144 - [Interview] Low Volume, High Conversion Cold Email with Brad Smith

So, like, how many people are actually going to convert at the end of your funnel? And then you have to work it back to see if it's actually worthwhile to do. So, you know, if you can close or get to, you know, an opportunity stage from every two meetings or something, and then every four opportunities turns into a win, then think about how many emails you have to send to get those meetings that you need to get the win, and then think it's actually worthwhile based on that ticket number, too. So, I would just recommend doing the work back math on that, but no, 50 would be way too small. I would be thinking, personally, too, because you're thinking about this in multi-cadences. This is a campaign that you'll run over the course of multiple months. I mean, you will have your cold callers be calling them, too. I mean, it's not just one channel. You're touching them from multiple different channels. So, not only is that person a big way to be getting an email, they'll be getting a LinkedIn connection from me, from someone that works for me. They'll be getting, you know, targeted ads from LinkedIn. That's Brad Smith, Senior Director of Sales and Operations at AI-Dash, a firm that sells AI-driven vegetation management to utilities. What the heck is that you ask? Well, it turns out that lots of utilities like electricity providers need to manage the vegetation that can collide with their infrastructure. In California, poor vegetation management has led to bankruptcy and billions of dollars in lawsuits for PG&E alone, the major utility there. So, what AI-Dash does is provide satellite information to help utilities prioritize their maintenance to avoid costly downtime and lawsuits. So, how in the heck do you sell that? One thing to note here is that the market is incredibly small. Yes, there are 3,300 total electric utilities in the US, but only 200 account for the vast majority of the market. So, if you're going to do cold outreach, you better do it well. I brought Brad on to talk about his approach to business development and client acquisition in a highly specialized field with an incredibly small market. We talk about strategies, tools, timing, the downsides of cold email, his approach to prospecting and messaging, and why low volume and super low tech is his preferred approach. Welcome to the Serve Don't Sell Podcast, a show about growth strategies for creative firms, consultants, and independent experts. I'm your host, Liston Withrall, and I'm on a mission to make 100 million people world class ethical communicators because the world needs more good people, yes, even in business. If you like what you hear, sign up for my email newsletter at ServeDon'tSell.com and get my top 10 podcast episodes and articles right when you sign up. Now my interview with Brad right after the short break. Hello and welcome once again to the ServeDon'tSell podcast and I have a very special conversation today with Brad Smith, who is a cold email expert with a background in services firms. Brad, welcome to the podcast. Thanks. Thanks for having me. So why don't we get started by you just telling us a little bit about your background and what makes you an expert in cold email and client acquisition? Sure. So I've been doing cold email for the entirety of my career. So over a decade, I've been working with tech service companies to pretty much exclusively throughout that time. And the primary channel of client acquisition has been outbound. So within that sub segment, if you're thinking calls linked in all those other touch points, email is a primary channel of conversion. So that has definitely been my specialty over the past decade. And how did like how did that start? Did you when you were a kid and they asked you what you want to be when you grew up, you set a cold email expert? Something similar. I think that when you're a guy who learned to manipulate your parents maybe and then so that kind of, you know, turned into being persuasive, you know, communication and running communication is one of my strong suits. So I think it was just a good fit. All right. So I have a lot of clients, a lot of people in the audience, everybody is always interested in new clients, right? They want additional stuff. And one of the ways to do that, you know, of course, I talk a lot on this podcast and on my blog about marketing and developing expertise and broadcasting your expertise through, say, a podcast or blog or YouTube or whatever your channel is. And that can be one way to attract people. Of course, cold email is, has this sort of sexy like cash machine feeling when people hear it. It's like, oh, if I just load up enough contacts, you know, if I load up 100 contacts and I get two clients, why not load up 10,000? So how do you think about cold email as a strategy and what is maybe kind of the right mindset to have in terms of what cold email can do for client acquisition? Sure. And, you know, to touch on your kind of thoughts about, hey, if we can just increase the size of our email list, then the conversion rates don't have to do the work and then we'll gain exponential clients that way. It's not like the easiest way to think about it because email marketing, you have to think about the top of the funnel, which is your addressable market, times that conversion rate to get to your inbox. So deliverability is also important. If you have 10,000 contacts and you hit send and you don't get engagement, Google and all the other email providers are going to be noticing that. So it will be less likely that your email is going to inboxes in the future. So you should not look at it from a just increase the size of your list and then the results will come. It's getting the right message to the right person