Alex Berman secured his spot as a guest on Radio Free Enterprise by sending me a “cold email” solicitation that was so well-crafted that I not only opened and read it, but also replied to it with a “yes.”
In this conversation he breaks down exactly how he did that and how he is able to generate similar results for himself and his clients while sending out over 1 million cold emails per year.
What follows is a computer-generated transcription of our entire conversation. Please excuse any typos!
Alex Berman 00:00
We’ve sent over a million cold emails this year. And actually just for us, we send about 150 emails every single day.
Dude Walker 00:14
And now it’s time once again for those show that gives glorious voice to 25 million business owners across the fruited plain, Radio Free Enterprise with Frank Felker.
Frank Felker 00:31
Hello, hello, hello. Yes, indeed, I am Frank Felker. Welcome back to Radio Free Enterprise.
My friend, I started doing email marketing back in the 1990s. back before there was even such a thing as HTML email where you could include photographs and graphics and that type of thing. And I thought it was just the most amazing thing I’d ever seen. I had people who were receiving my email newsletter, I send it out through something called listserv.com. And there were people in South Africa and Asia and Europe, who were receiving my emails every week. And I just thought this was the greatest thing ever. But then before you knew it, along came an idea that came to be called spam. And I’m not talking about the kind you make a sandwich out of or what Monty Python’s saying many a song about, but rather on emails that were sent without permission. And before you knew it, you could buy 10 million email addresses on a CD for $50. And just start spamming the heck out of people. And in fact, it did work a small percentage of people would actually buy. But the vast majority of people got very angry about it. And it got to the point where I’ve never I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, when not at all, almost never seen anything else, rise to the level of a national law being enacted, like the can spam act, that lay down the law and said, You can’t do this. But you can do that. And in fact, the spam regulations are different in Canada than they are in the United States. And in any event, spam for the most part, has has gone the way of the dodo bird. But every so often, we will still receive an unsolicited email from someone. And generally, they’re trying to get us to do business with them. And I received such an email from a man named Alex Berman the other day. And Alex contacted me and said he wanted to know if if I had room for another podcast interview, I believe was what the subject line was. And as it turns out, Alex’s desire was to be interviewed on Radio Free Enterprise. And in fact, he is our guest today. And so let me welcome Alex Berman to Radio Free Enterprise.
Alex Berman 02:41
Thanks for having me on, Frank, it’s a great opportunity.
Frank Felker 02:44
Well, let me just try to wrap up the story here. And then we’ll get into the meat of it, Alex. So you did send me this solicitation and I, I was intrigued by it, I might go so far as to say I was a bit charmed by it. And as somebody who’s been involved in marketing for a long, long time, I understand how difficult it can be to break the ice with an absolute stranger and get them to actually commit to a call to action that you’re offering to them. But you were able to get me to do that. And I I saw what you were doing. But I went along with it anyway because I just thought it was great. So let me ask you, you know, we’re all familiar with spam. We know what that’s all about. What you sent me was not anything close to spam, you call it cold emailing? How would you define cold emailing? And how is it different from spam? Sure, so
Alex Berman 03:33
I’d say the difference between cold emailing spam and spam as two factors. The first is you I know that you interview people similar to me. So I did some research ahead of time. And I looked, and I saw that you had some emails on like, how to get on podcasts, and you had some other, you had a background in email marketing. So I knew that your podcast was going to be a good fit. So the first tool is, it’s not cold if you’re able, or it’s not spam, if you’re able to do enough research to make sure you’re reaching out to the right people. And then the second thing is, it’s not spam, if it’s customized per person. So as you mentioned, the email I sent you, I called out the way that you’re super charismatic when you talk to your listeners. And he also called out your episode that you did on podcast appearances. So it was custom for you, along with some pitches with some topics that we could talk about.
Frank Felker 04:20
So this was basically digital kissing up to me.
Alex Berman 04:25
Yeah, and like you said, you did see what I was doing, but it didn’t matter.
