- Ole Lehmann (The AI Solopreneur)
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- đ From 0 to first sale: a cold outreach blueprint for solopreneurs
đ From 0 to first sale: a cold outreach blueprint for solopreneurs
how to use Ai for cold outreach (without it sounding robotic)
Read time: 5 minutes
Solopreneur,
If you opened this email, youâre probably interested in getting more clients for your business.
Perhaps, youâre tired of posting daily on social media without getting any leads.
Perhaps, youâre getting leads, but donât want to rely on the âcontent hamster wheelâ for customer acquisition forever.
Perhaps, youâre just curious.
Regardless of what reason brought you to open this email - youâll find the answer.
Weâll cover everything from start to finish. You will learn:
The secret behind mastering cold outreach (and unlocking predictable lead flow)
Draft 10 emphatic outreach messages in 2 minutes using the Empathetic Outreach Writer
A blueprint to send your first 100 cold outreaches via email, LinkedIn, and X
At the end of this email, you will have everything you need to get your first client from cold outreach.
Letâs dive in!
How I went from 0 to 300k profits in 7 months
9 months ago, the FTX scam stole my hard-earned money.
But through consistent content creation and the use of AI, I was able to get back on my feet again in record time.
Thatâs why I built my course, the AI Audience Accelerator.
It will teach you:
How to create a week's worth of content in 1 hour
How to create content that sounds like YOU
AI Systems that skyrocketed my growth
1820 people joined the course and their reviews are incredible.
The secret behind mastering cold outreach (and unlocking predictable lead flow)
Cold outreach is powerful because once you nail the positioning, it's a reliable way to get leads.
It doesn't change like volatile social media algorithms.
When you know that for every 100 cold DMs you send, you get 3 customersâŚ
âŚcold outreach turns customer acquisition into a math problem.
Itâs not longer about:
âHow do I get more customers?â
But:
âHow many cold outreaches do I need to send to get more customers?â
Thatâs why every solopreneur should know the basics of it.
The mistake most people make with cold outreach is trying to directly sell themselves.
Just look at your own Twitter DMs:
Theyâre probably full of bad pitches youâll never respond to.
The reason why youâre annoyed by these messages is that they talk about their features instead of your problem.
But the secret behind mastering cold outreach is to make it about your customersâ problems, not your solution.
You should position yourself as a "free consultant" who aims to understand their struggles first.
For example, look at these two cold DMs:
Pitch A (about their features):
"Hi there! Are you aiming to elevate your brand's presence on social media? I specialize in crafting and managing targeted social media advertising campaigns. Would you be interested in hiring me to boost your brand's visibility and engagement on platforms like Facebook and Instagram?"
Instant block.
Pitch B (about your problem):
"Hi! I've noticed that your brand has a solid social media following, but it seems like you're not leveraging paid advertising to its full potential. Have you considered the impact of targeted ads to enhance your reach and conversion rates? Before diving deeper into content creation, there's a strategic approach to advertising that could significantly increase your audience engagement and salesâallowing you to get more results with less effort on content alone."
While pitch A screams:
âDo you want to pay me to do ads for you?â
(which nobodyâs gonna want to do)
Pitch B is all about helping you make more money.
The first step to master cold outreach is to understand that your goal is to give your prospect so much free valuable advice that they ask you:
âWhat do you offer?â
Now, weâll cover how to use AI to draft messages like the above for your business:
Draft 10 emphatic outreach messages in 2 minutes using the Empathetic Outreach Writer
This prompt helps you write 10 empathy-based outreaches for your brand:
I want you to become empathetic outreach writer, a masterful cold outreach copywriter whose only mission is to 10 draft âempathetic cold outreachesâ for my offer.
For context [INSERT CONTEXT]
My offer is to [EXPLAIN YOUR OFFER AND TARGET AUDIENCE]
To write empathetic cold outreaches, I want you to follow this process:
Understand that empathetic cold outreaches are problem-focused, not feature-focused.
The mistake most people make with cold outreach is trying to directly sell themselves.
The reason why people annoyed by these messages is that they talk about their features instead of your problem.
But the secret behind mastering cold outreach is to make it about your customersâ problems, not your solution.
Your outreach messages should help me position yourself as a "free consultant" who aims to understand their struggles first.
For example, look at these two cold DMs:
Pitch A feature-based
"Hi there! Are you aiming to elevate your brand's presence on social media? I specialize in crafting and managing targeted social media advertising campaigns. Would you be interested in hiring me to boost your brand's visibility and engagement on platforms like Facebook and Instagram?"
Pitch B problem-based & empathetic
"Hi! I've noticed that your brand has a solid social media following, but it seems like you're not leveraging paid advertising to its full potential. Have you considered the impact of targeted ads to enhance your reach and conversion rates? Before diving deeper into content creation, there's a strategic approach to advertising that could significantly increase your audience engagement and salesâallowing you to get more results with less effort on content alone. "
While pitch A screams:
âDo you want to pay me to do ads for you?â
(which nobodyâs gonna want to do)
Pitch B is all about helping you make more money.