at the right time. So having that threading of the needle because if you be components in place, then you're not going to get the conversion. I mean, no one is going to respond to a cold email if it doesn't hit a pain point that is timely for them. So having relevant research done prior to your outreach is probably the first step that you need to do and think about what's going to be convincing towards that person. So just a quick clarification before you keep going. When I think of the term email marketing and I think of it as an industry term of art, which means one to many, I'm going to go broadcast a marketing related email. So for instance, today I sent an offer to join a free training I'm going to do to my list. When I think of cold email, another industry term of art, I think of something that functions closer to one to one or one to few email. So maybe I have 100 or 200 prospects that I'm going to go after and maybe I use something that allows me to do merge tags to personalize all of those. Do you think about it the same way because you use the term email marketing and I just wasn't sure what you were referring to? Yeah, maybe it's the type of ambiguous term that's used to describe many different ways of doing it. But the one to many thing and even like the amount of people in your list isn't what a focus of mine is. There was this phrase by Abraham Lincoln to his tailor and the tailor asked him how long he wanted his jacket. He said long enough. And the same way with a list, if you have a common attribute which you're marketing through, then find the people about that similar attribute. And that has to be like, I mean, you have to have a segment, a demographic, all these different way types of, you know, the message should be relevant equally to everyone in your list. So however, that big that list ends up being is however, however, big that list is. So I wouldn't be looking at it from a size perspective, but as a, what's the common thread? Okay. Let me try another way. So I, when I think of email marketing, I think of using MailChimp or ActiveCampaign, like an email marketing tool. When I think of cold email, I think of text-based emails that feel like I sent it to one single recipient. So what, what, what are you referring to? So we use tools. I mean, we'll do mail mergers. We'll use tools like folios and other things that kind of look like a plain text email to someone with personalized merge fields. So we'll add, you know, a lot of personalization to it, you know, as title for a company, I think that you might be interested in X, Y, and Z. But yeah, we absolutely use tools to be able to scale this type of outreach because efficiency when you're thinking about all of this. I mean, you have an addressable market, you have to touch. How are you going to do it efficiently? So we, we absolutely use tools to be able to do that. Sure. Okay. And I want to dig into some of your preferences here and I've had, I don't know if you know Jack Reemer, but he certainly has his preference, which is quick mail, but it's not mine. Anyway, so let's say I want to start my, I want to have the best strategy possible to acquire service-based clients. So, you know, I'm a marketing agency, I'm a coach, I'm a consultant, I'm an accountant, I'm a designer, something like that. What are the first things I need to think about in order to start to build my campaign? So I mean, when I think about all the different components that need to be in place to get the meeting, and that's what you kind of measure success for with these type of campaigns as getting your foot in the door. So the right message to the right person at the right time, so defining your persona and segments that you're going to be attacking, and then what that unique message is going to be to them. So those are like two separate components, but getting those in place are the first two things. Everything else kind of falls into place, but to find your persona on different levels too, so if you're a marketing agency, and you have an ideal customer profile, what are the attributes of that customer, both formographically, so like how big is that company, what's the revenue, what industry are they specialized in, and who within that company? So what persona in that company are you also going after? Because you might go be doing it at a couple of different angles too, so you might not just be reaching out to the CEO, you might reach out to the VP of marketing, the CMO, the director of marketing, you might be looking at it from different angles, the digital person might get a little bit different of a message. So I would be segmenting first, and then looking at what those ideal customer profiles are, so you can mirror exactly what your unique value prop is for those. And also that will increase your social validation. We've helped other companies with that exact same issue, and they're exactly like you. It just increases the relevance to them. So the more you can do that, the better your conversion rates will be. And one thing you mentioned is the right person at the right time. And when I think about timing, I think there are some external things I can observe. So I had a digital agency for a while. And timing was much easier, because I could see, have they installed something on their website recently that would indicate they're interested in the kind of help that I offer? Have they hired someone, something like that, right? There are these kind of observable, publicly observable factors. Whereas if someone wants to get better at sales, it's not as obvious. There are definitely things that I look at, which I'm not going to reveal my secrets here, dear listener, but there are some things I look at. They're just not nearly as obvious. How do you think about attempting to reach people at the