Frank Felker 04:31
I think that’s great. Yes, it’s still it was just something that worked no matter what. And while we’re talking here, I’m going to I’m going to pull up that email at some point if I can find it and see if I can choose a couple of the particular phrases that you use. That worked in particular. So you were with a company that’s called InspireBeats, is that correct? Yes. And you guys use cold emailing as a tactic to generate leads for clients.
Alex Berman 05:02
Is that correct? Yeah, we send we’ve sent over a million cold emails this year. And actually just for us, we send about 150 emails every single day, just to pitch our own service to clients.
Frank Felker 05:12
now and so let’s just start with your example, then 150 a day, do you actually do a similar level of research on each one of those recipients that you did with me?
Alex Berman 05:22
Yeah, so that’s actually our big differentiator, a lot of cold emailing shops or outbound marketing agencies will write what they call a really good template. And they’ll segment your users. And we’ll send out a really good template to all these people. We found though, we tried doing the template because that’s, that’s actually a way easier way to go about it. template emails got about a 1% conversion rate, the type of email I sent you, and the type of email that we sent for our clients and ourselves. Meeting book rate is about two to 3%. And response rate is six to seven. Usually,
Frank Felker 05:56
now, okay, so six to 7%, respond, and then have them about a third will actually then speak to you on the phone or take whatever the next step in the sales funnel is,
Alex Berman 06:08
right? It’s a, it’s about half. But yeah, that is, oh, two to three times more effective than doing the template in emails. That’s why we’ve moved towards that model.
Frank Felker 06:18
That’s an extremely valuable service. And we’ll get to that later point in the interview how you guys charge for what you do. But I’ve used the example, many times have a relationship between a prospect and your company being very much like dating, somebody has to break the ice, and intrigue the other party sufficiently to get them to engage in a two-way conversation. And all of us are fearful that we’ll walk up and try to break the ice and get to shut down slapped down and embarrassed. And it’s the kind of thing that just the fear of that type of outcome is enough to keep people from doing it. So I what I’m driving at here is it’s clear that you guys have figured out the right words, or the right angles to use to actually break the ice and break through to the consciousness of the person you’re reaching out to. Can you give us any sort of strategic tips on how you do that? Sure.
Alex Berman 07:15
Um, so it’s not about I know you said using the right words, and you did relate it to dating. It’s not like pickup, though. Where I don’t think you can use scripts and be successful. Whatever you don’t,
Frank Felker 07:28
either, although I guess
Alex Berman 07:30
that’s what I was saying. But that’s like the pickup mindset is like use pricing.
Frank Felker 07:32
Yeah, right.
Alex Berman 07:34
So yeah, I don’t think that works in sales either. So what I use is frameworks. And that’s what we do as a company as well. So in the subject line, I like to call out, you know, something specific about what’s going on with them, and then their name. So for the email I sent to you, it was room for another interview, Frank called out your name right there in the subject line. If you were selling, you know, to startups, we just sent out in an email about a Ruby on Rails list. And it was we built this tool that instantly finds Ruby projects, is that something you’d be interested in?
08:05
That’s great.
