How to Get More Sales Meetings from Cold Emails

Many sales people wonder how to improve their results from outbound campaigns. Cathy from Woodpecker.co shared with us her knowledge to help you create better cold emails and schedule more appointments with your leads. Let’s get started!

Start a conversation, set up a meeting, sell. As simple as that sounds in words, it’s a complicated process in practice. Outbound sales require lots of patience, some skills, and ideally some tools to handle it efficiently. Here’s more about how to start a B2B conversation, and how to increase your chances of setting up a sales meeting with an email.

Prepare a cold email campaign

Step 1 — Choose prospects

The power of outbound is that you can reach out to anyone you want to. That doesn’t mean you should reach out to everyone, though. The first and the most important part of your campaign should be the choice of your prospects. Choose them wisely, and each next step of the sales process will go smoothly.

You don’t need thousands of prospects, either. Go for quality over quantity here. Make sure you choose people who can actually benefit from your solution. Do some research on your target group. Find some valuable pieces of information about their interests, pains and goals. Use the information to craft personalized emails.

Step 2 — Craft personalized emails

Remember you’re reaching out to people who don’t know you yet. They won’t be interested in you, at first. That’s why you don’t want to start your email with talking about yourself. Start from referring to them — their work, their achievements, their pain points. Build some context for your offer or request.

Here’s an example of a common cold email intro that your prospects will NOT be interested in:

And here’s an example of a prospect-centered intro:

If you think it’s impossible to send cold emails including such an intro at scale, you might be interested in an automation tool like Woodpecker.co.

Here’s a screen shot of template used to write such a personalized intro:

Only after such an introduction, you can write a sentence about your offer. For instance:

And at the end, you can put an easy to respond to question at the end of your email.

Or, you can go straight to a call for a meeting.

Step 3 — Invite for a meeting

Setting up a meeting is not an easy task. Especially if your prospect has a lot on their plate — which, sadly, is the case for most of us these days. A crucial objective for you then should be to make the meeting setup as easy as possible.

Traditionally, you would propose a date or two for your prospect to pick from. Something like:

And this works, if only your prospect has some free spots in one of those two dates. If not, the setup will require at least two more messages between the two of you. In other words — more time, more emails, and more effort.

To avoid that, you can use a tool like Appoint.ly to generate a link to your calendar where they can pick a date suitable for them. After clicking such a link in your email, they will get straight to a calendar like this one:

They don’t need to log in anywhere or set up an account. They just click on a chosen spot, and they can set up a meeting with you in seconds. You, on the other hand, don’t have to worry about different time zones, because the dates in your calendar will be automatically adjusted to your prospect’s current time zone.

With a link from Appoint.ly, your call to action could look similar to this:

If you don’t want to send them an invitation in your first message, you can leave it for the signature, or for one of your follow-ups. In Woodpecker, you can set up a follow-up sequence to be sent automatically, in case your prospect does not respond to your opening email.

Such a sequence including links from Appoint.ly may look like this:

Here’s how to set up your meeting calendar in Appoint.ly and how to generate such a link for yourself.

How to increase your chance for a meeting?

A 20-minute meeting may seem like a little request to you, but it won’t necessarily feel like a little request to your prospects.

That’s why you should be really careful and considerate while creating a campaign that is supposed to bring you a meeting. Remember that your prospects’ time is one of the assets they value the most. Respect that and offer some real value instead.

If you do care about your prospects and your aim is to set up a meeting or a call with them, make sure to follow these three steps:

1. Give them a reason to respond. Build a context that will make them consider actually talking to you. Choose your prospects wisely and personalize your messages. Show them that you cared enough to do some research before reaching out. Give them some value before you ask them for a 20 minutes of their time.
2. Follow-up with them. We all have a lot on our plates. Our prospects do too. Sometimes the first message might get lost in their inbox. That’s why it’s good to send a follow-up after a couple of days and remind them that you still care about their response.
   Most cold email senders ignore that part of cold outreach, so by sending a follow-up you already stand out of the crowd. By using Woodpecker to automate your follow-up sequence, you can make sure that you won’t forget to send a reminder on time.
3. Make the meeting setup easier for them. The less effort they need to put into setting up a meeting with you, the greater the probability that you will actually meet.
   By giving them a link to your Appoint.ly calendar with available spots for a meeting, you’re making it easier to set up a date convenient for both of you. You both save the time you would normally spend for arranging things.

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Cathy Patalas is Head of Marketing at Woodpecker.co — SaaS helping B2B companies directly contact prospective clients via personalized sales emails & follow-ups sent automatically. Cathy writes about cold emailing and prospecting at blog.woodpecker.co.