right time when you're pushing out versus attracting people with advertising or other messages that would allow them to raise their hand and tell you now's the right time? Sure. And I mean, that's a very good statement to me, I like how you put that, but you know, the right time is not just about like need to, I mean, I just want to be clear about that. It's also about when people are in their inbox. So you can identify certain attributes, which are going to increase the likelihood that they are going to be a good, you know, service market fit. So that your service really fits in with what they need. And some of those things when you're thinking about like vendor selection process, if you are new to that organization, you have a higher likelihood that you will bring on a new vendor. So you can be looking for people who are fitting that ICP, fitting that persona segmentation and then find out when they've changed jobs and then approach them at those right times. But then, you know, time of day also, you know, people are in their inboxes at certain times a day and there's a lot of publicly available information about exactly when people are opening emails the most. Both time of day, day of week, week of day, you know, we're on Thanksgiving week. So people sent me out emails tomorrow, that is going straight to an inbox is never going to be read. I mean, that email is never going to resonate. So leaving the bookends of holidays. So, you know, the Wednesday and Friday, you know, around Thanksgiving, don't expect to get a lot of responses on that. So being, you know, understanding kind of like the, you know, how people interact with their inbox and just being like, you know, honest with yourself, when you get an email from someone that you don't know anything about, how are you interacting with it? And then try to think of tactics where you can be able to, oh, if they did this differently, maybe it would resonate. I mean, look at yourself as kind of a test case, you know, if that makes sense. What are your goals for your campaign? So you said, get a meeting and that's easy enough. That's kind of binary, right? Do we get a meeting? Do we not get a meeting on a contact or account level? But I also think about, especially colds like, I'm interrupting someone, they probably don't know who I am. It's a big ask to first time say, hey, are you available for 20 minutes on Tuesday? What are you attempting to do in order for someone to take a step closer to you and say, maybe ask an easy question or is there a step before the meeting in other words? Well, I always look at like, you know, decreasing barriers to taking desirable actions. So I do not want to sell anything and I do like to create a sense of like, hey, what are you guys actually talking about? That is something, but I don't want to sell via email. And so part of this is to, I'm just trying to sell the meeting. So I will tell them how I can help them with something that's professionally relevant to them. So how can I help that individual, not company professionally? So before we even do it, that's the kind of the importance of the research. If we know that, hey, you are responsible for X, Y, and Z, and these are the KPIs on which your boss is measuring you, and then I'm wasting you an email saying, hey, I can help you increase the metrics on X, Y, and Z, the likelihood that they will take the meeting is higher. And if you're trying to say, hey, do I take a sales call with me? So I want to just talk about everything in the context of what's important to them. Do you want to have a conversation about how you can improve what's the most important thing in your job? All right. Do you have 20 minutes? Great. So I got up a call with you and my boss, or someone really smart, a subject matter expert. And then we can dig into deep into how this could be relevant and also improve your cloud within the company. I mean, everyone outside gold star by their name bringing a great idea to their company. So those are some of the ways you can kind of frame the messaging to resonate with them or convert more. That makes sense. Does it work better if someone has a boss? Does there be hold in to an external level of accountability? Well, if they don't have a boss, then you talk about the bottom line type results. So if you're reaching out to the CEO or even anyone in the sea level or leadership team, talk about how you can help them reduce costs and increase revenue. That's something that universally resonates with that level of seniority level. And then you can actually layer in kind of like specifically. So if you're a web development company or a digital marketing company, hey, let me tell you how I can get more people to your website. And then once they're at their website, increase a likelihood that they take desirable actions like fill out a form or ask for more information or x, y, and z. So tell them like the steps on, hey, we can help you do this by doing this and those things also. And also think about the timing. If they have something on top of their mind, that also increases their relevance, which also increases conversion rates. Okay. Let me ask you a question that you probably don't get asked often. Or what circumstances as a service business owner, should I not consider doing cold email? Is there anyone who's just not a fit for this? Well, I mean, there's certain people. I mean, for one thing, you need to be opting out like, I mean, honoring and can spam compliance and GDPR compliance and castle and all of that good stuff that's data privacy and making sure that you're not emailing people who expressively said that they wouldn't. And in Europe, do not email people from Europe unless they have opted in. So I would absolutely have everyone, I would encourage everyone to look into the specific