Cold Outreach

Flakebuster

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A couple weeks ago, I wrote an email with the subject line “Nasty followup.”

That was about a potential auction partner who was stringing me along. He kept pushing off the test for our potential auction, first to next week, then the week after that.

I sent that potential auction partner a slightly snarky message, hence the “Nasty followup” subject line.

My potential auction partner didn’t get offended at my slightly snarky message. He replied to me in a cheerful way. But once again, he told me to push off our auction test until the end of what is now last month.

At the end of last month, I followed up with him again.

At this point, he didn’t reply any more. A few days later, I followed up again. He still didn’t reply.

And then last night, I was going through Nick Bandy’s Ghostbuster Sequence v2.0, which Nick just rolled out yesterday to existing buyers.

Of course v2.0 is bigger than v1.0, but I was genuinely impressed by how cool of a product it is now.

Nick includes some sample case studies in the back. I picked out a message from one of those case studies and sent it to my mostly dead potential auction partner.

And you know what?

After two+ weeks of silence, the dude got back to me! Amazing! Exciting! Incredible! He wrote me to say:

“Hey buddy! Let’s do next month?”

… in other words, more flakiness, more maybe, more mañana.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1) I wanna be transparent about the realities of 1-1 follow-up.

Sometimes you send one message after months, and the deal gets immediately and magically done. Ch-ching!

Other times, like here, you get somebody who is a flake to keep stringing you along. But if it’s a partnership worth tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (as this has the potential to be), it warrants at least sending some messages to push it along or to find out for sure it will never happen.

2) After I got the “Let’s do next month?” reply, I sent Nick Bandy a message. I told Nick his next offer should be about converting people who keep saying “maybe” into people who tell you a clear yes/no. Working title, “Flakebuster Sequence.”

I’m glad I wrote Nick, because he gave me a great recommendation. He suggested I send his “Stage 7” message next, which I called the “Mr. America” technique in my email earlier today.

I’ll wait a couple days and then do exactly as Nick says, and maybe even report on the results of it.

But by the time that happens, it will be too late for you, at least if you’re looking to get Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence (v2.0!) before the price doubles, today at 8pm EST.

Yes, you will still be able to buy Ghostbuster Sequence next week. But why spend more? And why wait? Mañana, mañana, mañana…

Ghostbuster Sequence is a set of copy-and-paste messages that can be worth a pirate ship’s worth of gold bullion to you, starting right now. If you wanna get the lot today before the price goes up forever, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

P.S. If you do get it before the deadline, forward me your receipt. I will personally send you a bonus of equal real-world value, My Secret of the Magi. It sells for $54 on my site right now, and tells you the biggest secret I’ve learned about opening up (not following up on) conversations that lead to business partnerships.

Glossary of 1-1 follow up

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The past few days, I’ve been telling you about Nick Bandy’s system for reactivating leads and deals that have gone silent, called Ghostbuster Sequence.

If you open up Ghostbuster Sequence, you might find yourself confused by the unfamiliar follow-up jargon. I don’t want you to be confused. I really don’t. So let me give you a glossary that defines some of the terms you’ll see inside:

Stage 1: Conversations that have been dead for 2 weeks or more. For conversations like this, send Nick’s “Stage 1” message and proceed to Stage 2.

Stage 2: Conversations that have been dead for less than 2 weeks. In Princess Bride terms, these are “mostly dead” conversations. There’s a big difference between “mostly dead” and “all dead.”

Meme Warfare: A strategic graphical assault on your dead (or mostly dead) prospect, designed to get them to crack a smile and make it easy for them to reply.

The “Jim Camp Nuclear Option”: A 7-word message to send prospects after multiple previous followups have failed to produce a response. (Nick attributes this message to marketer Travis Sago. I happen to know it goes back to negotiation coach Jim Camp.) Says Nick, “It works TOO well.”

The “Negative Reply Pivot”: A message to send high-value prospects who explicitly tell you “NO.”

Educated assumptions: Statements to send your dead (or mostly dead) prospects that break the pattern of constant follow-up questions.

“Mr. America” technique: Nick doesn’t call it this inside his Ghostbuster Sequence. Instead, he calls it “Stage 7.”

