"The future of marketing is authentic engagement on a personal level."

I recently had a great conversation with a B2B cold outreach expert, Bill Stathoupoulos, the CEO of SalesCaptain.io. 

I’ve never tried cold outreach before, mainly because I personally don’t find it effective as a recipient of the emails. 

In my mind, cold email is a competing in a noisy, commoditized, and spammy world. 

But in reality, I’m completely wrong. 😦 

That’s just because people are not executing on cold email correctly.

After speaking with Bill, I have changed my mind and see the potential of cold email for B2B outreach. 

Especially when layering in AI tools. 

Read on to learn more about the strategies, or just listen to the full conversation I had with him here.

💡 Strategy: Improve Your B2B Sales Outreach with AI

The first step to successful cold email campaigns is to define your ideal customer profile (ICP) and deeply understand their needs, challenges, and opportunities. 

If you want to learn how to use AI to do create your ICP, I went in depth about it here, with prompts and all.

Once you’ve segmented, you will break out your prospect list into meaningful buckets.

AI tools like Clay can automate the segmentation process by enriching prospect data from multiple sources such as LinkedIn, Crunchbase, and BuiltWith. 

Once you have your segmented prospect list, AI can assist in generating email copy, subject lines, and hooks. 

However, the effectiveness of the AI-generated content depends on the quality of the inputs you provide. 

It's crucial to thoroughly brief the AI on your ICP, their specific needs, your unique offering, and what optimized copy looks like. By feeding the AI this context, it can generate more relevant and engaging content.

Here’s the key thing that people get wrong with cold email: 

The goal is not to sell them via the email. 

Your goal should be to simply start a conversation! 

No one is going to buy from the first cold email. 

But once you get the reply, your opportunity opens up.

🔍 Use Case: AI-enhanced Prospecting

Use AI to analyze data from your existing customers to refine your ICP. 

This includes identifying common characteristics, behaviors, and needs that your best customers share.

There are several ways that you can use AI to help do this. 

By the way, Bill used to have a team of 25 people specifically for this role. 

Now, that whole team can nearly be replaced by AI. 🤯 

Lookalike Modeling:

Once your ICP is established, employ AI to scan through databases and social platforms to identify new prospects that match your ICP's characteristics (lookalike prospects). 

This method expands your potential reach to those most likely to be interested in your offerings.

Qualification and Prioritization: 

Implement AI algorithms to automatically score and qualify these new prospects based on their fit and engagement potential. AI can prioritize prospects who are more likely to convert, allowing your sales team to focus their efforts where they're most needed.

Using AI here has big impacts on scale, which is the key factor in cold outreach, is hitting numbers: 

• Streamlined prospecting process, identifying high-quality leads faster.

• Improved efficiency by focusing on leads with the highest conversion potential.

• Expansion of your target audience through intelligent lookalike modeling.

🤖 Process: Your Cold Outreach Blueprint

Here’s a more detailed process of how Bill sets up his B2B cold email campaigns: 

1. Gather Comprehensive Data: Collect initial prospect data from diverse sources such as 

LinkedIn, company websites, and event attendee lists for a broad segmentation base.

2. Employ AI Tools: Use AI segmentation tools to efficiently process and categorize the collected data based on predefined criteria.

3. Enhance Data with Specific Tools: Integrate specialized tools (e.g., Clay, Storeleads) to enrich prospect data with detailed insights like funding status and technology usage.

4. Define Precise Segmentation Criteria: Develop clear, detailed criteria for segmentation that reflect potential needs and align with your offerings, focusing on factors like industry, company size, and tech stack.

5. Automatically Classify into Buckets: Use AI to automatically segment prospects into meaningful buckets, making it easier to target and create relevant marketing efforts.

6. Personalize Outreach Meaningfully: Craft personalized messages for each segment, moving beyond basic personalization to address specific characteristics and needs of each group.

7. Implement Efficient Workflows: Create automated workflows that place prospects into the correct buckets based on the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), ensuring relevance and efficiency.

8. Refine Segments Continuously: Regularly assess and refine segmentation criteria and buckets to stay aligned with market changes and performance feedback.

🔬Expand: Keep Your Lead List Fresh

Your cold outreach is only as good as your data. 

So it’s important to continuously update with data enrichment tools. 

This ensures that your outreach efforts remain targeted, personalized, and relevant.

Going back to the outreach process, it requires you to identify your data sources, link it to your database, and then determine which fields you want to keep updated. 

The AI regularly checks for updates and incorporates new data into your prospect records, enabling dynamic segmentation.

Monitoring and refining the data enrichment process is key to success. 

By analyzing the impact on your outreach results and optimizing your AI algorithms, you can improve the quality and relevance of the enriched data.

This will keep your prospect database a valuable asset that drives better results for your cold outreach campaigns.

📖 Resources: Deep Dive into AI-Driven B2B Sales Outreach

For those new to cold email, there can seemingly be a learning curve that includes the art (messaging and sales) and science (warming up email domains).

Bill has a detailed resource to walk through the process of getting your cold email campaigns set up:

Now it’s always a challenge to know exactly what to say in your outreach.

Remember, the goal is to get a reply.

Here is Bill’s framework for effective cold emails:

And if you want to see how others do it, Lemlist has a nice resource with different templates based on criteria.

That’s it for this week. Hope that this was helpful in showing how AI can improve targeting and outreach.

See you next week, until then, stay Super, Marketers.

Gen