Lightning like Steve McQueen I'm in the fast lane when the light turns green and I built tough I ain't nothing but grit cause I made rugged blood, sweat and spit yeah like a horse I fly better push yourself in for a bumpy ride I like to play hard but I work harder and I weather the storm cuz I'm built stronger.
What is up, ladies and gentlemen, we are back. We are live. It is the freight coach morning show, the top morning show in transportation coming to you guys every single weekday, 830 in Pacific, 1030 Central to break down some industry headlines. But most importantly, you guys provide some actual insight into what you can do with all of this information. If this is your first time tuning in, welcome. This is the real side of freight, ladies and gentlemen. You know, at the end of the day, you guys, I want to talk to individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve. So you can take all of this information, apply it, utilize it and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. I got a very special guest for you guys here today.
I'm going to pull him up in like 30 seconds. But we're going to talk about email marketing, you know, email sales, all of that stuff, because it's an emerging way. And I mean, it's just a new method out there. And, you know, how do you get noticed out there when there's tens of thousands of people sending emails? Not just from a business solicitation standpoint, but internal emails and then, you know, emails about literally everything. And we're going to break all of that down. So with that being said, I got Adam Rosen on the show, ladies and gentlemen. Adam, thank you so much for joining me.
Chris, I appreciate you having me. I'm psyched to be here.
No, man, I'm pumped about this because it's, you know, in my industry, inside of transportation, it's a lot of cold calling, you know, but then there's also people out there that are like, no, man, I don't even have a desk phone. I will only answer email. But, you know, you get 10,000 emails in a day or a week or whatever. How do you, how do you stand out on that? But you know, before we get into any of that stuff, man, like introduce yourself a little bit. What? Who are you?
So I've never held like a true corporate job. I, right out of college I started what ended up being my first company. I had it for about five years. I sold that company now back in 2019. And I always say, I always want to make sure I'm fully transparent with this. And Chris, were kind of talking about this. Off air is the journey of being an entrepreneur and how much sacrifice goes into it. And for me, although my company was acquired back in 2019, it was not some glamorous exit that we all dream of when we start a business. It was a lot of blood, sweat and tears that we put into it.
We had an acquisition, learned a ton, but most importantly, it's led me to where I am today because how we got just about all of our customers in that business, and a lot of them are big brands like Think bank of America, Amazon, Apple, Goldman, all these big brands we got from cold emailing them. So I ended up starting my current company, email outreach company, now back in 2021. And I started just because one of the customers I was, or one of the startups I was advising, I should say, just said, hey, man, we're struggling to get meetings on the books. Can you help? I spoke to his head of sales, and long story short, I saw there was a big gap with what they were not doing when it comes to cold emailing.
And now we're three years down the line working with over a hundred customers and a wide array of industries to help them get more sales appointments through cold email.
Dude, I, you know what I love the most about with kind of like what you're saying right there is, you know, you're selling a service or, you know, you've worked in and you've accomplished what a lot of founders are out there trying to do. Right? Because like, you know, another thing were talking about before we got, before went live was, is, you know, for me, I was in business for five months before I actually collected my first invoice, you know, and then same thing with this podcast, I did it for 14 months, essentially, before I got my first advertiser and everything. So it's like, there's so much output that goes into just getting that one. Yes.
And then on top of that, you know, you are, how do you stand out in a crowd, you know, because there, it doesn't matter what industry you're in. I saw, I actually saw a really good post yesterday on social media, which is very rare these days, but it was very, it was probably the best I've ever seen a describing business, you know, because it was, everybody thinks that their industry is unique. They all think that, you know, oh, real estate would be easier this would be easier. That would be easier than what I'm currently doing, and that's just not the case at all. There are absolute hustlers and killers in every single walk of life out there in business. And how do you stand out in a crowd? You know, because that's, I think that's the biggest thing.
If you pulled every single business owner or sales rep or business development rep, whatever it is, they all want more meetings, they all want to convert more. How do you stand out in that crowd though? I think that's the biggest issue that most businesses will always have.
