Cold Outreach Strategies That Actually Work in 2025

0:08Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ductate Marketing Podcast. This is John Jance. My guest today is Matt McQuinn. He uncovered a hidden gem for marketers, outbound campaigns driven by research-based prospect lists, produce more leads. So after working as a director in multiple agencies, he co-founded Coldlytics to make what was previously unscalable, scalable research-based lists for cold outreach. Since its inception, Matt's team has delivered more than 10 ,000 lists and sourced millions of targeted leads for digital agencies and was sharing his expertise with the world to gain from.

0:47So as you might have guessed, we're going to talk about lead generation today. So Matt, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks so much for having me on. So let's, I want to talk about kind of a range of, you work with a lot of agencies, certainly a lot of agencies want more leads, want more business, want to grow. So I want to talk a little bit about what's working, not working. But let's kind of dive first into the whole cold outreach component. Sure. Cold is in the name of your business. So legitimate topic. Let me set the table a little bit and really in part to allow you to defend the practice.

1:21There's a lot of people that do not like cold outreach. A lot of people don't have much success with it. A lot of people on the receiving end don't care for it. I get 10 pitches a day for people who want to generate leads for me. So what are you bringing to the world of that kind of cold outreach that you think is different? Well, I think what really sets apart the men from the boys who are doing cold emails or the women from the girls is going to be really the intention of the outreach you do. If you were to walk into a convention and you started talking over crowds of people who are already talking to each other, you bump into people and you start telling them what you do.

2:02My goodness, they're going to find a way to get you out of that event if they possibly can. And that's how most cold emails feel or cold messages in general. That's the intention most people have is to not care about the person on the other side, be so consumed with themselves. They show up and just start talking over everybody. And that has been something that initially worked. unfortunately in some capacity because it then seemed to validate something that people tried to scale and it's led to what we all experience today and all have a negative association with being old emails so what what really differentiates then is someone who has a intention of meeting someone where they're at with something valuable and useful and bring as much to the table than And more than you expect to take from that person.

2:52And that looks very different than probably most of the cold emails you'd picture seeing in your inbox right now. So I know a lot of some agencies, you know, are just trying to sell project work or trying to sell tactics. So let's say they do SEO. So it's like, hey, anybody who needs SEO is our client, which is one of the aspects of cold email or cold outreach. And then it's like, it doesn't really care, you know, who you're attracting. And in our agency, we're a little different. I mean, everybody that works with us is going to go through strategy first. It is a very set period of time where we're going to develop a strategy.

3:25And so the fact of the matter is there's a lot of clients we don't want that aren't a good fit. So how do you balance kind of that idea of, hey, I feel like I want to have a role in choosing my clients as opposed to just casting this like anybody who is in an industry or is a certain size, I'm going to pitch to. Yeah. So that's the beauty of cold outreach is that you do get totally granular control if you choose to take it before you get in front of those people. And my favorite way to do this is to take an externally verifiable factor. And let me dumb that down into layman's terms. Take something you can sit down and confirm for yourself about that business to be clued in that that person actually cares about digital marketing.

4:12you're probably going, well, how do you do that for somebody you don't know or don't have any information about at this point? So what you will go, aha, to hear is the most obvious thing you can look for using either a platform like ours or just digging into a website's code is a pixel installed on a website is evidence of someone who believes in the entire concept of digital marketing and has probably spent good money. Or at least somebody's convinced them to put that on their website, right? They may not even know it's there. Precisely. And that's so true. But that really tells you someone's nature of, hey, they probably are aware of what digital marketing is all about and have bought into the concepts at least enough to have taken some prerequisite steps that quite frankly, as a business owner, if you don't have any interest in this stuff, you're not going to do it.

4:59You're either going to pay someone else to do it. So this is a big green flag. So if you can start with something like that, and maybe it's not a pixel, Maybe it's they put Google Analytics on their website. Well, I'll tell you another thing we do. Of course, we work with traditional kind of brick and mortar type businesses. Certainly, they're very digital as well. But a lot of times, involvement in their industry is actually a great, like if they belong to their industry, you know, local chapter or they serve on boards in their chamber. You know, that's actually a really telling sign that they're in it for the long haul, you know, which is what we're looking for.

5:33So it doesn't necessarily just have to be that digital artifact. Touch point. Exactly. Yeah. And that's the right way to think about it. I mean, you're a veteran in this world. So you know that really it takes that initial effort to say, hey, I know this person is even remotely someone I want to give time to or not at a surface level. So once you've got that initial qualification in place, then you're really teed up to say, OK, now what can I bring to the table to start an interesting conversation? So if we go back to the convention analogy, if you were to walk up to somebody and again, you just start going right through your elevator pitch and you start rambling on about what you sell.

