"thinkalike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kmbrian.com\/blog\/thinkalike\/","title":{"rendered":"How ThinkAlike Inc Uses Mailshake to Help its Clients Close Six-Figure Deals"},"content":{"rendered":"

Using Cold Email Outreach to Help Clients Sell Smarter<\/h2>\n

ThinkAlike Inc.<\/a> is an LA-based consultancy that helps ambitious B2B brands sell their product. Working predominantly with small companies that create tech solutions for the media and entertainment industries, the ThinkAlike team is absolutely amazing at cold email outreach<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Generating leads and booking product demos is their bread and butter. And Mailshake plays a huge part in what they do.<\/p>\n

Starting Valuable Conversations Through Hyper-Personalization<\/h2>\n

Throughout the years, the ThinkAlike team has developed a watertight lead gen process based around sourcing potential prospects via LinkedIn Sales Navigator, then targeting them with super-personalized email<\/a> campaigns delivered through Mailshake.<\/p>\n

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Personalization is absolutely key to their success. We\u2019re not just talking about superficial personalization, like sending the same message to 1,000 people but including their first names in the subject line.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re talking about hyper-targeted campaigns aimed at highly specific lists of just 10-15 people per day. At that level, it\u2019s possible to personalize to such an extent that it\u2019s almost like they\u2019re speaking to a single individual.<\/p>\n

With such a granular focus, you\u2019d imagine ThinkAlike would be chasing after the big-hitters in the C-suite. But that\u2019s not the case.<\/p>\n

Instead, they seek out a very specific type of person within their target companies: someone who would be using the product on a day-to-day basis, would clearly understand the benefits it offers, and has the influence to make a recommendation and move it up the totem pole to consideration.<\/p>\n

Having made contact with a prospect, it typically takes about three touches to strike up a conversation. ThinkAlike\u2019s metrics show that clicks and replies start to spike once the third message has been sent, explains the company\u2019s Founder & President Zack Gutin: \u201cI believe it\u2019s people thinking \u2018let\u2019s see what this guy\u2019s trying to get our attention about and that\u2019s where we\u2019re seeing the activity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Without the right toolkit, running such laser-targeted campaigns would require a huge amount of legwork. It would be inefficient.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Mailshake makes it simple, says Zack: \u201cOne of the things I love about Mailshake is the ability to really personalize so that the emails come through with merge tags that don\u2019t feel very spammy, and we can remove things like unsubscribe links because we\u2019re targeting very small lists. The idea is it takes a long time to get those hyper-targeted lists together, but they pay off in the long term.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking the Right Language<\/h2>\n

Having made a commitment to hyper-personalization, it\u2019s absolutely vital that the ThinkAlike team get their messaging right.<\/p>\n

The language of the campaign is \u201ceverything,\u201d says Zack. \u201cI often explain to clients one of the mistakes people make with B2B email campaigns is they try to make the language of the campaign feel almost like a white sheet or a one-pager of some form, and it\u2019s very heavy in its marketing language.\u201d<\/p>\n

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A conversational approach \u2013 speaking to prospects as peers, rather than as a faceless service provider \u2013 is the way to go. It\u2019s like meeting someone at a networking event for the first time; you wouldn\u2019t introduce yourself and start spewing USPs and statistics at them.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019d go over, explain who you are, explain a little bit about what you know about them and how that might overlap with what you\u2019re doing, and why it might be of value to get to know each other a little better,\u201d says Zack.<\/p>\n

\u201cI find that really goes a long way and ultimately it works really nicely with Mailshake because we can take that first message to be really friendly and casual, and in the followup sequences we can start to add more and more information about what the product is and the features and so forth, knowing that that\u2019s all going to be automated anyway.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fitting Cold Email Into the Sales Mix<\/h2>\n

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ThinkAlike focuses solely on cold email outreach. That didn\u2019t happen by accident \u2013 it was a conscious decision, based on the fact that email makes it far easier for prospects to share information verbatim with their colleagues.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe ability to share the information and push it around internally with an email versus some sort of rehashed version of a phone call where they\u2019re not getting all the details correct, I think that\u2019s really valuable,\u201d says Zack.<\/p>\n

The ThinkAlike team prefers that their clients don\u2019t engage in cold-calling alongside their email outreach, as Zack believes that this risks damaging the relationships he\u2019s worked so hard to build and nurture: \u201cMy fear is that whoever it is they\u2019re hiring to follow up the leads I\u2019m creating is going to take a different tone. That they\u2019re going to be too aggressive and step on the toes of what I\u2019m doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, he believes reaching those same prospects via social retargeting campaigns can <\/em>be effective: \u201cSome of my clients will do retargeting campaigns, where through Facebook or others they\u2019re taking the email address and are setting up campaigns so that they\u2019ll see advertisements later in the day, even after work, in their social feeds. That I don\u2019t mind as much, that\u2019s soft-touch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Generating Five and Six-Figure Leads in Three Months<\/h2>\n

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Over time, the ThinkAlike team has developed a 90-day sales cycle<\/a> that enables them to deliver real, measurable value to their clients via cold email outreach. Clients are given the following roadmap for how a campaign will work:<\/p>\n