Yeah, it's funny you say that too. I'm smiling as you talk about that because I was just having that conversation last week with somebody is how everyone thinks their industry is so unique. Everyone thinks that all getting to my buyer is so much more difficult or no, my customer will only respond to these type of marketing where the reality is, for the most part, humans are humans. The way humans buy is very similar. Whether you're in freight, whether you're b two b tech sales, whether you're real estate, you name it. Buyers tend to buy in very similar type of ways. And like you said, it's how do you stand out? I don't care if you're doing a cold email, a cold call. I don't care if you have a billboard in Times Square, if you do a Facebook ad, Instagram ad, you name it.
How do you stand out? And it starts with understanding who your customer is. Who is your ideal customer? Where can you find them? What problems are they facing? And then how can your solution address that problem? But it's all very similar. It doesn't matter what industry we're in.
Yeah, I think, you know, I look at it like this because, you know, inside of transportation, it is a lot of cold calling that you're doing out there. And you know, it's, you know, I make cold calls every single day. And it doesn't matter whether you've been doing this for the 1415 years that I've been doing this, or if you've been doing this for three months. We all sound the same essentially, as soon as you pick up the phone, right, I hope I would sign sound a little bit more polished, you know, but I get the exact same feedback on my cold calls that everybody else does. Oh, why are you calling? Yeah, hold on.
And then they transfer you to the one, the voicemail that is just like the spam one that nobody ever replies to, or it's, you know, we're not adding anybody right now, or they're like, nope. And then they just hang up the phone. And I think a lot of people gravitate towards email more because you don't have that direct feedback, right? Because if somebody doesn't reply to your email, it's not as personal as somebody telling you, we hate people like you, and then they hang up the phone. Not like that ever happens. I don't want to deter people, but there is that less of a, you know, that direct feedback that you get with it.
And, you know, from my perspective, I think it is, it's really dependent upon the prospect because there are a lot of old school individuals out there that, you know, they want to talk to the people that they're working with. They don't want to just get an email. But then there's a whole other wave of people in business who are like, I will only reply via email. You will only get my attention via email.
You are never going to make everybody happy. You know, like, we have different slack channels within my company. One of those slack channels says, great memorable responses based on people say, hey, this is the best email ever. We love this. This is amazing. We have another slack channel that says bad, ugly responses. Now we have very rarely. Now we do. We get a bad, ugly responses. And I'll share one of the reasons why that's happened as of late to give you guys all kind of a little hack that you could all implement today. But the funny thing, I can't tell you how many times this would happen since we started the company to the exact same email. We would have somebody replying saying, this is the best email. Thank you for following up. Let's talk.
And then five minutes later, you'll get someone that'll say, f off, you suck. This is the worst email ever. You are never going to make everybody happy. I don't care if it's email. I don't care if it's call. I don't care if it's a Facebook ad. I, in between selling my first company and starting email outreach company, I ran a couple of real estate developments. I ran land development projects in the northeast, and I would do a lot of Facebook ads. It would be me on the property with my phone, walking across the property, sharing it, and then I boosted out on, you know, social media. I had a gentleman that said, and this was during, you know, the heart of COVID He basically said, hey, I hope you get Covid and bad things happen to you.
And the way I always like to handle that stuff is just like, hey, you know, I'm sorry, it sounds like you're having a bad day. I wish you the best. And so I just was trying to be nice to him, and we ended up getting kind of a back and forth conversation. By the end of it, he was like, hey, man, I'm really sorry. I was having a bad day. Like, you seem like a cool guy to get a beer with.
Yeah.
Long story short, it's like you're never going to make everyone happy. And typically when people say things like, hey, you suck. Worst phone call, worst email. I hate you. It very rarely has to do with you and usually has to do with them. So I always encourage people, do not take it personally. Take what you can learn from it, so that your next email, your next call, your next ad is better. However, don't take these things personally because they rarely are a personal attack at you.
Yeah, no, I. I mean, I think that's very sound advice because for the most part, that is true. Right. I think you know, we're always the sum of their prior engagements during that day. You know, you never know. They might have just got lit up by their boss, you know, about the exact thing that you're calling, you know, like, there's a bunch of stuff that could happen. But I also look at it like this. If somebody is truly like that, and I tell people this all the time, Adam, would you want to work with somebody that is, that, is that much of an inherent asshole? If they're going to talk to you like that in the prospecting phase, imagine how they're going to treat you when they're paying you. You know, it would.