regional regulations and then abide by them because those are very specific and can have severe penalties like by lane GDPR can cost up to 4% of your annual. Well, okay. So let's aside from not doing things that are illegal. Let's just assume that our listeners here are responsible enough to know not to do that. But other factors might make it in terms of my business, in terms of the clients that I'm going after. Is there anything else that might make this a bad strategy for me? Personally, I don't think so. I mean, the worst case scenario is someone saying, no, I mean, that is literally the worst case scenario. And you're a cold email. So it's not like you're Google emailing them. Like if you're a person who's like doing this in your service company, a likelihood that they know who you are, if they are cold to you, is low. So them opting out of an email is like someone buying a cup of coffee. They don't even remember it afterwards. So I think the risk to reward ratio is not really something that I'd be concerned about. I often think of kind of a minimum client value that I would need. So like if someone's average sale is a thousand bucks or two thousand bucks, it's probably, it seems to me, probably not going to be very worthwhile because you need to then enter a sales process because this person wasn't looking for you and they didn't opt into anything and then you're going to have to have probably multiple calls with them potentially. And I don't mean the average sale, but the average client value. And kind of the benchmark that I use, maybe benchmark isn't a good word for it. The rule of thumb that I think about is five figures. If you can sell something that, you know, your client is worth 10,000 or more, this might be a really good thing for you. But if not, it's going to be difficult to break even on this. What are your thoughts on client value? I agree. I mean, I've only really done this in the business, the business context with, you know, at least five to six, I mean, five would be the bare minimum. So client acquisition cost me to be weighed with, you know, kind of what that bandwidth is going to cost you as well. This is not like an easy thing where you can do transactional things, send out a mass email and have a lot of people buy, you know, whatever pyramid scam you're trying to sell or whatever it's, it has to be more consultative selling where you're talking to a person. You know, I mean, you can't just have them click on a box and buy something. This is more of a, hey, let's start building our relationship type entry point rather than, you know, click to buy pyramid scheme, watch your mouth on this podcast. Hey, I'm just saying. I mean, I, you know, it's just one of those things like it's, this is a thoughtful approach to doing, you know, marketing. It's, you know, you're convincing individual people, not just broad sprang of people where you're spraying and praying. This is something where you're doing it surgically where you find the exact right person and say, I know exactly how I can help you succeed. Okay. So let's, let's talk about that right because praying pray always implies, first of all lack of personalization, generally it's used in a derogatory way to say, you didn't think about it this very much. You could have done better than you did. And it also implies generally volume, right? We're just going to dump, I actually talked to a guy one time. I said, how'd you get business before talking to me? Like, why are we here, what, what might I be able to help you with? And he goes, well, I bought a list of 200,000 people and I sent the same email to all of them. And I said, what happened? And he goes, I got, you know, 30 clients. And I was like, well, it's not what I would have recommended to you, but, you know, I guess it worked. The only downside, of course, is you can't do that again. That and maybe your, your feelings about yourself and how you think about what's ethical and business, but, you know, volume. So I know you want the right length coat, but in the past, when you've worked for a service company, one thing I think about is how much work it is to set up these campaigns, right? If I want to do them right, usually there's some element of supporting material. There's going to be a sales process or a meeting structure that I'm going to use. There's going to be probably some educational element as well that will go into it. What is the minimum number, like, how do you even think about volume? And please don't say it depends because I know it does, but just humor me. Sure. Well, volume is one of those things that impacts deliverability. So I always want to be cognizant about the volume of the email and the frequency of emails that I send. So when you think about Google, they look at, you know, all the emails in the world and understand which ones are spamming, which ones aren't pretty accurately. And so there are a lot of common attributes of people who do spam a lot. So they will do a big blast, so a volume spike really quickly and then taper off on emails throughout the time. So you want to be very cognizant that you don't have any of those volume spikes. So consistent volume is something that you try to aim for. So we always think about it in that and like the cadence structure, too. So we don't want to have a volume spike. We want to be consistent. So trying to stay within that number is important. When we think about a campaign number size, too, again, like we can spread this out over the course of days. They keep consistent volume and do it in waves. So the size of your code is the size of your code regardless. Like if this message is going to resonate and be relevant to you, why should you be excluded from my list? Like, why would that make sense, right? So I want to be able to make sure that we