I think my name is distinctly better. It comes from the following story from the book Mr. America, about health publisher Bernarr MacFadden:

“With his marriage to Mary officially over, Macfadden had captured headlines by taking a new bride. Johnnie Lee McKinney was a forty-four-year-old health lecturer and former interior designer when she met the seventy-nine-year-old publisher — a sturdy, vivacious blond Texas beauty molded in Macfadden’s preferred silhouette. Theirs was a whirlwind courtship. He attended one of her talks in Manhattan, then hounded her into a lunch date at the New York Athletic Club. After a wholesome meal, the two proceeded to Johnnie Lee’s apartment, where the vigorously amorous Macfadden demonstrated his usual distaste for small talk by unzipping his trousers to reveal what Johnnie Lee called ‘the most exquisite sex organ I had ever seen on a man.’ Johnnie Lee declined her date’s unspoken offer — as well as his shouted proposal to marry her immediately—” though she did end up marrying MacFadden and his exquisite sex organ within the month.

Maybe you find that story crude. Don’t worry. Nick’s take on this technique is anything but crude. In fact, Nick’s use of this technique is professional and yet effective, and can work not just at the start of a courtship, but after everything else has failed to produce a response.

Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence goes up in price from $54 to $97 at 8pm EST tonight. If you’d like to get it before then:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

P.S. If you do get it before the deadline, forward me your receipt. I will personally send you a bonus of equal real-world value, My Secret of the Magi. It sells for $54 on my site right now, and tells you the biggest secret I’ve learned about opening up (not following up on) conversations that lead to business partnerships.

Follow up about yesterday’s follow up

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Yesterday, I sent an email telling readers to:

1. Find out who their highest-LTV customer is

2. Reach out to that customer and simply catch up

A couple hours after that email went out, I got a message from a long-time reader who runs a paid newsletter, which she sells via a $2k yearly subscription. The reader wrote:

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What a great idea, John!

I sorted my Google spreadsheet and found 11 current subscribers stood out as paying in the 5 figs, some of whom surprised me.

Sent them each a nice note since no one in [industry] answers the phone, while they do respond to emails.

Every one of them responded within an hour. Several good convos came out of this.

Also reached out to 6 expired subs worth over 5 figs.

One is in between jobs and will sub once they land somewhere.

Two have retired and miss the blog dearly.

One is waiting for the new 2026 budget to open.

One just re-upped their subscription and thanked me for the reminder.

===

That’s-a what I’m a-talking about!

Particularly impressive I thought was the last line, about somebody who had lapsed as a customer, and who ended up making a $2k purchase after being hit with a little reconnect message.

This morning, I took this to heart and created a spreadsheet which I titled “Follow Up Systems.” It’s a more structured way to follow up with people than simply counting on a kind guardian angel to remind me to do it. My spreadsheet has following columns:

* who

* when (eg. email, Skool)

* where

* about what

* next followup date

* next followup content

I noticed that creating this spreadsheet already took a lot of anxiety around the topic of followup out of my head.

Today, I found myself following up with people just so I could fill in the spreadsheet.

Tomorrow, I figure I will add any conversations in there that have stalled in the meantime.

And then in the days that come, I will sort this spreadsheet by the “next followup date” column, and follow up with people I said I should follow up with then.

Maybe it’s worth creating a spreadsheet like this for yourself right now, if you’re looking for clients, referrals, JV partners…

… except, that’s just the structure, the scaffolding.

What about the content? The stuff you actually send to people?

I figure you have a few options:

1. You can wing it each time.

2. You can craft your own system based on what worked and didn’t work for you.

3. Or you can take somebody else’s system that works.

The Notorious Nick Bandy has a system that works, called Ghostbuster Sequence.

It’s a series of 5 mostly templatized/somewhat adaptable followup messages you can send to clients, referrals, JV partners to get them to say yes or no.

Either a yes or a no is ok. What’s not ok is not following up at all or sending one message and treating silence as a reply, and letting it eat away at your little entrepreneur heart.

Btw, when I say Nick’s system works, here’s a recent story he shared about it:

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Last year I set my eyes on an A+ potential partner, he tried ghosting me. I even wrote about him on the sales page for The Ghostbuster Sequence.

I busted the ever-loving ectoplasm out of that ghost…

Totally flipped the script…

Got HIM chasing ME.

But I got busy…went to Singapore…hibernated for a month, chillin’ with my wife and toddler.

