Don't know where to start? A guide to choosing an industry and cold emailing.
OK first thing's first: Go read the GOLD - No network? No money? No idea? No education? NO PROBLEM! thread by @IceCreamKid.
This post will be addressing step one of the above thread:
So first thing we need to do is to pick an industry. How do we know which industry to pick?
Here are ten criteria that I like to use when selecting an industry to target:
Criteria Number 1: The business currently pays for tools of some kind that increase their efficiency or profitability. This shows that they are interested in taking initiative to grow.
Criteria Number 2: Lucrative (highly profitably) industries are preferred.
Criteria Number 3: Has a profit driven business mindset.
Criteria Number 4: More than 10,000 businesses (or more) in the market.
Criteria Number 5: Reachable by phone, email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or message boards.
Criteria Number 6: Can get person with pain point on the phone
Criteria Number 7: The average successful business earns at least $100k per year in revenue, and ideally profit (estimate this).
Criteria Number 8: The business will not have to change their behavior that much when they use whatever you eventually sell them.
Criteria Number 9: The industry has minimum 0.5% annualized growth until 2021.
Criteria Number 10: The industry is spread out geographically.
Now you may be asking, where will I find all this data.
Here is the main source that I use: IBISworld Industry Reports
(Tip: You may be able to get full access to all the reports through an old university account.)
Throw all your potential industries into a spreadsheet along with all the data from IBISworld:
I assign a weight to each criteria and quantitatively rank each industry by normalizing the data points. This is basically a decision matrix as MJ mentions in his books. I then compare the top 5 ranked industries with the three main criteria, average revenue, margin, and growth. Depending on how you weigh each criteria, you will get a different result.
Choose your industry from your top five results. Or choose a different industry that didn't make top 5, but still meet the above criteria. There are business opportunities in all industries, we just want to increase the probability of success.
Next we need to niche down, please see the difference between industry and niche in this thread: Target Market vs. Ideal Client
To pick a niche within the industry I recommend looking at the current hot trends in the industry. These can be found by Google search and looking at what the top movers and shakers are doing in the industry.
Speaking of the movers and shakers -- how do we find the top 100 performers in our chosen niche?
As suggested by ICK:
To add on to this, I suggest looking at who is spending money on advertising. Keep your eye out for local billboards, see who ranks high in Google, see who stands out in terms of website design/content.
A quick and dirty way to get the top 100 off Yelp is to use Web Scraper for Chrome. It's easy to scrape the company names, website, phone, and address within a couple minutes. I can share my Yelp scraper script if people are interested.
Next comes the dirty grunt work. Visiting each site and finding the decision makers name and contact email.
I will not get too far into detail about finding email addresses as other posts already have done so, but here are some of the tools that I use for finding email addresses.
1. Whois lookup (sometimes the domain owner is the decision maker)
2. Email Permutator (copy paste this result into 3)
3. Bulk email verification
4. Single email verification (I use a combination of 3 & 4)
5. Linkedin Xray Search (search business name and "owner")
6. BBB
Once you have captured all the names and email addresses of the top 100 you can now send them an email. There are multiple services that you can use for a bulk email like this, MailCheat(Chimp), Mailerlite, ConvertKit, Quickmail, HubSpot, the list goes on. However, most of these are paid services geared towards professional bloggers and will ban you if they think you are not complying to anti-spam laws.
Personally, I like to use YAMM, as it allows for complete customization and it works off a Google Sheet, and best off all it's free for up to 50 emails a day. Add some referral emails and you can send 400 emails a day -- more than enough for what we are doing now. I recommend tracking open, reply and bounce rates as well. If you want you can split test multiple subject lines or content by making a separate column for that in your Google Sheet.
I recommend trying to find something you have in common with each decision maker on your list and add this as an intro sentence on top of your standard email. Maybe you went to the same university, maybe you saw a blog post they wrote and it stood out to you, maybe you both love hot dogs. Whatever it is, just try and build some rapport in the intro sentence.
Give this article a read, it is written by the founder of Quickmail. He also has a book on cold emailing if you are interested.
In your email I suggest you politely give a call to action to schedule an interview or call with you. You can provide them with a Calendly link that will allow them to schedule a call directly into your calendar.
You must have an attitude of servitude at all times during this process. You are in it to help them.