Alex Berman 08:06
Yeah, it clocked in at about 81 characters, which is, you know, one character too long for a subject line. But it still had an incredibly high open rate and meeting book rate. So subject line that’s customized that fits their criteria, then you jump in, you know, with an intro, like, hey, Frank, then personal line about something about their business. So I came across your podcast and love the charismatic way you interact with listeners was the one I sent you came across your agency, look through your portfolio and love the work you did on the Tyson website redesign. Also, that would be a great one for that. Something that you really like about their business. In that first line, then you go into your pitch. I try to keep it around one to two sentences. So for the one I sent you, it was ahead of growth for a company called InspireBeats, we do fully manage sales and lead gen for startups and agencies. Similar to lead genius, naturally, we’re trying to get the word out. So quick, one sentence, tell them what you want to do. Then, for what I sent you, I sent bullet points on potential topics. But you don’t have to do that if you’re just selling stuff. So you can just after your pitch, you know, you go into what you do if it’s not, you know, in that first sentence. So, for the Ruby on Rails list, it was like, we built a tool to find 60 to 70. Ruby on Rails projects from scouring over 100 plus paid meetup, Facebook and other private groups is where, where we’ll just send you all the project details and your business development team can reach out and book a meeting. And then so that was the pitch for that then you do a call to action. So is that something you’d be interested in Mike? If so, I’m here if you want to book a call, or here’s a link with more info. Thanks, Alex. PS. So the last thing is a PS line that pulls something else personal. Usually I go to their social media profile for that. So for you I talked about since your podcast or talked about your past episodes, so Awesome episode about the power of podcast appearances. A lot of times though, they’ll call out on their Twitter profile that they’re like into climbing up cliffs, or they’re into sports. I don’t reference sports personally, because I’m not a fan of it. But or they’re into dogs or they’re into to craft beer. So like PS, saw on Twitter, you loved craft beer, any good bars in Boston, they,
Frank Felker 10:23
yeah, might be one or two. That’s great. I, by the way, I will post with your permission, Alex, I will post the exact text that you emailed to me that that resulted in this interview, so that everybody can see exactly how you how you phrased it, and not the least of which because, as you you’ve referenced the episode I did about the power of podcast appearances. A big challenge for people trying to get interviewed is to send an email that’s going to get the attention of the host and get them on the show. And so this almost exact word for word people could use. They obviously change it for the particulars of the person they’re sending it to. But I think it’s fantastic.
Alex Berman 11:06
Yeah, go ahead and post it. The thing that I would recommend for your listeners, though, is don’t use it word for word, take the feeling of what I’m talking about, maybe use the subject line. But the first sentence and most of this email was different for your podcast than it is for all the other podcasts. I spend, I spend up to five, I see
Frank Felker 11:24
you’re talking to other podcast hosts as well. I see how you are.
Alex Berman 11:29
Actually I’m doing 10 podcast interviews a month. That’s what our That’s awesome. I have my marketing team doing right now.
Frank Felker 11:35
Fantastic. Just great. Well, I, you know, I can see that you and I could talk talk talk. So let’s move forward, though. On to some additional stuff. You guys, what you’re really doing is generating leads, obviously, that’s what you do. And I heard from another interview that you had done, that you had started out offering this type of thing as sort of like software as a service. But it turned out that really what the clients wanted was then leads get us the leads. And so that all starts that’s a process and it starts with prospecting. How do you go about deciding who you’re going to target for a given client? Sure.
Alex Berman 12:12
So a lot of the bigger startups, especially if they’ve been doing sales for a while, they’ll have an ideal client profile. Maybe they’ve hired a sales consultant to write this thing out. But a lot of solopreneurs and lifestyle businesses, like if you have less than 10 employees or something like that, it’s not as thought through. So the way we try to think about a few things. So the first thing is, what have your past clients look like? And can we clone that. So let’s say you’ve worked mostly with agencies in the past, like digital agencies that have between 25 and 75 employees. So that’s the first thing that we want to write on the top of our ideal client profile that we’re coming up with. So the first step is think about the past clients. And then what we try to find based on that is buying signals, other factors that we can find that are publicly available online, that we can then use to further qualify before we ever email them, because we don’t want to blast out, you know, an email to 1000 agencies that aren’t, you know, qualified, wouldn’t make any sense. So buying signals, for instance, could be if you’re selling design work, right. Maybe they’re posting on a job board, and they’re looking for user experience designers, that means they have a need for it. Or if you’re if you’re selling like chief security officer outsourcing or technology outsourcing, you can look around for keywords, maybe they’ve posted a tweet, a tweet or a blog post, like complaining about how they’ve been hacked recently. So you want to find those blog, or those buying signals. And most companies are pretty open about posting things online like that. Wow,
Frank Felker 13:43
that’s great. I love that, that you’re not just looking for even you already, you know, narrowing it down to a specific avatar, but then you’re looking for somebody that has the highest propensity to buy based upon what they’ve been talking about recently. Exactly.