I’m a busy and very important guy.

🦥

He kept following up…over and over again.

And today? Just sent over his entire customer and lead database.

The LIFEBLOOD of his business.

THIRTY THOUSAND CUSTOMERS.

30k!

Do you know how hard I’m rubbing my hands together right now? With an average deal size of $20k and up?

To me. Some random guy. I’m dressed like a K-Drama fanboy in my profile picture. You should not trust this dude with your business. But he did.

Why? Because I’m the best copywriter in America?

No.

Because I read this 9-page, poorly formatted PDF and I know that NO isn’t NO.

===

That 9-page PDF Nick read?

It’s Nick’s Ghostbuster Sequence, which he himself rereads and applies.

The Ghostbuster Sequence will set you back a mighty $54. But it could legit be worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to you if you only put it to use.

If you wanna get it, and better yet, want to start using it today, in just five minutes from now:

https://bejakovic.com/ghostbuster

“The best cold email ever”

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I hate cold emailing at scale, but here’s an idea that works even if you don’t cold email at scale:

Back in 2017, a company called Ramp sent out 50k cold emails.

They were pitching their “print you a custom tshirt” service to 50k small businesses.

The results of this campaign, according to the Ramp blog:

Open rate: 50%

Click through rate: 25% and above

Total revenue: “Tens of thousands of pounds, dollars and euros!” … which sounds actually kind of miserable, but maybe that’s what you get for printing custom tshirts as a business.

If the revenue numbers don’t turn you off too badly, then here’s the cold email that Ramp sen—

Actually, the copy in the email was pretty irrelevant.

The big idea, “the scheme behind it,” was what mattered.

And the scheme behind it was to include an image in the email, featuring Ramp’s CEO, smiling and wearing a custom tshirt that had the logo of the recepient’s company printed on it.

(As you might suspect, it wasn’t really a real tshirt with a custom logo printed on it. It was just a bit of automated photoshopping magic, but it looked perfectly real.)

Along with the “tens of thousands” in revenue, this email got tons of engagement, positive replies, and free publicity for Ramp as recipients tweeted their custom thsirt images and called Ramp’s campaign “best cold email ever.”

So.

It worked for Ramp.

It can work for you too, even if you don’t print custom tshirts as a business, and even if you’re not trying to cold email 50k or so strangers.

Maybe it’s obvious enough what the underlying psychology here is, what principle made Ramp’s cold email a success.

If so, you can run with it and use it to open up new conversations that can lead to deals and business partnerships.

If it’s not 100% clear, or you simply want me to go into the topic in more detail, then I have a little guide on this that I prepared and sold only once before, last year, called Secret of the Magi.

Secret of The Magi covers just one thing — the biggest lesson I’ve learned about opening up conversations that can lead to business partnerships.

The “secret” inside this guide is simple, but very versatile, and most importantly, it gets results. If you want to find out what it is, you can get it below:

https://bejakovic.com/secret-of-the-magi

Masculine and feminine hitchhiking

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Here’s a bit of an allegory about life and marketing:

My friend Marci, part of the group of my long-time friends who assembled during my current visit to Stockholm, told a story of hitchhiking across Europe at age 20 or so.

Marci is from Hungary. At the time of this story, he was living in Budapest. As an adventure, he decided to hitchhike to Amsterdam.

(Of course, when Marci’s mom found out about this, she threatened, begged, and offered to bribe him with anything to keep him from carrying out his plans. “I’ll buy you a plane ticket,” she said. “You will get murdered.” “I’ll have a heart attack.” Marci, for his own reasons, refused to buckle and decided to go on with the hitchhiking.)

On day zero, Marci walked to a gas station where the town ends and the highway begins.

He positioned himself along the road where lots of traffic was passing. He held up his cardboard “Austrian border” sign to his chest. He smiled. And he started waiting…

And waiting…

And waiting.

Nobody was stopping to pick him up. Hours passed.

At some point, another dude on foot walked by. He saw Marci, and did a bit of a double-take.

“Have you ever hitchhiked before?” the dude asked. Marci admitted that he hadn’t.

“You won’t ever get picked up like that.” said the dude. “You have to go to the gas station and start asking people to take you.”

Marci, being new at all this, decided to follow the dude’s advice. So he went to the gas station.