get the entire address of a market and pass this message along to everyone, but just be consistent on the volume throughout all the days. That's how I look at volume. If that makes sense. Well, and I wasn't asking like how many emails should I send in a day? I guess I'm wondering like, is it worth it to do a campaign with only 50 contacts? Or even? Yeah. Yeah. I know I understand where you're getting. Yeah. No, that. I mean, you have to think about your conversion rate and do the work back math. Right. How many people are actually going to convert at the end of your funnel? And then how many, and then you have to work it back to see if it's actually worthwhile to do. Right. So, you know, if you can close or get to an opportunity stage from every two meetings or something, and then every four opportunities turns into a win, then think about how many emails you have to send to get those meetings that you need to get the win. And then think it was actually worthwhile based on that ticket number two. So it's, I would just recommend doing the work back math on that, but no, 50 would be way too small. I would be thinking, personally, too, because you're thinking about this in multi-cadence. I mean, you will have your cold callers be calling them to, I mean, it's not just one channel. So not only is that person be way to be getting an email, they'll be getting a LinkedIn connection from me from someone that works for me. They'll be getting, you know, targeted ads from LinkedIn because we have their advanced segmentation, like exactly who the people are from the exact companies. So they'll be seeing that. If they click on any of their link, they're also going to get remarketing matters on top of them. So we want to be able to like, you know, put ourselves in front of them because the right time isn't, you know, the right time just due to a project. When can they respond to us? When are they going to remember us? When can they act? And what channel are they most likely to respond to us? I want to talk to our prospects where they want to be talked to, not about like we want to be talked to. So, I don't know if that answered your question or got this. Yeah. So I answered this, or I talked to this guy, Dan Oshinsky, who runs a consulting firm for email newsletters. And he, you know, he's worked with Buzzfeed in New York Times and other very, very notable outlets. And his website, at least it was at the time I interviewed him, was a Google slide deck. And the reason why that's remarkable is because it's the absolute exception to the rule. And often I think of a website as being kind of a critical piece of infrastructure in order to execute any sort of marketing endeavor, whether it's cold email or whatever. Because a lot of people, the first thing they'll do is go look at your website. So I know you may not agree, but what kinds of supporting infrastructure do I need in order to not guarantee, but increase my success rate with this? Sure. And so, you mentioning the website, I think it's absolutely plays an important role when you're, especially when you're nurturing, too. I think for those initial touch points to get your foot in the door, I typically don't want to send someone to a website because that's increasing barriers to getting the conversion. Hey, go to my website, fill out a form, and then I'll set up a meeting with you. Like that doesn't make sense. I want to have that personal touch point. So like that type of infrastructure, I don't think I think it's more important further down the funnel to me, at least. Well, okay. Well, let me interject real quick, though. Here's what I think, and you please feel free to tell me that I'm wrong or this is not what actually happens. But the feedback I've gotten from a lot of people is when I reach out to them, no, I'm not sending them to my website and saying go fill out this form. I'm reaching out and saying, you know, people like you are experiencing this problem and I've helped XYZ people with this problem in the past. If you'd like to know how it works, you know, hit reply. I know what a lot of people will do, which is go visit my website as maybe to learn more if they're not ready to reply yet, maybe to see who is this list and guy, right? How credible is this guy? What is this all about? That's what I mean by website infrastructure. I don't mean do we have a form someone can go fill out. Can does a website do a good job of convincing people that this is legit? Yeah, I think for certain, I think it does enhance and it's one of those things where it's a good piece of the puzzle because people will do that. I mean, if you think about conversion rates and everyone and what they're going to do, that's a significant portion of people will look at your website. I do think that is important, but a significant amount of people will not do. I mean, thinking about best practices for cold email marketing, you have 175 words. Be concise and be relevant to that individual, and then they won't need to. I mean, if you're being convincing, you should, I mean, have supporting documents will help you convince people, but also sending them to your homepage isn't going to be that place where you should logically put them. Have a landing page. It's going to be able to discriminate this information quickly or something like that, but I would just say if you're going to be doing things, make it easy for people to convert because Americans aren't big readers from a whole to their scammers, they want concise information, they want it to be easily disseminated and they want to be able to easily act on it if they were to be able to do it. Yeah. Right. We are single-handedly killing nuance in the world. Go. America. 