6:13Again, they're tuning you out, trying to get away as quick as they can versus coming up to them and knowing them. Hey, Bob, we haven't met before, but I wanted to let you know I was on your website and I did see one thing that I fixed for three other companies like yours. Can I tell you what it is? You can go do it yourself after this if you want to. I just couldn't not pass this information along. Okay, that feels a lot more genuine. And if you spend some time to iterate on that, just top of mind example, you'll get to something that feels very natural, very comfortable and authentic for the other person to say, oh, okay, yes, I am going to engage with this person.

6:49I do care about it. And they're not asking me to buy. They're not asking me for my time. They're literally trying to tell me, hey, I know you've ran ads in the past and I could send you an ad of something that converts really well for other people like you if you'd like, this is what we do for a living or whatever the example may be. So bringing that value to the table really differentiates you. And it's all about that initial quality control of who are you going to reach out to and how do you plan to approach them that makes all the difference in the world? So we are seven minutes in and I'm going to make my first mention of AI.

7:24So, you know, that's, of course, the latest flavor of, you know, the pitch I get now consistently is, hey, let us create AI bots for you that will do all the prospecting and cold outreach for you. So how is AI impacting kind of that, you know, that segment of lead generation? Yeah, so I know there's quite a spectrum of involvement in AI at this point in time. And I think the more dramatic implementations of complete done for you services are yet to be seen in effectiveness. Not to say somebody hasn't cracked it. I haven't seen it, but I think we will get there rapidly based on how things are moving.

8:02But again, just like that initial version of cold email we discussed at the start of this podcast, it will work for a time and then it will need iterated and improved as well as with anything in mass marketing. Yeah, that's interesting. I mean, you know, you see these trends or even fashions or, you know, whatever you want to call it of types of emails, types of campaigns, types of landing pages. And, you know, they work great for a while and they don't work anymore because people get tired of them or they start seeing everybody do them. So you really do. I mean, that's probably the one consistent thing is change, right?

8:35That's exactly it. Yeah. Yeah, and I think we will quickly turn a page and enter an era where the AI improves on its own as in a machine learning style, where it takes the data from the campaign it ran and iterates on that, tests it for you. And those things truly will turn on autopilot for some of this for probably an extensive period of time when we accomplish that effectively. But again, I haven't seen it yet. Yeah. So one of the big promises of AI, and again, I don't, I'm not sure people are there at scale yet, but is, is authentic automation. Does that sound like an oxymoron? Sure. But to where, where I'm automating stuff, I'm personalizing stuff, but it is, it's, it still feels authentic.

9:18Is that, are we there yet? Or is that something that's still kind of almost handwork? You know, if you've spent any time with AI, this is going to resonate. The quality of the inputs you give it are directly correlated to the outputs you get on the other end. So, again, if you've given it enough information to do a nice personalization, it will word it probably better than you would have the first time. But the question is, did you take the time to give it that information it needs to leverage its world class education in language? And usually most people don't. And so we end up with a whole bunch of naturally generated garbage.

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10:30And try it out for yourself. Right now, duct tape marketing listeners get a dollar for dollar match on any TV campaign up to$5 ,000. That means if you spend$5 ,000 on TV ads, you'll get an additional$5 ,000 to spend. Head on over to adcritter.com. That's adcritter.com and get started. So if somebody came to you, we already talked about this idea of things changing and that you have a little different approach. If somebody came to you and said, Matt, I need to generate more leads. What's working right now? I mean, what would you set up for them? Yeah. Yeah. So at an infrastructure level, I'll speak to kind of the whole product solution.

11:11So what you would do from start to finish, regardless of whether you were doing that through CodeLytics or not, because CodeLytics is only a data provider. So we don't give you everything that is required. We just focus on that data quality. So start to finish, you're going to need some tech fundamentals that I won't bore people with on this. You can reach out to me or somebody else to find that boring stuff. Once you've got your tech set up right, and I can't overstate that that is something most people try to bypass and they do wrong, and you're going to flop right from the beginning. And this process should be pictured as learning to ride a bike for the first time.

11:46If you expect to get on this bike and bike to work that day, you're not showing up without skin knees, if at all. So you need to get into the mindset of you're going to get on this thing and fall off a few times, make a couple mistakes, and you'll build momentum and you'll get where you're going, but not without a little commitment on the front end. And then after that, it's smooth sailing. So you've got your tech component that needs to be set up, your emails, all of that's in place. The next thing I'm going to do is make sure I know exactly who my audience is and that the list I'm working with is spot on.