It took him a long time to muster up the courage, but eventually he scoped out a couple that looked nice and friendly enough.

He jogged up to them and asked if they were going towards the Austrian border and could take him.

And… no.

Marci went back to stalking the gas station. It took more time to muster up more courage to ask somebody else. Once again no.

One more time… and another no.

After a half hour or so, Marci had managed to ask five prospects if they were headed his way and would give him a lift.

All said no.

Marci, learning his first lesson, went back to his spot near the highway.

As he was readjusting his cardboard sign for an optimal position on his chest, he spotted the dude who had earlier given him advice about approaching gas-pumping drivers and asking them for a lift.

The dude was lying in the grass and reading a book. And then, Marci saw the dude’s friends arrive. The dude jumped up from the grass, greeted his friends, and the lot of them headed towards the gas station.

They split up. They started instantly asking anyone and everyone who stopped to take them to just the next gas station down the road.

Within five minutes, as Marci looked over from behind his cardboard sign, the dude and his friends all hitched rides and were off.

I think you see where this is going.

The short and shorter of it is, Marci learned his second lesson. He swallowed his pride, went back to the gas station, and did as the dude did.

He asked anybody and everybody who stopped to take him to the next gas station. He got picked up soon enough.

It was the beginning of a long adventure that Marci still talks about fondly. But I won’t retell all that here. Really, as far as marketing goes, the part above is the relevant part.

It’s a kind of allegory for what I’ve heard described as “masculine mojo” versus “feminine mojo.”

Feminine mojo you are probably well familiar with.

It’s what Marci was doing from behind his cardboard sign. It’s also what blog posts are about… as well as Facebook and LinkedIn posts… and even emails like this one.

Masculine mojo, on the other hand, is more like what got Marci to Amsterdam.

It doesn’t necessarily involve going up to strangers, but it does require proactively approaching people, one by one, and asking if they will give you a lift — or a job, or their advice, or help, or whatever — and keeping at it until somebody says yes.

The point of this allegory is not that masculine mojo is better than feminine mojo, or the other way around.

My point is simply to remind you that these two poles exist. In many situations, a blend of both will give you the best results. And when one pole stops working, it’s almost certain that the other pole will work.

By the way, the terms “masculine mojo” and “feminine mojo” are ones I picked up from Travis Sago.

If you’ve been reading my emails for a while, you might get the sense I am about to plug Travis’s Royalty Ronin community, of which I am a member. And that would normally be true. Except, I got the following question from reader Michael Hinchliffe the last time I plugged Royalty Ronin:

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I have no idea what the Ronin thing is?!! Even after listening to Travis Sago yacking on, I’m none the wiser. What is it?

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At bottom, Royalty Ronin is a place to learn from Travis and to apply his ideas. The guy is as close to the second coming of Claude Hopkins as I’ve been able to find, and the results he gets and his students get back up my claim.

Beyond that, Ronin is a place where you can get access to all of Travis’s big courses on topics such as selling high-ticket offers ($5k-$50k) without sales calls and with email only… or partnering with business owners to take over and monetize their “trashcan assets”… or running communities on the back of an email list for quadruple the total value.

These courses, which have sold for a combined $12k in the past, are all available for free inside Royalty Ronin.

Finally, Royalty Ronin is also a place to partner with over 500 other business owners, marketers, copywriters, and investors, plus of course Travis himself.

Travis keeps fiddling with the front-end offer for Royalty Ronin.

There’s currently a free 7-day trial.

In the past, that trial has both appeared and disappeared. It’s not clear that, the next time this free trial disappears, it won’t disappear for good.

If you’d like to see for yourself what Travis is about, and why I keep recommending his Royalty Ronin community:

https://bejakovic.com/ronin

The moat of asking for help

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A few months ago got an email from copywriter Suraj Punjabi. I know Suraj from the PCM community I worked in as a coach last year.

Suraj and I exchanged a couple emails, in one of which Suraj opened up and shared some pretty personal stuff. I’m reprinting it below, with Suraj’s permission. It’s a long message but worth reading in detail if you are looking for clients, copywriting or otherwise. Says Suraj:

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I’ve been on a dry spell since April, but I finally landed a gig thankfully.

It turns out I was busy doing cold outreach that didn’t bother looking at my own data.