Alex Berman 13:58
The way that I see it, and I might have stolen this from Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue. The more the more high quality the leader, the more qualified, the less you have to actually do when it comes to the email. So for instance, if someone really wants like SEO, if they’re just dying to hire somebody to do SEO, and you message them with a one sentence, email that with no subject that says, hey, I do SEO, I’d love to help you. They’ll probably get back to you because they’re in dire need of somebody.
Frank Felker 14:25
That’s awesome. And I wouldn’t worry at all about stealing that. I believe it was Picasso that said, Good artists copy great artists steal.
Alex Berman 14:34
Yeah, just try to whenever I can remember that I’m stealing I try to give credit back.
Frank Felker 14:38
Yeah, I do too. I do the exact same thing. Always say sores. Yeah. Okay. So what kinds of companies is your solution best suited for?
Alex Berman 14:47
So anyone in the business-to-business space, it’s perfect for 70% of our clients right now our software as a service businesses so anything that is like a WordPress plugin agency or Maybe you, you know, sell some kind of pricing solution to Amazon affiliates, any sort of software as a service like standard startup style company. And then the other 30% are digital agencies, or not digital agencies, any sort of agency. So like social media companies, PR companies, mobile app development firms, that
Frank Felker 15:18
sort of thing. And who are they targeting that you guys go after and prospect, say, the social agency or somebody like that? Yeah, well,
Alex Berman 15:28
so you were at, you’re asking about success stories in the pre interview, I can go into the success story.
Frank Felker 15:33
Actually, if that kills two birds with one stone, that’s great.
Alex Berman 15:36
So one of our one of my favorite clients is named Sherman Lee, and he runs this company called good audience. And he’s a former Yahoo engineer who launched a social media company, and he’s been using us to book leads for him. And basically, he’s been our client for around six months, but the people that he’s targeting are startups, so funded startups that have, you know, maybe 1520 employees, and a social media presence that’s growing. So we’re able to go and we’re able to see which company Twitter accounts have increased followers by like, 30%, in the last 30 days or something, which means that they’re starting to ramp up social media, which means that whoever’s running it the marketing manager, whoever would have a need for good audience, because he outsources all of it.
Frank Felker 16:17
Wow, that’s awesome. You guys are really smart. I love that. Well, you know, depending on what industry you’re targeting, and you just describe the types of industries you target. But there are a lot of companies out there that are sort of lead gen companies like in the home improvement and construction industry companies like Home Advisor, and Angie’s List. And then there are others that you more directly compete with, like you had mentioned in your original email lead genius. What differentiates InspireBeats from other companies that generate leads.
Alex Berman 16:52
So the quality of leads is, I’d say it’s higher, because we have the proprietary tools. And then we also do that prospecting that I just talked about, which is finding the buying signals. Also, as far as I know, no other company does custom emails, right now, everybody has some sort of email template, or taking emails and like running them through like a bunch of different user groups, and basically automating things and I, me and the rest of the team out here, we hate robotic people to death, like we love customizing emails, and it’s, it’s so much more effective. So that’s the main way we’re different.
Frank Felker 17:27
So and do you send these then literally one at a time.
Alex Berman 17:31
So we use a proprietary mail merging software. So what’ll happen is, we’ll write you know a few custom sentences, and then come up with like a master template. So let’s say 40% of the email is a template. And then 60% of the email are these custom sentences. So like, how we found you, and like a
Frank Felker 17:50
compliment, you put those into the database associated with that contact.
Alex Berman 17:55
Yeah, and that way, we can send a bunch at once. And it’s a lot more efficient to do it that way than trying to send everything one to one. Yeah, I
Frank Felker 18:01
was wondering how you could get 150 out a day. It just, that’s just a lot of concentrated creative work, which would be enough to, you know, burn somebody out pretty quickly.
Alex Berman 18:13
But David’s got the David’s got the process down. He’s our biz dev lead. He sends emails 150 a day, but it takes about two minutes per email. He’s got it down that quickly. I’ve tried to do it too. When I send cold emails, I’m about to 32 minutes, 30 seconds. And then Wilson who’s our founder. He’s also about, you know, two, three minutes. So David’s, like crushing us. All right.
