How To Get Over $1,000,000 in Sales Opportunities Using Reply.io

The Client

Hi, I’m Daniel Wallock. I’ve never taken a traditional business class or any marketing classes. But, from a young age, I’ve always been interested in marketing.

It’s hard to say what exactly I do for my clients.

Most of my clients come to me wanting one thing, but usually, that isn’t what we end up working on together.

I’m a marketer and, specifically, I help companies who are doing a few million per year in revenue and want to exponentially grow their customer acquisition process.

I was named a “Top 8 Content Marketer to Watch in 2017” by Inc.

I was also named as a “Top 17 Marketing Influencers to Watch in 2017” by Forbes.

And finally, I was recently named by The Huffington Post as #1 in their article, “10 Highly Influential Millennial Marketers to Watch in 2017.”

The Overview

With Bookkeeping Central they have a pretty complex sales process, but it all starts with cold emailing.

Since we are looking to sell to major accounting firms, getting in the door for John Cruse, the CEO at Bookkeeping Central, was rather difficult.

Using very specific cold emails that we dripped and that were auto-customized using Reply.io, we were able to get in the door at accounting firms all across Australia.

Regarding the sales cycle, John is still figuring out what works best. But, after a lot of testing, it seems the best way to start a sale like this is through cold emailing, have a few calls, and then finally ask for a sale a few weeks from the initial call.

The Challenge

The most challenging thing about starting my work with Bookkeeping Central is that we didn’t have any clear idea whether these big accounting firms would get on the phone with us.

I’m very good at writing cold emails and, for the first month of my contract working with John, all we did was work on a few variations of cold emails we thought could get these accountants to want to jump on a call.

When it was time to send, those emails performed incredibly well.

The Solution

The strategy I created with Bookkeeping Central was rather simple.

We spent 45 to 60 days discussing strategy and trying to understand how best to target their customers. After this strategy (and/or consulting style period), we would move forward with a regular marketing contract.

During the consulting period, we went back-and-forth talking about how best to position ourselves and also how best to sell to these accounting firms.

We finally decided that cold emailing was the best way to get to them because it truly was the easiest way to get them; it gave us a chance to, within a few sentences, qualify them using our email so we didn’t waste time on prospecting calls with unqualified leads.

I always test a few emails against each other for the first few hundred sends. Whether it’s A/B or A/B/C, I am always testing.

Communicating with whoever is taking the sales appointments is of utmost importance. You don’t just want people replying to your email – you want people who are replying who also understand what you could potentially be going to offer or discuss on the phone.

Whoever is taking the sales appointments you’re getting via Reply.io should be able to tell you a lot of valuable information about what they feel the prospect has expected and felt so far.

For example, several prospects got on calls thinking you were offering them white-label consulting services they could sell when you were trying to discuss a potential partnership between your companies.

This is just an example, but the idea is that you should always be noting feedback and trying to understand how your prospect feels at every single step of the sales funnel and cold email sequence.

The point of cold emailing is not to sell to them immediately.

The point of cold emailing is to engage their interest enough to get them on a call.

Think of cold emailing not as a selling tool, but more as a relationship building tooling.

Of course Reply.io is a sales tool, but the most common two mistakes I see with cold emails is that people don’t personalize the emails enough and people try to sell immediately via the email.

The point of the first email is to show them that you’ve done your research and present something that is of unique value to them that piques their interest enough to want to get on a call with you or move on to the next step of the sales cycle.

The Result

I’ve gotten Bookkeeping Central over $1,000,000 in new sales opportunities using Reply.io.

When I worked with another client using Reply.io, my emails consistently saw over 80% open rates.

I consistently get my clients a 20% to 25% reply rate of which maybe 8% to 12% are interested. On non-sales related emails where I’m just emailing to build relationships and thank people, I’ve gotten reply rates above 60%.

I consistently have my new clients get Reply.io accounts – whether it’s for sending cold emails to help them get booked on podcasts, get in the press, and or help them get sales appointments.

If you’re reading this and you want to hire me to write cold emails or help your company grow using Reply.io, you can contact me at my website.