Why Your AI Cold Emails Are Failing (And How to Fix Them) | Jason Bay

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1. 0:23

   So once you made that available to everyone, now it's like, click of a button, like I can send as many emails as I want and make as many phone calls as I want to, like the volume has just gotten out of control. The way that people are using AI is the same way that we use sequencers and dialers. It's just to increase volume. The quality hasn't really gone up really at all. “You have to think about how you're using it to be more precise.”

   In AI research and drafting

2. 2:41

   Great. What's number two? Number two is offer. We studied 85 million cold emails with Gong. With the presence of an offer, the reply rate will go up by as much as 28%. So your job when you're doing outbound is to put an offer in front of the buyer that they would feel irresponsible for saying no to. “If you're an SDR setting a meeting for an account executive, I want you to hype them up, talk about their experience, the companies they're working with, what they could expect in that meeting.” The second thing that you can do is also give them some sort of tailored offer that's a little bit more personalized. So one of our clients sells an e-comm solution. They'll go through and buy something off of the website and do a cart audit, and that's what they offer to walk the buyer through.

   In Pre-meeting value setting

3. 6:33

   that kind of stuff in it, but we're in an age right now where we call it too good to ignore. You as a rep have to be too good to ignore in how you show up in order to stand out. And it's human-led, AI-assisted. All of the AI stuff, you can't just use it as a volume tool “You have to think about how you're using it to be more precise.” And that's how we came up with that three-part methodology of disqualify, offer, and provoke. These are the things that you need to do radically different with outbound in order to stand out right now. It's funny, that journey that you just laid out is pretty much the one that I

   In Tools and AI

4. 11:58

   and it really opened up time for their HR team to focus more on recruiting and hitting their hiring targets instead of getting bogged down with legal compliance. So that is literally like the email. It would need to be a little tighter if it was an email, but that's the first line of my email. The tension statement, the problem, that's the next line, the third line, that trust statement. And if it's an email, “the call to action might be an offer.” Can I put you in touch with Nick who recently helped XYZ company with this transition? If it's a cold call, I might say, how does that compare to what you're seeing right now at your company? Today's show is brought to you by Align, the AI deal workspace that helps sales teams close complex deals.

   In Cold email calls to action

5. 14:25

   than individual and industry baseline triggers for Director Plus specifically. So what does that mean? That means that if there's a director, VP, or C-suite, I don't need to point out where they went to college or something that I saw them post about on LinkedIn, “unless it's relevant to the business.” What I really need to do, they're closer to the business problem. I need to talk about stuff going on in their business. So what you need to think about beforehand is, so if you could imagine like almost like a mind map with the trigger tension trust, you would have like two or three tension buckets in the middle.

   In LinkedIn message personalization

6. 18:16

   Can I add one more thing actually? Like another way to find triggers is through the sales process. So like when you get a sales call set up and you're doing research, like you're finding the triggers that are making that conversation relevant, like reverse engineer why people hop on sales calls with you. Ask them these questions. “If you're an SDR, listen to those call recordings” with your account executive, like you can reverse engineer those triggers. That's part of that disqualify bucket too. Like the first thing you wanna do is like a closed one and closed lost analysis and look at your last 10 or 12 deals. Or if you're a sales leader, look at your last six months of deals and look at all the deals that you win

   In Call review coaching

7. 34:39

   but has a lot of notoriety. People tell me all the time when they reach out, yeah, we work with Walmart and Google and Amazon. That's really great, but I don't have a lot in common with those companies. So the company needs to be similar in size, similar industry, “And you need to have some sort of story around it and it could be a sentence or two.” And it could sound as simple as, hey, XYZ company was running into something similar, doing a lot of international hiring. And we cut down the time it took for them to do this type of hiring in about half. So instead of taking six months to work through all the compliance, it took about three or a bonus points.

   In Outbound case studies

8. 37:22

   Something like that. Um, I think that facts and figures and like numbers, I think people talk a lot of shit about case studies and results and like, dude, executives want to see that it's, it's called a proof point. Yeah. It's like literally the first thing I need to do when a CRO or VP of sales gets introduced is they want to know proof points who have you worked with and what results did they get? “So you need both.” I think we tend to over-index maybe on the proof point, but you have to have, you know, people buy based off emotion and justify with logic. Well, I think that's why the, the sequencing here really matters, Jason. So what you're doing is to Alex's point, you are telling a story and the story gets them emotionally bought in.

   In Proof and social proof

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