175 words. Where does that come from? There's a lot of studies that show it. So every single mass email platform in the world has like optimal rates on a lot of things. And then even when you think about like how you would structure paragraphs in like white space. So it's one of those things where it's like a good four paragraph format with a couple sentences in the middle and it gives you like areas to put CTAs. So if you have a lot of CTAs, it makes it really obvious what they need to do to take that action. So that's kind of what they usually say 175 words was a 23 or 27 character count on your subject line to make it optimized for the iPhone and a couple other like little things like that. But yeah, that you use usually about 175 words right at that point. In terms of technology infrastructure, what do you recommend for using cold email? Mail merge. Just good old fashioned, you know, mail merge. Like I think that gets through inbox gets to inbox is more frequently. And when I think about it, like I don't want an HTML heavy email that looks like it was formatted by Salesforce or something like I want this to be looking like a personal touch point from an individual rep saying, Hey, Bill, I'm writing this email to you specifically. And it looks exactly like that. So you can do a plain text email from mail merge with all types of personalization fields in there. Really simple, really easy to make sure you have a consistent volume to the only disadvantage is the overhead on the database management burden. So making sure that you opt out people, making sure that you record notes, making sure all this data gets into like the right, you know, Salesforce, you know, those are the type of things were like the automated emails make that really simple. But you know, it's part of the thing like you want your emails to go into inbox is because if a great portion going to spam boxes, your conversion rates need to be going a lot higher or your volume needs to get to a lot higher to maintain those type of things. So if you're a results driven organization, I would highly recommend using mail merge and then just hiring people to do the database management. What do you use for mail merge or is that the name of a product? Yes, so that's a combination of Excel, Word, and Outlook. So if you have all three of those products, you have the ability to do a mail merge and we'll combine it cell street with the Word document and put it on the Outlook and then you send it from there. I see. And then you're just copying and pasting out copy and pasting is all automated. So basically to modulate the volume, you turn Outlook on and off from the trigger button and then it will make sure that's consistent. But it loads up all of those emails directly into that. So you have a database with people's first name, title, we go into what we reformat everyone's title to make it shorthand. So it sounds like instead of director, comma, information, technology, it shows up director of IT so it's chromatically correct. Right. And then that like company names, we use like the doing business as names, like the DBA names. So what you would say is shorthand. So if you were dealing with, I'm trying to think of a name, I'm thinking of Spotify, right. And they would have the German corporation extension at the end of it. You would want to get rid of that. Or even use the abbreviations, we were running higher education campaigns for a web development company. We would find out those acronyms. So like, you wouldn't say University of California, Irvine, you'd be like, so you would just say those type of shorthand names, University of Alabama, U of A, those okay, little touches where it's like, oh, this is going directly to the person because when you think about like human interaction too, if you were to send a physical piece of mail and a mailbox to someone and it said, you know, too listed or current resident, you'd be like, this trash, I'm throwing it away. But if you have all these like great personalization fields, like say, hey, as title or company or as the title or acronym, like, oh, my God, that looks so great. I think you'd be interested in better understanding how we can help you with exactly your professional role and what's going to be relevant to you. So can we help you improve the KPIs which your boss is measuring you by, which your organization measures success by, you just have like 15 minutes to be able to have a quick conversation to discuss that and then make it easy for them to act and they'll act, you know, those are how you get conversion rates up, but you're never going to have great conversion rates on even marketing. These are cold emails for random people. So those are the ways to increase the likelihood though. Do you think of benchmarks of like, in turn, usually I think of, you want to reply rate benchmark, open rate, reply rate, meaning rate. Do you have benchmarks that you target? You know, when you're doing mail merge, you don't have the luxury of doing, because you're doing plain text, you can't put tracking pixels in there to be able to measure open rate, click through rate, all that good stuff, so you're measuring response rate and conversion rates. Okay. The email says, take for me to get my meeting and then we can do the work back math to do the forecasting to be able to say, Hey, we know that this many meetings turn into opportunities, this many opportunities turn into a win and then be able to forecast based on that. I'm, I'm trying to figure out if I were to be doing a campaign, how would I assess whether I'm on track or not? So are we looking at, let's just look at the meeting rate, right? Because how many turn into opportunities, very dependent on who you're reaching, how good you are at that first meeting, there's lots of other things that are happening outside of the email. But in terms of percentage of contacts that turn into a first