Frank Felker 18:35
That’s still five hours a day of doing this.
Alex Berman 18:39
But he’s biz dev like, what else? Yeah, I’m going to do Yeah,
Frank Felker 18:41
what else is he going to do? That’s great. So you’re telling me Dave, then is the one David sent me this email?
Alex Berman 18:48
No, I sent you this email. So I run the marketing team. So I do all the marketing stuff. So outreach for podcasts, speaking events, guest blogging, I respond to heroes, and then also testing new products. So I do cold emailing when we’re launching new products like that Ruby on Rails list is just talking about,
Frank Felker 19:04
where are you guys located?
Alex Berman 19:06
So we’re over in South San Francisco, near San Mateo. Okay.
Frank Felker 19:12
And how much does this cost? I mean, the I and before you tell me a number, what have you people who don’t understand that customers cost money, they need to they need to get that figured out. I worked. The subject of the first book I wrote was the experience I had working as a salesman for a home improvement company. And that company had this whole flow down to a science very much like you guys do. They used other media, they use television and radio and newspaper advertising, that kind of thing. But they would spend over $500 a lead because the value of the lifetime value of the client coming in was also quite high. So people need to understand that leads, you know, the cost of a lead can range anywhere from you know, $1 to a minute In dollars, it doesn’t really matter how much should lead cost, it’s only relevant to what the value of that lead is. So, with that, having been said, How do you guys charge? And how much do you charge for generating leads for people? Sure.
Alex Berman 20:13
Um, so there’s actually a really great post by Neil Patel, who does a lot of digital marketing. He read through.
Frank Felker 20:19
Yeah, I’ve heard him interviewed.
Alex Berman 20:21
Yeah, so he runs through, he has this really detailed post when he was testing things on how much things cost. And yeah, his LinkedIn leads were about $5,000 per lead. And it’s his lowest one was like $30, a lead from Facebook or something like that. And then there’s also data from Adobe that says that outbound email gets a 39 times return on investment. So every $1 you spend on outbound email, you’ll get $39 back, which is almost double the other channels, so you know, higher than Facebook higher than direct marketing, all of that stuff. So are packages to answer your original question? So we have two outreach packages. One is scale, and it’s us reaching out to 200 people per month, that one is 699. And then we have a bigger package for 1799, where we reach out to 700 people per month, and then they go up, you know, we’ve got custom packages and everything from there.
Frank Felker 21:15
So when you say you reach out to let’s use a number of 1000 people, then based on the response rate that you get, the you would get, what was it then? 60 responses and 30 appointments? Or how would that work?
Alex Berman 21:31
Yeah, so I don’t even like to count responses, right? Because they’re not really worth anything. I only really care, you know, 1000 times 2%. Yeah, that would be about 20 appointments, 20 to 30 appointments per month. And that’s right in line with what we’re getting for Sherman over a good audience also.
Frank Felker 21:47
Awesome. That’s great stuff. I can think of a lot of different companies for whom your service is an excellent fit. And speaking of scale, are you guys in a position to be able to scale yourselves as you’re able to lay on new clients? Oh, yeah. So
Alex Berman 22:03
our team is growing. We’re nine employees right now. We’re expecting to be about 15. By the beginning of next year, I’m getting two other people on my marketing team underneath me now I already have two. So I’m going to have four. And then our biz dev team is growing. So yeah, we’re, we’re expanding pretty quickly.
Frank Felker 22:20
That’s great. This is all really interesting stuff. And very exciting. You know, in one of our email exchanges, you mentioned that conferences are often an overlooked lead generation opportunity, what what were you talking about them?
Alex Berman 22:34
So when you go to a conference, right, the way that most people approach it, especially people that are in I’ve seen this a lot with agencies, they’ll go to conferences, where people are very similar to them. So for instance, conversion, Excel is this conversion, like internet marketing conference. And if you go there, you’ll see that everybody there, most of the people there 6070 80% of people, there are internet marketing consultants. And what that what happens is, you end up with a bunch of people that sell internet marketing, trying to sell each other at a conference, which is
23:05
good luck with that.