So in January, I did just that. Gave cold outreach a break and looked at my own data hard.

And I noticed that literally 100% of my clients for the past 5 years came from referrals through connections I made from Facebook.

I felt pretty dumb for abandoning such a proven strategy in favor of cold emailing.

So, when I went back to leveraging this strategy, I immediately started getting inbound leads.

One of them, a 9-figure powerhouse in the keto space, just became a client.

In fact, I’m starting with them TODAY.

Oh and another gig I got was working under a senior copywriter who currently has his plate full and needed help with emails.

I’ll never forget the lesson life just taught me.

Some coaches swear by cold outreach, others by Upwork, LinkedIn, or X.

They might be right in their own way.

But nothing beats looking at your own past data to see where most of your clients have come from and doubling down on that.

Of course, this is not exactly newbie stuff. You need to have solid data. And I have 5 years worth.

Since PCM until today, I have sent at least 5000 cold outreaches using different strategies.

I have done PCM, I have tried sending conversation starters…

I have tried sending personalized Looms to show them how they can get more subscribers to their list…

I have pitched low risk offers like helping them write a blog just to get my foot in the door.

I made a LinkedIn profile and paid monthly for the premium subscription.

I even went back to Upwork to compete against $10/email copywriters! 🤢🤢🤢🤢

And none of those strategies held a candle to simply reaching out to my Facebook network and asking for help.

Not saying those other strategies don’t work. Perhaps they do work for some people (I know PCM works for A LOT of people), but it didn’t work for me.

Felt like a fish being told to fly. haha.

I felt so stupid when I realized it.

But oh well.

Lesson learned.

===

Two things to point out:

The first is the obvious — expert opinion doesn’t mean much compared to your own direct experience.

The second is less obvious, and it’s where Suraj says, “And none of those strategies held a candle to simply reaching out to my Facebook network and asking for help.”

Asking for help.

Most people don’t have a problem asking for the time, or for directions, or for a book to borrow.

But asking for help finding work — something that suggest genuine unokayness on your part — is something that few people are willing to do.

I never really did it when I was a freelance copywriter, and in need of work, except tentatively, with a few previous clients. (Even that rare and hesitant asking for help got me new leads.)

All that’s to say:

Asking for help works. People like feeling helpful, useful, and important.

At the same time, most people won’t ever ask for help, not in things like getting work, because it’s too threatening to the ego.

That just means that, if you can get over your own hesitations about asking for help, then you’ve just created a kind of moat around yourself and your success, which the hordes of others in your industry are not able to swim, jump, or walk across.

That’s my message for you today.

My offer to you today is my new 10 Commandments book, because this asking for help is actually Commandment I in the book.

It’s easy to read this book and think, “Oh these are interesting ideas, maybe I could use one of them in an email or a headline.”

But the fact is, each of the commandments in this book deals with the fundamentals of effective communication, and each is applicable to pretty much any problem you might be facing, whether personal or business. If you haven’t yet gotten your copy:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

The client-catching benefits of having your own offers

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I got a testimonial to crow about and then a possibly valuable lesson for ya.

First the testimonial. Says Brett Freeman, a copywriter out of the UK who recently signed up for my Daily Email Habit service:

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Fourth day in DEH. Turned the Elvis bullet into an email. Got a sale to my £170 course.

So I’d say the investment has paid for itself 🙂

===

Pretty nice! I’m happy to feature Brett’s little case study, and put it up on the sales page. But of course, it’s really up to Brett’s previous work, with just a bit of extra catalyst that I added via Daily Email Habit.

I talked to Brett a while back (gasp, on Zoom, one to one, just because I wanted to hear who he is and what he’s up to.)

He told me he’s a copywriter, primarily working with fitness brands. He has a PT background himself, and he launched a few offers for fitness folks. (I’m guessing that’s where the £170 sale came from.)

Which leads me to the possibly valuable lesson I wanna give ya.

I once watched an hour-long YouTube video of a guy making cold calls to rustle up leads.

He was selling sales training to local business owners.

The very first call on the video was pretty impressive.

Within a couple minutes, the sales trainer cold-called a local business owner… introduced himself… had a bit of a chat about the business owner’s problems… and then scheduled a time to come into the local business owner’s office and have a proper meeting — with the clear and stated goal of selling something if it works out.