Figure out a way to do empathetic outreach for my offer that makes the customer aware of the problem I solve for them, and what pain its causing to them by using a question
In the above examples, the question that achieves this is
âHave you considered the impact of targeted ads to enhance your reach and conversion ratesâ
Constraints:
Your empathetic cold outreach must be no more than 150 words
Your empathetic cold outreach should start with a complement and acknowledge the receiver
Your empathetic cold outreach must include an illuminating question to make my prospect aware of their problem
Your empathetic cold outreach should have a gentle, non-needy call to action, which can be as simple as a question to the customer
Do not use salesy langue like âunlockâ, âgame-changerâ, etc. Just as a normal question.
Now, write 10 empathetic cold outreaches for me. Do it in a tone of voice that looks âoff the deskâ, as if a friend wrote to a friend. Be casual
HOW TO USE THE EMPATHETIC OUTREACH WRITER PROMPT:
Fill in the [INSERT CONTEXT] placeholder with context about yourself and who you are. (If youâve done the AI Audience Accelerator, write /context to use your pre-written context)
Example:
âI am a solopreneur and I write a publication called "The AI Solopreneur". I post content on Twitter, have a community full of AI-driven solopreneurs, and publish a newsletter twice a week. All my content is made specifically about how Solopreneurs can use AI to streamline their business, work faster, and make more money. Most commonly, I talk about different ways to use ChatGPT, but I also introduce solopreneurs to other helpful AI tools and workflows in them. The goal of my content is to attract as many AI-interested solopreneurs (or aspiring solopreneurs) as possible. I want to be the world's best resource for them. I don't know how to code, but I'm fairly skilled at marketing, writing, and investing. In my past, I was a music ghost producer, cryptocurrency investor, and I also took many educational resources to learn about skills related to solopreneurship. I am a big proponent of psychedelics and have positive experiences with them. I don't take myself too seriously. â
Fill in the [EXPLAIN YOUR OFFER AND TARGET AUDIENCE] placeholder with your offer and who youâre trying to reach
Example:
âMy offer is to sell B2C courses to solopreneurs interested in using AI to grow their socials faster. I'm looking to recruit more affiliates for my buisiness that can help me reach more of my target audienceâ
Here are some of the 10 cold outreach drafts it wrote for me:
Sure - not all of them are great - but they are pretty close.
Choose 2-3 of your favorites and tweak themâŚ
Then, do the cold outreach:
A blueprint to send your first 100 cold outreaches via email, LinkedIn, and X
To make cold outreach work, you need to figure out out three things:
How to find your target customers
How to get their attention
How to make them trust you
The empathetic outreach method helps you get attention and trust because it directly separates you from sleazy salespeople.
But it doesnât solve our first problem:
How do we find people to reach?
Thatâs why I want to share the TL;DR of the 3 main platforms for cold outreach:
1) Email outreach
Email allows personalization at scale for qualified leads.
How to find leads:
Use tools like Apollo (not affiliated) or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find target company employees and their email addresses based on filters like:
Role
Industry
Company revenue
How to reach out to them:
Option 1: Use a tool like Apollo to send out a bunch of unpersonalized emails if you have a large target market
Option 2: For smaller volumes, you can send highly personalized emails from your own inbox manually to the emails you got in step 1
(recommended reading: How to write a cold email that actually works)
2) Twitter outreach
Twitter/X is cool because you can find rich people who hang out there casually.
How to find leads:
Use Twittersâ search function to search for your target customer (for example âEcommerce Founderâ)
How to reach out to them:
Send a DM with your outreach message. Follow up every 3 days.
3) Linkedin outreach
LinkedIn is powerful because it has so much data about its users, and if you have a personal brand on there it makes cold outreach easier.
How to find leads:
Use LinkedInâs search function to filter for company industry, location, etc.
If you havenât used your free month of the LinkedIn Sales Navigator yet, you can activate it to get short-term access to powerful search tools
How to reach out to them:
Send (very) casual connection requests to your prospects. Show interest - and donât pivot into sales too fast.
WRAP UP
WHAT YOU LEARNED TODAY
The secret behind mastering cold outreach (and unlocking predictable lead flow)
Draft 10 emphatic outreach messages in 2 minutes using the Empathetic Outreach Writer
A blueprint to send your first 100 cold outreaches via email, LinkedIn, and X
Whatâs better than ending a newsletter with a food pic?
A dog pic.
This little homie chilled with us while we had an amazing breakfast.
Thailand is just amazing when it comes to food (and cute dogs).
Keep diving,
Ole
What did you think about today's edition? |
P.S.
I made over $300,000 in 150 days selling my online course. Iâm now creating a course on how to use AI to build and sell a digital product in record time (without being an expert or paying 10k to consultants)
Donât have an audience yet to sell to?
No problem, my last course will help you create 1 weekâs worth of content
in 1 hour using AI and grow your audience.