All I truly feel is I don't think that there's that many assholes in the world, but I do think that if that's how they are, dude, it's going to be way worse when they start paying you. So it's like, I really think, like, hey, you're probably dodging a bullet in these instances, 100%.
I say this to my co founder pretty regularly. It's just like, I have a no asshole policy. Like, I don't want to work with everybody. If you're an asshole. I'm so. I just don't want to work with you. I don't need your money bad enough. I don't want to help you. Like, I just would rather, I wish you nothing but the best. I have nothing against you, but I don't really want to work with you. And we've all had, we've and look, for some people, it's a little more difficult. Like, look, if you're not the founder, if you're just, you know, if you're working for somebody else, it's obviously a little bit more difficult. So empathize people that have to deal with jerks.
But for me, I'm like, I don't want, if people are going to treat my team like crap, treat my co founder like crap, treat their potential customers like crap. Like, I don't really want to work with them, period. I'd rather find somebody else because there's so many good people out there that are working on good things that are doing it the right way. I would much rather work with them because it's also just, it's going to be a more enjoyable relationship, but you're going to be able to do more work together. Like, typically when people are jerks, all that happens is worse results lead to it. Why? Because there's less communication, there's less trust, there's less feedback, there's less opportunity to grow. Some of the best, smartest, wealthiest individuals I have ever met.
I feel like every single one of them is such a nice person, respectful, great listener. When things don't work out, they're not a jerk about it. There's always a way to handle things. And it's not like we have to be all sensitive if someone isn't nice to us. There's a difference in, hey, someone just being like, tough. Like, look, I'm from New York. I like that New York kind of zip. There's a difference between being a jerk and being straightforward. And I agree. I like to work with people that are just good people and good to work with.
So with that being said, man, how, what's a great first step for somebody from, like an email sales outreach, right? Like, because again, how do you really start to stand out and establish yourself? Because, you know, everybody, you know, like, through everybody can comment there. You know, people do business with people they like and yada, yada. But you know, that's the end result of quality outreach that leads you to that point, right? I think a lot of people are like, puts, they put the final destination first and then they gauge everything on it. But there is a build up. There is, you have to build relationships to get to that point. So it's like, what have you found in, you know, across your experience of this, man?
Because you work with multiple industries, what is there been like a couple of key things that were like, hey, from a first email outreach. This is always what we see leads to a higher success rate.
So first, it's important to understand what's the goal of cold email. Cold email is just connecting person a to person b. That's the bottom line. Now, how do we connect person a to person b? For most of us, we're not going to make the sale through cold email. Sure, if you sell a $7 product, you can make sales through cold email. But for 99% of us, we're not making a sale through cold email. What we are selling is typically a phone call. So hey, is this person worth 15 minutes of your time? That's number one, is understanding what's the goal of cold email? You're not making a sale. You just want to have the opportunity to meet them, connect with them, and then present your value.
Now, what's more important than ever now is not that first email is not that follow up email is not AI. Personalization is not how you're going to respond. It's none of that, not a subject line. The number one most important thing right now is around your infrastructure. So what do I mean by infrastructure? As many of us know, there have been major changes in the cold email world. For the last almost year. We've seen a lot of the Google and Yahoo restrictions that they put into place. The whole point of cold emailing is how do we get into the inbox? These spam tech filters have made it more and more complicated to get into the inbox. That's why having your infrastructure built is so important.
What I mean by infrastructure is your domains and your email inbox that you're sending from anybody listening to this podcast. Do not ever mass email from your main domain. It is far too risky at this point. And when I say mass email, I mean sending more than 20 emails per inbox in a day. It's not about sending thousands of emails in a day. It's gotten so tight where you cannot send a lot of emails per inbox per day. If you do that, you're going to go into spam.
What do you mean by per inbox per day? So would that mean I can't, Chris Jolly can't email Adam Rosen 20 times in a day? Is that what you mean by that? Or Chris Jolly can't send out 20 emails to 20 different recipients?
Exactly. 20 outbound emails to 20 different recipients. That's really the max right now.