The thing that stuck out to me was how the cold caller introduced himself and opened the conversation, right after the line connected.

He didn’t say, “Hey Bill, I’m a salesman with an offer that might be a good fit for your business.”

He also didn’t say, “Hey Bill, WHO DO YOU HAVE IN YOUR CORNER to help you get the most out of your sales team, with NO RISK to you?”

Instead, he said, “Hey Bill, I’m a business owner here in Towson as well. I’m guessing you’ve never heard of me?”

The online, non-cold-calling version of that is exactly what Brett is doing.

Having your own list and your own offers allows you to genuinely say, “I’m also a business owner” — because you are.

All that’s to say, if you’re a client-chasing copywriter and you don’t have some kind of an offer, you’re missing out on positioning that can help you get exactly what you’re after. The magical thing is you don’t even have to make any sales of your offer for it to still have a positive effect. The sooner you start working on this, the easier your life will get.

And if you are a copywriter like Brett, who is smartly selling your own offers to your own list, however small, then I can only end by inviting you to check out my Daily Email Habit service.

Brett signed up for it, even though he knows how to write emails, as insurance.

If you’d like something similar, or for more info on Daily Email Habit:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

The JV Nothing

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The first book I read in English — English not being my native language — was The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.

Maybe you know the 1984 Hollywood movie? The original book is much bigger, and much more profound.

At the core of it is a boy named Bastian Balthasar Bux, who leads a gray and dreary life.

But then one day Bastian is transported to a fantastical land called Fantastica.

He’s brought there to save Fantastica from an existential threat known only as The Nothing.

The Nothing is not a hole. It’s not black. It’s not white. It just makes people and places in Fantastica disappear. Where these people and places were, nothing is left, or more precisely, The Nothing is left.

But let me get to The Something of this email:

Last year, I went on a kick of cold emailing random business owners in a quest for JV partners.

I did this in part because I was following Travis Sago’s BEAMER training, and also because I was working as a coach in Shiv Shetti’s PCM mastermind, where most people were doing similar cold outreach. I wanted to see if I could do it myself.

My quest for JV partners came to exactly nothing in the end. And that’s even though I had a good offer, and I did my research on people, and though my copy was on point.

What happened? Nobody knows, and nobody ever will.

One minute, my cold outreach messages were in my gmail composer, and after I clicked send, they disappeared. The JV Nothing swallowed them up.

No information ever came back about where I went wrong — whether it was the list, or the offer, or the copy.

I’m sure somebody has good experiences to counter my bad experience with cold outreach.

But from what I’ve seen, it takes huge numbers of cold outreach messages to get any kind of a serious prospect, and even when you get somebody, they rarely turn out to be a good partner, and the relationship tends to be very flimsy.

So what to do?

In The Neverending Story, Bastian eventually saves Fantastica (and himself) via an act of total self-abnegation. He has to give up his own identity, down to every desire, every memory. It turns out to be transformative.

I’d like to propose the same if you’re trying to get JV partners, whether for a list swap, or an affiliate deal, or some sort of long-term collaboration.

Many things go into making that happen and turn out well.

But in terms of getting it at least started, I can recommend the following:

Start with people you know, and who know you.

Once you’ve worked through those, go to people you know, who don’t know you — people you’re a fan of, follower of, genuinely can say feel you know them, even though the feeling is not mutual. (Trust me, if you communicate this, it somehow comes through clearly in a message.)

And once you’ve worked through those people, go to people you make an effort to get to know, over time, either via an introduction, or by following them, reading their stuff, buying their products, writing them, helping them — without your desires or your memories of your planned JV deal in mind.

Anything to avoid the genuinely cold outreach message.

That’s my fantastical tip for you today.

My fantastical offer today has nothing to do with today’s fantastical email. Well, it does, but in a way that I’m not willing to reveal just yet.

For now, if you’d like my help in starting and sticking with a consistent daily email habit, so you can gradually expand the universe of people who know you, and who can connect you, and who you can partner with:

https://bejakovic.com/deh

Ponzi-like cold calling

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I’m rereading David Sandler’s book You Can’t Teach A Kid To Ride A Bike At A Seminar, But You Can Teach Him How To Fish.

Even though the title won’t tell you so, it’s a sales book.