12:17So in over 100 years of direct mail studies, they found that 60 % of a campaign success, you probably heard this, came down to the quality of the list they started with. The next largest factor is the offer. And that's the next thing I'm going to say. It's true in any direct marketing that the next piece you have to have right is the offer. We can dumb that down to a call to action and figure out how do I start this conversation? How do I get the wheels moving and the value exchange going and people engaged and interested and somewhat trusting what I've started? So for me, that looks like probably a three to four email sequence campaign, starting with something valuable that I know about that particular prospect in advance, using that to personalize the email.

13:02Again, that's a spectrum. It could be highly personalized that you took time to write a single or a paragraph of whatever it may be for every email, or you do something more scalable, like the pixel detection, talking about advertising and offering them an ad sample that you can send. Whatever that may be is going to be a big determining factor in how you shape your offer. And if that offer is effective, because if you're in an industry where their cousin's always the one that set up the website and they're the only one that knew about the pixel, then talking about advertising pixels or any of that is.

13:34jargon that they won't understand. So you have to be meeting that person where they're at. And really, as I'm talking right now, I think what I'm trying to really say nicely is that the messaging, the positioning, all of the things that go into marketing and traditional fundamentals are contained in the context of outbound and cold email. You got to know who you're talking to, how you're going to say it, what that offer is going to be, and be willing to test and iterate on that. So take your four emails and do six or seven versions of those if you can, because the first three are going to just do nothing for you.

14:08And someone might raise their hand on the fourth. And that's where you'll take your next three split tests from and start to get down the road. So talk a little bit about brand and privacy. And, you know, there are a lot of people I get a lot of pitches from from folks that are clearly cold outreach. They're using a made up domain name that's not the same as their brand. And that's just standard practice. If I called up 10 cold outreach companies, they'd say, yeah, you need five domains and this because you got to get around the spam filters and all that. I mean, so when people start having those conversations, it doesn't feel like the kind of marketing I'd want to do.

14:50So how do you reel that image, you know, that the, that the industry is sort of created back in. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, that's a great point. That's how I felt about the space when I got into it. And I still feel that way because that is a true statement to make that it is kind of uncomfortable. It feels unnatural. It feels genuine. So how do we bridge that gap and get to doing something that we can all feel good about doing? Again, we've talked a lot about the intention that goes into this and that effort. So you mentioned specifically setting up a separate domain and a separate email, which again is a prerequisite to doing this stuff.

15:28What I always tell people when they're doing this, the sole goal here is to recognize that in any marketing effort, it will not resonate with everyone. It will upset someone. And these are all things outside of your control, short of shutting your business down in fear of upsetting someone. So being mindful in how you do this. You want to have this separate domain existing just to protect yourself in case your domain did get marked as spam. You certainly don't want your own clients to stop receiving your invoices when they come to. So it's a necessary evil to set it up, although it can feel a little bit off-putting, especially the first time you do it to go, oh man, is all this really necessary?

16:07Should I be doing this? And then once you've got, like we talked about that kind of tech stack in place. All of those things are set up. Then it comes down to asking yourself, hey, how few of these things do I have to send to be effective? Not how many can I send to hit how many inboxes, which is the approach most people default to, because that's what it sounds like you're supposed to do. But the reality is I started with asking myself, how little effort do I have to put in to get an output? And that usually means it's most valuable and relevant to those people. And there's minimal collateral damage.

16:39So doing tests in small batches is a great way to bridge that gap when you're getting started. Well, and I suspect a lot of front end work on qualifying who's actually a lead or who's actually a prospect, right? I mean, a lot of people want 100 ,000 names when maybe 1 ,000 names would be a heck of a lot better way to go because they're going to be a lot more qualified for what you're looking for, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And I do see that a lot when people start in this space to go, you know, I talked to somebody, they said, Hey, Matt, I'm excited about this. I want to get 5 ,000 names from you right away.

17:11And I said, I actually told them, I said, I could sell you the 5 ,000, but I don't want to, what I want you to do is buy your first thousand. And I want you to split that up 10 directions. And I want you to test it. And I want you to take your time. I said, because if you're not going to spam people and you're going to build meaningful relationships out of this, you're not going to start with 5 ,000. There's no need for that. You would never knock on 5 ,000 doors and not get a result. You'd quit. So that means how many doors, if we use the door to door and as well, maybe it's only a hundred to drum up enough meetings to follow up with that you didn't need 5 ,000.