Gotcha.
Okay, you can test it, you can get a little further. But we tried pushing it to 25 emails per inbox per day, deliverability dropped. We moved back down to 20 emails per day. Deliverability went back up. So what does that mean? That means in order to send thousands of emails in a day, you have to set up 5100, 150 email inboxes that you're sending from now. That sounds complicated, probably for a lot of people. It's not as complicated as you might think, but we'll leave it there for now. So number one is your infrastructure built? Number two, it's understanding who's your ICP because we got to get lists. If you want to do cold emailing, you obviously have to get their email addresses that you could send from. So where can you get lists from?
There's many avenues, whether you want to use an Apollo or an instantly AI. You don't need to spend a dollar a contact anymore like we used to have to do through Zoom info that no longer is necessary. You can get high quality lists for not a lot of money. So number two is the list getting high quality lists that aren't going to bounce, that are also going to fall within your ideal customer profile. Number three is of course the copy. Now how do we put together high quality copy that's going to convert? And, you know, I can get as nerdy as you like with that, Chris.
I would love to get nerdy about that because I think like there's so many different theories that are out there and like, you brought up a good point. I don't know what the infrastructure of the recipients email is, you know, because they're like, have you noticed, is it like, are there any spam filters? Would you know, would it be, don't send attachments on the first ones or images or what? Like, what does that look like? Is it text the best way?
Yeah. So you want to keep things plain text. So tracking open rates and click the rates that increase the likelihood you go into spam, sending images, putting links and emails, that all increase the likelihood you go into spam. You want to reduce all these things because again, it's getting more and more complicated to land in the inbox. You know, one of my favorite quotes is you can't hit what you can't see and that relates to a lot of things in life. One of those things is related to email. If it's not, doesn't land in your inbox, you're probably not going to get a response. So.
Is it short? Less is more like, do you work with your clients on like, hey, we need to come up with like a couple bullet point value proposition. Or, you know, because, like, for. For me at least, Adam on my, outreach is. I want it to because, like, I look at it as like, hey, value, value. It's not, we can save you money. We can do this. It's more of like, hey, here's who we are. This is our service. And then it's like, you know, I try and tie in some of the things that I know our industry is known for, right? Like, hey, I know that, you know, this is what we do, this is how we operate. But I like to focus it on my solution and the services that I provide.
Not necessarily trashing competitors, but it's like, hey, I know you've probably experienced this. This is what we do differently.
So I'll give everyone just a couple of. Just things that you could just take and run with right away. Subject lines. The best performing subject line. It used to make my stomach curl. The data has proven you get far better response from the subject line. It's simply high. And then their first name. I used to not like it, but you know what, the data has told me otherwise. So. Hi, first name, that's the best, highest performing subject line we have when it comes to copy. I'll give you guys a few different ideas. Number one, like a simple, fundamental way to look at what an email should look like. It should be purpose, problem, solution, social proof. And your ask, so what do I mean by that? The first line is, what is the purpose of your email? One line, what's the purpose?
Why am I reaching out to you? Next line, what's the problem that you solve in one line on its own line? Next line, on its own line. Again, one sentence, what is your solution? Next line, what's your social proof? I've worked with companies X, Y and Z. I've been featured in a, B and C outlets. So what's your social proof then? Finally, what's your call to action? Hey, do you have 15 minutes to chat? That's a simple way of looking at it. If anyone wants, we built a custom GPT prompt. It's completely free. Just send me an email and I'll send that over to you. It'll help you rewrite your emails of different styles. So that's a. That's one way to write. Now, what's much more advanced is personalization. I'm not talking personalization, like, hey, I see you live in, you know, Miami.
Have you went to this great restaurant or I saw you went to this university. What do you think about the mascot? No, that adds no value. That's crap. That's easy to do. How do you do real personalization? Like personalization, as if you were just on their website for 30 minutes doing a deep dive into their company?
Yeah.