It's that easy! Now get talking to people. "Spend your money on diesel and coffee"
OK first thing's first: Go read the GOLD - No network? No money? No idea? No education? NO PROBLEM! thread by @IceCreamKid.
This post will be addressing step one of the above thread:
So first thing we need to do is to pick an industry. How do we know which industry to pick?
Here are ten criteria that I like to use when selecting an industry to target:
Criteria Number 1: The business currently pays for tools of some kind that increase their efficiency or profitability. This shows that they are interested in taking initiative to grow.
Criteria Number 2: Lucrative (highly profitably) industries are preferred.
Criteria Number 3: Has a profit driven business mindset.
Criteria Number 4: More than 10,000 businesses (or more) in the market.
Criteria Number 5: Reachable by phone, email, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or message boards.
Criteria Number 6: Can get person with pain point on the phone
Criteria Number 7: The average successful business earns at least $100k per year in revenue, and ideally profit (estimate this).
Criteria Number 8: The business will not have to change their behavior that much when they use whatever you eventually sell them.
Criteria Number 9: The industry has minimum 0.5% annualized growth until 2021.
Criteria Number 10: The industry is spread out geographically.
Now you may be asking, where will I find all this data.
Here is the main source that I use: IBISworld Industry Reports
(Tip: You may be able to get full access to all the reports through an old university account.)
Throw all your potential industries into a spreadsheet along with all the data from IBISworld:
I assign a weight to each criteria and quantitatively rank each industry by normalizing the data points. This is basically a decision matrix as MJ mentions in his books. I then compare the top 5 ranked industries with the three main criteria, average revenue, margin, and growth. Depending on how you weigh each criteria, you will get a different result.
Choose your industry from your top five results. Or choose a different industry that didn't make top 5, but still meet the above criteria. There are business opportunities in all industries, we just want to increase the probability of success.
Next we need to niche down, please see the difference between industry and niche in this thread: Target Market vs. Ideal Client
To pick a niche within the industry I recommend looking at the current hot trends in the industry. These can be found by Google search and looking at what the top movers and shakers are doing in the industry.
Speaking of the movers and shakers -- how do we find the top 100 performers in our chosen niche?
As suggested by ICK:
To add on to this, I suggest looking at who is spending money on advertising. Keep your eye out for local billboards, see who ranks high in Google, see who stands out in terms of website design/content.
A quick and dirty way to get the top 100 off Yelp is to use Web Scraper for Chrome. It's easy to scrape the company names, website, phone, and address within a couple minutes. I can share my Yelp scraper script if people are interested.
Next comes the dirty grunt work. Visiting each site and finding the decision makers name and contact email.
I will not get too far into detail about finding email addresses as other posts already have done so, but here are some of the tools that I use for finding email addresses.
1. Whois lookup (sometimes the domain owner is the decision maker)
2. Email Permutator (copy paste this result into 3)
3. Bulk email verification
4. Single email verification (I use a combination of 3 & 4)
5. Linkedin Xray Search (search business name and "owner")
6. BBB
Once you have captured all the names and email addresses of the top 100 you can now send them an email. There are multiple services that you can use for a bulk email like this, MailCheat(Chimp), Mailerlite, ConvertKit, Quickmail, HubSpot, the list goes on. However, most of these are paid services geared towards professional bloggers and will ban you if they think you are not complying to anti-spam laws.
Personally, I like to use YAMM, as it allows for complete customization and it works off a Google Sheet, and best off all it's free for up to 50 emails a day. Add some referral emails and you can send 400 emails a day -- more than enough for what we are doing now. I recommend tracking open, reply and bounce rates as well. If you want you can split test multiple subject lines or content by making a separate column for that in your Google Sheet.
I recommend trying to find something you have in common with each decision maker on your list and add this as an intro sentence on top of your standard email. Maybe you went to the same university, maybe you saw a blog post they wrote and it stood out to you, maybe you both love hot dogs. Whatever it is, just try and build some rapport in the intro sentence.
Give this article a read, it is written by the founder of Quickmail. He also has a book on cold emailing if you are interested.
In your email I suggest you politely give a call to action to schedule an interview or call with you. You can provide them with a Calendly link that will allow them to schedule a call directly into your calendar.
You must have an attitude of servitude at all times during this process. You are in it to help them.
It's that easy! Now get talking to people. "Spend your money on diesel and coffee"
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