Do you know Jim Camp’s Start With No? Camp’s book is in many ways a rewrite of Sandler’s book. But the original, as always, has stuff that the rewrite doesn’t have…

… such as the following story of Ponzi-like cold calling, which could be useful to many, even if they never make a cold call in their life:

In the early days of his sales career, Sandler cold called business owners to sell self-improvement courses and sales training. It was the only way he knew how to get leads.

Valuable point #1: Sandler got 9 out 10 cold-called prospects to agree to meet him. How?

Simple. He’d offer something for free, something that the guy on other end wanted, something nobody else was offering.

Specifically, Sandler would offer to come down to the prospect’s office and demonstrate his cold calling techniques to the prospect’s sales team, and motivate the lazy bums a little.

Like I said, 9 out of 10 business owners agreed to that.

Valuable point #2: Sandler didn’t offer to come do a demo as a means of making a sale. He did it as a means of making cold calls.

Sandler hated making cold calls. If he had to make cold calls at home, he’d put it off, do it half-heartedly, and not make enough of them to set his weekly quota of appointments.

That’s why he did the scheme above.

He’d show up to the prospect’s office, nervous but also amped up. And then, for an hour or so, he’d cold call — for himself.

He’d spend an hour in the prospect’s office, with the sales staff looking at him in wonder, making cold call after cold call, chatting on the phone, digging into the pain, and in many cases, setting new appointments for himself.

A couple days ago, I wrote that identity is just about the most powerful appeal you can make.

Well there’s a close second, and that’s reputation. In fact, for many of us, reputation might even trump identity. Cause you wanna look good in front of people, right? Even if you have to do things you would never do on your own.

And so it was with Sandler. He’d end an hour at a prospect’s office with another 2-3 set appointments, way more than he’d get at home had he spent the afternoon there.

Plus of course, he’d have a way better chance of closing the sale. Because nothing sells like demonstration.

Such story. Much lessons. So few people who will do anything with it.

And yet, it could be so powerful if somebody would only apply it, whether to cold calling… or to any other persuasion-related activity.

I’ll leave you to ponder that, and I’ll just say my email today is a “demonstration” of the daily email prompt I send out this morning for my Daily Email Habit service.

Maybe it’s easy enough to figure out what today’s prompt was.

Or maybe not.

In any case, today’s prompt is gone. Today’s prompt is lost to history, to be known only by the current subscribers to Daily Email Habit.

But a new prompt will appear tomorrow, to help those who want to write emails regularly, both for their own enjoyment, and to impress and influence others in their market. Because powerful things happen when you know that others are watching you.

If you’d like to read the email I write based on that prompt, and maybe try to guess what the prompt was, click here to sign up to my email newsletter.

Angel Heart cold outreach

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Last night, I rewatched a dark but fascinating movie called Angel Heart:

Mickey Rourke plays private detective Harry Angel, who is on a missing persons case.

Throughout the movie, in order to unearth the next clue, track down his guy, and collect his unfortunate bounty, Harry Angel pretends to be:

– A researcher from the National Institutes of Health, when getting records from a hospital…

– A journalist writing an article, when talking to Toots Suite, a blues guitar player…

– A client coming to have his future told by a spirit medium…

– A customer at a hoodoo supplies store, looking to buy some High John De Conqueror root.

Harry Angel lies. He doesn’t work at the NIH, and no amount of squinting will make that fact true.

You don’t have to lie. But you can still reposition or repackage who you are and what you do, with integrity, right now, in a matter of seconds, to make it more likely people will hear you out. Without lying, you can get the benefit of what Harry Angel does to move his case forward.

Really, it’s the same thing I talked about in my email yesterday — ask what your prospects are looking to buy, instead of how you can sell what you have.

Because this doesn’t only apply if you want to get people to buy your PDFs or coaching or copywriting services or whatever.

It applies equally well if you’re simply trying to open up conversations with people, which can yield valuable information or lead to a valuable relationship or partnership down the line. In other words, cold outreach.

In entirely related news:

If you take the idea above ^^^^ and generalize it a bit, it applies just as well to get people to open up your newsletter emails, read them, and have their mind gradually or suddenly opened to the possibility of giving you some money.

And if you want specific step-by-step instructions on how exactly you can do this today:

https://bejakovic.com/sme