meeting, what do you think of? Arrange is fine too. Hey, like I always say, answering these questions and I, you know, settled in my nuance. But yes, about A, B testing too, it's about continuous improvement, like no email you should do unless you have your finger directly on the pulse of your target market. It should not be like converting at a rate this optimal. So A, B testing and improving is what you should be. I would say a good aim if you're especially like, you know, this is new to you and not being too super ambitious, but being realistic, if you can get out of cold people who you've never talked to and don't know you, if you can get one in two hundred, one in three hundred people to take a meeting with you, that's success. I mean, other people are needing to, well, I mean, talking about qualified meetings, because like not only like you, you can go to organizations where you can set up a hundred meetings, but those hundred meetings will convert at one in a hundred. I mean, when you're thinking about bandwidth allocation, if you can find the right person, the right message at the right time, the likelihood of converting is high, but when you're threading the needle, your wind, that's a lot of needles too. So when you have to be like cognizant about that, well, so how would you define a qualified meeting then qualified meetings are ones that have immediate needs and timelines that align with what you're trying to solve. When you know that before they were before you set the meeting, no, we have a, we think of it as a way of a likelihood, like we think because based on their form of graphic information, based on the person we're talking to, there's a, there's maybe a good fit, then if there's that good fit, after you do get on the call, then that's a qualified meeting. Right. The purpose of, well, but that would be, okay, I think we're splitting hairs here, but I think initially you differentiated between meetings and opportunities, and I think what you're describing there is an opportunity, right? Something called, as a nuance, it's a Salesforce lightweight of thinking, and maybe I'm just stuck in that mentality of like the demarcation of when you convert a lead into an opportunity. Yeah, yeah. It is a little bit new. It's a little bit different for our process. So I think that is just a nuance of, of how we do it. How do you think of the differences in prospecting for a service versus a product? Well, so a service will probably usually have an already existing demand for that. I mean, it's a competitive space, like you're not, I mean, if it's a service, it's probably a commodity almost. I mean, it's going to be competitive. So it's going to be something where you're going to be going up against an incumbent likely. So if you are a digital marketing company, the people you're reaching out to either have an in-house team or are probably doing it with someone else, so you're going to have those barriers of friction. If you're a product company, there's potential that your brand new product category, and that you're just trying to introduce it. So I think part of it is kind of understanding the landscape of where these people are in their journey. If you can like find any indication of if they have an internal team versus external team, if you're a service company and providing that function, that would be beneficial. But I think part of that is to do with like the research too, like if you can find that form of graphic information and only focus on the people who are fitting that exact ideal customer profile, then the likelihood is maybe increase that you have success with that segment. And right, so a couple of things you said there, and often I think about the difference between selling a product and service as services are intangible. And so therefore, the demand for trust and credibility is much greater, because there's a lot of risk for me to try it out. They've probably been burned in the past or they've had a negative experience with potential competitors. I've seen that really a lot in the digital marketing space and web development where they've had a really negative experience and you have to overcome those obstacles of being considered in that same pure class. You do, but I think that's better than them never feeling like it was valuable enough to spend on marketing. That's a harder client to sell. Is there really no difference in your approach? You just go in knowing, hey, there may be someone who's already doing this for this client. And so therefore, maybe you need to have a greater uniqueness or more really hone in on your differentiator more. Yeah, maybe that or increase the social validation, but I mean, I don't think that there's too many, you know, especially with cold marketing, understand your market deeply, like who are you trying to sell? What are their pain points and then market to those pain points or opportunities that they're trying to seize upon? I mean, that's the way I market. I feel like maybe service of product marketing, other people might take different approaches where there's increased differentiators between like the two categories, but I personally think that if you are solving, I mean, in the B2B context too, if you're solving people's professional problems, that's what's going to resonate with them, whether it's a service or product that's solving like the things that they're trying to accomplish, I think that's less relevant personally. All right. Well, you've been very open sharing all about your experience. I really appreciate you being here. I know that some of the listeners will probably want to follow up with you, learn more about you. What should they do, Brad? You can email me at [email protected] or just find me on LinkedIn, Bradley Smith, AIDash. Fantastic. You're welcome, thanks.