17:43That's for sure. Well, and that's another great point too, because I mean, I, I work with a lot of agencies, a lot of people that are just getting started. Three or four more clients would actually make a big difference in, you know, in their world. And yet they're, they're focused on trying to do things to, you know, send to thousands. It's like, well, maybe you need 10 meetings. So like, let's back that objective up and say, okay, how do we get 10 meetings and start? I mean, let's, let's get that list of a hundred people and let's figure out how to spend a whole lot of time and money and effort on those hundred people.

18:16And I think, I think a lot of people really miss that because automation makes it seem almost free and effortless, right? Hit the button, send, And no work involved in that, but obviously, you know, probably not a great result either. Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned having that list of 100 people to reach out to kind of loosely, but that's actually something I encourage people to do specifically is that. If you don't have the, let's zoom out for a second and say you're an agency that has only a handful of clients right now. like you're in that position where three to four more clients would be more work that you know what to do with at that moment.

18:53And you'd have scaling problems beyond that, maybe within that. Okay. That's a great place to be. It's an exciting place to be. But the thing that people overlook when they're starting these new marketing channels is they go, Oh, everything's got to scale to the moon. We got to grow this thing to$2 million by next year. And you're only doing 20 ,000 a month at this point. So it's going to, that's okay. Slow your roll. Just come in here, focus on getting a few of these clients. And sometimes that looks like getting a list, kind of a dream 100 list of targets that would be if you could close one or two of them, you'd be set, you'd be very busy for quite a number of months, and you can focus on doing that.

19:29And so I often encourage people getting started to just start very small, ease into this stuff. And you will bring customers through the door, experience those problems, learn how to manage that growth and continue to scale from there. But it is a balancing act that sometimes gets totally flopped because the default is once you close one of those deals should be at least all your attention goes, OK, how do I fulfill to this client? And usually that means people shut the marketing lever off right away for themselves, which is the same thing you as an agency probably tell your client not to do. But agency owners are guilty of it themselves.

20:05So you have to keep in mind there's a balancing act between maybe you're testing 25 or 100 emails just over the course of a month. and you're managing your client book and growing that sustainably as well. And as these two things begin to grow, you get that momentum and you learn scalability, both on the outreach side and within your own client management. So, you know, there's no silver bullets. There's no shortcuts. You have to take your time and do good, genuine outreach if you're going to have any impact in your business. Another thing that's, of course, funny is, you know, a lot of people want lots and lots of leads, which is, of course, important, but they're not close to many of those leads.

20:44And it's like, you know what? If we focused on doubling our close rate, we definitely would not need hundreds of leads, right? Yes. And so it's almost like just what you said. Get your fulfillment down, figure out how to convert leads, and then go generate leads. Right. But, you know, that sounds backwards to a lot of people, but it's definitely the right way to grow, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. It's a balancing act. I'm curious, you know, we talk about all these digital tools. I mean, where do you think the phone fits in the whole continuum, right? I mean, it's like nobody does direct mail anymore.

21:19So direct mail is all of a sudden really effective again. Nobody calls anybody. So is that what we are? You know, I'm just curious where you feel like that fits in the continuum. So I chatted with a gentleman's name, Justin Michael, and he has coached Fortune 100 sales teams. And what he told me is that the most effective form of outreach is all of them at once. And I thought, man, that sounds terrible. But he said, genuinely, if you look at the stats, if you sit down and you decide, Hey, I'm going to write this personalized email, I'm going to send, I'm going to pick up the phone. I'm going to call them right then.

21:56I'm going to go to their LinkedIn, send them a message. And I'm going to go interact with their company, social media content. Okay. you stand out 10 times anybody else who's tried to reach out to them because you hit them on multiple touch points. It's obvious you're invested and know about them and their business. They're not just another email on a spreadsheet that got automated. So it has its place. You can always focus on a singular channel, but combining outbound channels, especially today when many of them are overlooked, can be highly effective. Yeah. And I think so much of, you know, email one-time pitch things.

22:31I mean, it's really, who knows if I even saw that that day, right? I think the omni-channel kind of trust building that can be done. Again, you can also irritate people that way too, but the trust building that can be done, you know, omni-channel, I think you're spot on. So again, Matt, I appreciate you dropping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you'd invite people to find out more about the work that you're doing and how you might be able to help? Sure, absolutely. I think you work with, right? Yes. Yeah, we do focus. Yep. And that's my background as well, as I've mentioned.

22:59So if you want to connect with me, just search up Matt McQuinn on Coldlytics, sorry, on LinkedIn, or you can just go straight to coldlytics.com and you can message me through a live chat there. I'm more than happy to chat one-on-one at this stage of the business. I have the privilege of still getting in front of the customer and talking to people one-to-one and I really enjoy that. So I'd love to chat. Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. Maybe we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road.