Alex Berman 23:07
Yeah. And it was the same. I was just at sales stack in San Francisco, which is a bunch of salespeople. And it was just a bunch of lead generation companies trying to sell each other. So that was a waste of my time. However, I was just in a month before that I was in Seattle for Seattle interactive, which was an advertising and social media conference. So for my type of business for, you know, lead generation and sales. What that meant was every one of the people that had booths there that were trying to get into advertising, were people that would need our Legion. So what me and Wilson did was we went booth to booth and talk to all the salespeople, they were forced to talk to us, right. And we were able to give our pitch for a service. And out of the 15 people there, seven or eight turned into qualified leads for us.
Frank Felker 23:53
You know, I have tried, that’s not the exact same approach, because obviously, you guys are really masters at using the right words to get somebody’s attention and engagement. But I’ve run into a problem in the past where people who are paying for a booth at a trade show don’t appreciate getting pitched by somebody who just got a ticket, that’d be a member of the audience. How do you get around that? do you how do you and they are also supposed to be there gathering in new clients and doing their job rather than getting pitched by somebody else? How do you guys get around that?
Alex Berman 24:24
So if your service can help them, right? They’re going to they’re going to like what you do ask some qualifying questions up front. So for instance, at Seattle interactive, I was I walked up to some random like mobile app development firm. And I was asking them, and it turned out, I was talking to the head of product. So I was asking about their sales processes and stuff. And he actually turned and he’s like, Oh, my head of biz dev is right here. And he just called her over and I was talking to her and then it was qualified at that point.
Frank Felker 24:49
I say, Sure. Right. He introduced you. That was nice.
Alex Berman 24:53
So that’s what I would recommend it. If you’re worried that people might get annoyed, that just sounds like fear. And if What’s holding you back? It’s not, you know, the best mindset to get into. So try it and see what happens. If, you know if your service is good, and if it fits their needs, they won’t, they won’t mind talking to you. And in fact, they’ll, you know, they might even turn away potential customers to keep the conversation going.
Frank Felker 25:16
And in your case, obviously, what you’re talking to them about is getting more customers, which is their objective and being at the tradeshow in the first place,
Alex Berman 25:24
right. But any, any business, you know, makes clients more money at some point. So like even an accounting firm, you know, make some more money by saving time, or things like that. So if your business has, you know, a benefit, they’ll love to talk to you.
Frank Felker 25:39
That’s great. Well, I can’t believe we blown through the time that I had allotted for this already. But I kind of had a feeling when I knew what we were going to talk about. And it all started with that great email that you sent me. If somebody listening is excited about what you guys do, and would like to learn more about how you could implement your processes to help them what’s the best way for them to get in touch with InspireBeats Alex? Sure. So
Alex Berman 26:03
just go over to InspireBeats calm, and you can either pick one of the packages directly from the site, or there’s a question form, somebody will get in touch with you, you know, ask about your needs, and, and that should be it. We try to keep it as painless as possible the starting of the of the process.
Frank Felker 26:21
That’s a great idea. Another way to make it easy for people to engage with you. Well, Alex Berman, I really appreciate you spending this time with us today on Radio Free Enterprise. Thanks, Frank. Thanks again to Alex Berman. And thank you for listening. What we need to do now is you need to go to the iTunes Store and subscribe to the Radio Free Enterprise podcast while you’re there, maybe leave me a little rating. Maybe leave me a little review. Just ask him. After that head back over to Radio Free Enterprise calm and register with the site so you can stay on top of all the exciting doings happening here at RF HQ. If you promise to do that. I’ll promise to remain your fearless host Frank Felker. Until next time, I’ll see you on the radio.
Dude Walker 27:06
A role model though flat footed, potbellied, balding, middle aged white men everywhere, here’s Frank Felker.