One of my favorite tools out there is a tool called Clay. It's clay.com. Phenomenal tool. Complicated to use, though. It's allowed us at scale to send highly personalized emails for our customers and also for my potential customers. That makes it seem like I did 30 minutes of research on their website, or our customers did 30 minutes of research on their website with a simple call to action. Hey, do you have 15 minutes to chat? So that's like the next level? That's more of like the PhD level of cold outreach. But if you just want the basics, the GPT prompt will help you get there. The purpose, problem solution, social proof ask will help you get there. But when you want to take it to the next level, that's where the clay.com can be huge.
Yeah, I think that's the, you know, because for me personally, that's kind of the battle that. That I go through is it's like I want it to look like it's coming from a human being. Right. You know, because I think that we've all received that copy and paste email before. We've all received that. Clearly this is a template. You. But you did not write this out specifically to me. And, like, and I get it right. Like, I see the. The counter argument to both kind of sides of it. But have you seen that? You know, like, is that where things are going? Where it's like, no, this actually looks like you. Like you said 30 minutes. You did your research on it. How can you take that and quantify that to the masses?
Is that, you know, you can do that level of in depth communication for a thousand recipients in a day? Or is that why you're back down to, like, no, you can do this for about 20.
No, you can do it for as big as your infrastructure allows. Like, you could going back to the 20. Because I don't want to confuse people. Just because you can only send 20 emails per inbox in a day doesn't mean you have one inbox. Like, our largest customer has over a thousand inboxes that we're sending from.
Yeah. So you.
Just a thousand times 20 emails a day, like, you could send as much as your infrastructure allows. There's a lot of domains that were emailed from a lot of inboxes, but you're able to do that at scale and for anyone who hears that, it's like, well, I'm not going to have a hundred inboxes. I'm not going to do all this stuff. I have a small team, my team is eight people, we have three people that their job is to manage all of our inboxes for all of our customers. You know, we have well over 3000 inboxes at this point and they're able to manage it because technology automation and systems can allow you to do it. We have a KPI of how long does it take you to respond when somebody wants to meet with one of my customers?
When somebody responds to one of our emails and says, hey, this is interesting, let's talk. Every Friday my team sends me a report saying it took us x amount of hours as an average across all of our customers. Last week it was 1.6 hours that it took for my team to respond to all of our customers to book a meeting. That includes when somebody emails us at 10:00 p.m. Eastern time and we can't get back to them until seven in the morning.
So how do you get that down? Because I think you'll be able to resonate with this really in any phase of to business development. It is that response time, you know, and a lot of it, you know, inside of transportation in particular, where it's like, man, you got to get them, sometimes you got to get them prices within a minute or two minutes or somebody else has already kind of beaten you to the punch in that. Like, I have a rule inside of my organization that we're striving to get to. I want to be very abundantly clear. We are not there yet, but my goal is to get it down to a two minute response time. That's where I wanted to get down to any outreach that comes to us, that's like an actual request from somebody we're working with or a prospect.
I want two minutes. I want speed, speed, speed. I want to push that. Is that something that you see is attainable out there with some of the technologies that are currently available?
Look, time is the killer of all deals. You know, that's why it's so important to create some type of urgency, because the more people think, the less likely it is that they're going to buy. Because a lot of times we'll overthink things and we'll convince ourselves out of doing something that maybe we should do. So you always want to be timely when it comes to sales, including responding to emails. So absolutely. Like, of course it might require some scale challenges, like you might need to hire more people to get there, but that should be the goal for all of us is when we need something or when somebody needs something from us, how do we get back to them as soon as possible and show that we're going to be good to work with?
No, I get it. Lorena has a question. Is the 20 emails per inbox? Because it's a similar format. I usually send emails from my personal inbox, so outside of sales we'll send other emails. Does this mean that it's not a good idea to send for my personal email address?
It's a great question. So as long as it's not like a mass automated email, it fits to different recipients about totally different topics, you should be fine. You know, if you're sending just back and forth emails, of course, with anyone within your organization or to just people that have received emails from me before, that's not going to spark any new trigger. The reason why you want to limit it to 20 emails per day is because these are most likely going to inboxes that you have not reached out to before or have not interacted with you before, which is going to increase the likelihood they don't respond to you or don't open your email. And that those are types of things that are going to set off the spam trigger.
There's also something called spintex, this included in the GPT prompt for anyone that emails me. In the old days of cold email. A year ago, we would send just about the same email to thousands of recipients while swapping out their name. And that used to be okay, now that's not good enough anymore. Google, Yahoo, these providers, they'll see when you're sending the same email over and over again. So this thing called spin tax, what it does is it randomizes different parts of your email so every email looks slightly different. Something simple like it'll say hi Chris to what? To you. And might say hello Joe to the next person. And it might say hey Sam, to the person after that. So you have to do all these little things to stay out of spam and into the inbox.
Dude. Yeah, it's, I mean, it is literally turning into a science because I think that, you know, as technology and as things evolve, I mean, you know that there's going to be a massive push on the recipient end to block out any solicitations that come in because, you know, on any given day, you know, you can receive, you know, some people might think 100 emails in a day is too much and then some people might think 1000 emails in a day is too much or whatever that looks like. So it's all kind of completely dependent upon the recipient.
But I think, like, as things kind of progress, I mean, you know, you bring up AI and chat GBT and a lot of this stuff that's out there, I think it's going to be more and more challenging for people to decipher what's real and what's not real. And, you know, I think that with that being said, spam filters are only going to increase from there and you're really going to need to have Adam, I wouldn't be surprised. And this might even be out there right now. If some organizations won't accept inbound emails unless you send them an outbound email or you receive an email from them.
First, that is happening. I mean, one of our most exciting meetings was with one of the leaders of cybersecurity at. I'll just, instead of saying the company, I'll say a fortune ten company because I don't want them to find out about this and then start changing things. A Fortune ten company, they're ahead of cybersecurity. One of our customers is cybersecurity company. They booked a meeting from cold email and were really surprised. In a week, you're like, hey, this is a Fortune ten company in a cyber. You wouldn't think to your point, Chris, that it would be able to get through to their actual inbox. So, yes, organizations are doing that and that's why it's a cat and mouse game. And look, it might be 20 emails per inbox per day today. It might be something totally different next week because it's changing so rapidly.
And my customers used to be all early stage customers, all early stage companies. A lot of sub ten employee companies would work with us. That's because a lot of bigger companies, hey, they could get away with doing cold email on their own. Now, a lot of our customer base are just more mature companies. We're working with very smart people in sales and marketing, AI marketing, that are just basically like, hey, I'm waving the white flag, just come help us. This stuff is too complicated. We don't want to stay up to date with everything that's going on. We just want to hit give you guys the keys because it is so complicated and it's not going to stop today. There's going to be more and more changes that come in.
No. And that's going to be something that we're going to have you back on to talk about, especially from a cyber standpoint, I think it'd be cool to have so, like Aya, the national NMFTA, they're a trade organization inside of transportation. They do a cybersecurity conference. They're really spearheading cybersecurity inside of transportation. I think it'd be cool to have, maybe we'll have you come on with them and we can talk about that to, you know, from the phishing aspect, because that's just like the biggest issue that's out there. Identity theft is a massive problem inside of the transportation industry, and that's a conversation for another day.
But I think that'd be cool to come on and talk about that, to try and really help some of these organizations with phishing, because, I mean, dude, the amount of cyber attacks and data breaches that are going on across the world right now, it's only going to get more and more complex. And I think that really educating people from that standpoint is going to be a great, you know, initial step forward on that. But Adam, I appreciate your time, and these shows always go by quick, but I like to keep these at 30 minutes to keep people in and out so they can get back to work. How does anybody reach out to you to find out more about what you got going on, man?
Yeah, my website is eocworks.com, and then if you want to email me, just adamorks.com dot happy to answer any questions you guys might have about emailing. If you want that GPT prompt again, email me. I'll send it to you. It's completely free. But thank you, Chris, for having me on. And thanks to everyone that's listening to this live, and we'll be listening to it as a playback. I appreciate the work you're doing, Chris.
No, absolutely, man. And if for some reason you guys can't find Adam, just hit me up. I'll gladly put you guys in contact with them. You know, email sales, everything. This is only going to evolve. This is only going to, I think, get more complex out there, and we really need to kind of get ahead of a lot of these things. But as always, you guys, if you guys got value in what you heard today, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there. Dear network, because if you see value, your network's going to see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys, and we'll be talking to you soon.