In our latest episode of "Go to Market Made Simple" Weekly Series we had the pleasure of hosting Jesse O., a renowned expert in cold email deliverability. Unlike typical discussions about cold emails that focus on content, subject lines, or the body of the email, this episode took a deep dive into the technical aspects that ensure your emails actually reach the inbox of your prospects.
Key Highlights:
[1] The Importance of Email Deliverability:
Jesse emphasized that no matter how well-crafted your email content is, it won't matter if it doesn't land in the primary inbox. We explored the critical setup of email systems, focusing on email deliverability, DNS settings, and other technical configurations that pave the way for successful email campaigns.
[2] Technical Setup for Success:
We discussed the intricacies of setting up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. Jesse likened the process to getting into a popular nightclub — your emails need the right 'ID' (setup) to be allowed into the 'club' (inbox).
[3] Using Tools and Platforms:
Jesse shared insights on utilizing platforms like Clay for personalizing outreach and how tools like Lead Magic can be leveraged to identify and target companies that are actively hiring, indicating potential needs that align with your services.
[4] Real-Time Demonstration:
In a live demonstration, Jesse showed how to use Lead Magic to pull data on companies hiring for specific roles and then push this data to Clay to enrich it further with contact details of decision-makers like Chief Revenue Officers. This practical demonstration provided a clear view of how to streamline the process of gathering and utilizing data for targeted outreach.
[5] Interactive Q&A:
We had an interactive Q&A session where Jesse addressed questions from the audience, clarifying doubts about deliverability metrics, the importance of not sending cold emails from main domain addresses, and the effectiveness of AI in personalizing emails.
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Andy Mewborn:
Hola, buenos dias, amigos, buenas tardes, and today we hosted a cold email masterclass with Jesse O. I can't pronounce his last name, so I just call him Jesse O. Now, this isn't your typical cold email masterclass. Why? We didn't even really talk about content inside of a cold email. We didn't talk about subject lines. We didn't talk about the body. We didn't really even get into that. What we talked about is more important than the content of the email, because guess what? The content in the email doesn't matter. if your email can't land in the primary inbox of your prospects. So we talked about how do you set up your email systems, your email deliverability, your DNS, and I know this is getting technical, but we talked about how do you set all that up to actually set yourself up for success so that when you send that email and put all that time in those pretty subject lines, pretty body, you actually get a response. All right. So we went to that. It's very nerdy. However, we tried to break it down and make it simple because of course this was part of our weekly series. Go to market made simple. Now, before we dive in, last thing I got to say is if you have not checked out distribute yet, please do. It is the all in one solution for mutual action plans, business cases, call followups, and any type of sales collateral that you need. So go check it out if you haven't already, and we hope you enjoy this masterclass today. Thanks y'all. How should we start this masterclass, man?
Jesse Ouellette:
I think what we got to do is just fundamentally talk about the math. Okay. I want to hear your side of the math. We're going to just all agree that the same rules are there, right? For everybody, because we can't, you can't even get to the problem if you can't. So I guess your goal really is as a sales or mark, you know, if you're doing sort of any sort of outbound email, The math has to be that you're going for the reply, but not like, I'm not talking about like out of office and things like that. I'm talking like an actual person who says if they're interested or not, or they unsubscribe or whatever they want to do, right? They have that freedom and you want to see what that number is, right? Because like, I know even when I was talking to you initially, It was, it was like, you know, hey, we need, I need to get this going and I need to get some, you know, we're even just talking like hey, let's just talk about like getting some real replies because I think before everybody said hey, you can get a conversation going on email. It's harder now, right? It's usually they're just going to opt into like taking a meeting with you, right? So two people who don't want to screw around with like back and forth. So you've got to really get that reply, that real reply. And you've got to measure that against the benchmarks of like other campaigns that are like this, that other people have run. That's what I think.
Andy Mewborn:
What are people doing right now that you're seeing? So for context for everyone here, Jesse runs Lead Magic. For those that don't know Jesse, Jesse's kind of like the cold email like king. Jesse's, yes, yes, he's one of them. There's many, you know, there's many. There's Eric, there's Enzo, there's, we've got a whole crew of kind of cold email pirates is what we call them. We've got a little WhatsApp group going. But Jesse is the man when it comes to deliverability, which used to be a boring topic. And everyone was like, why would you talk about that? And like, no one saw that, actually, that was me.
Jesse Ouellette:
I was like, a lot of people just ignored it, man. It was I'm like, guys, you don't know, or people, you don't know, like, this thing is gonna get really bad all of a sudden. And I mean, I saw what AI and ML could do to your, you know, for sequence emails.
Andy Mewborn:
And, you know, yeah, super brutal, like, and you, you kind of changed my perspective on that. I will say, man, so kudos because I wasn't worried about it. I knew what it was and I knew how to do the basic stuff, but I didn't really like, I wasn't until I got fired for it.
Jesse Ouellette:
Yeah. I fought the system. I had to, I, I knew that putting an email signature on my, and I, you know, I was, they said no email signature, no job, no W2 job. And I said, Well, I've been thinking about this anyways, so let's, let's go and let's, let's turn it around. And, you know, the rest of it was the best decision I ever made, but you know, I, I knew landing in the primary inbox has never been more important because people don't respond. If your email is in spam, it just literally will not respond. They won't even see it.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Which is, it's crazy. Right. And like in most people, so everyone actually, if you're listening, put it in the chat. Leave a comment and let us know how you're thinking about deliverability, if you're thinking about deliverability at all, or just say you have no clue. Because it all kind of starts here, y'all. I know we're kind of doing this as an off-the-cuff masterclass, but it all starts here, and we should actually get into the intricacies of this, Jesse, and what you should look at when it comes to deliverability. Cause right now that probably sounds like magic to people. And so what are like the top three things I think people should be doing there? Um, let's frickin show them that way they can like start to think.
Jesse Ouellette:
So if I have to think about it, just holistically, I would say, if you want to make an analogy, it's like a popular nightclub that everybody wants to get into, right? You're in the inbox. There's a, there's a, there's a door person, right? That's sort of handling, you know, the riff raff, right? That's what they would say. You know, I had a couple of buddies who were bouncers college, but You know, they would handle their profit. And you never knew, like, they would kind of like... Hopefully they didn't kick your ass out.
SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, I wouldn't be there.
Andy Mewborn:
You gotta get him out of here, man. He just wants to drink beer and talk about emails.
Jesse Ouellette:
Yeah, later. But you know, that popular party that's going on there, right? Everybody wants to kind of like, you know, because that right, obviously running ads, as you know, is not cheap. When you get a six, seven, eight, nine figure bill from Google, Microsoft, or Reddit, or any of the other ad platforms that are out there, you're going to feel that. And when you could send emails, if you can send them automated, which outreach really built that incredible business on that. And I think that you just have to really think about, okay, now I'm automating it. Now imagine if a nightclub had a bunch of like robots trying to come into it. They'd say, no, no, no, you're not coming in. We don't need robots in our, we don't need robots in our nightclub. Right. So they would stop everybody at the door and you'd have to look more like a somebody who could, they could actually want in their nightclub. And that thinking about it that way is the best way to really figure out what you need to do to improve your email delivery.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, and there's like it just to define it for people that's typically like three things right there's D mark. There's your SPF records and there's your D key dk I am that you like for sure need to get set up.
Jesse Ouellette:
And those are like- Yeah, that's table stakes for the whole thing. And what that sets is this thing, there's a thing called authentication. What that means, that's like having an ID. What that means, it's like, so if you don't, you know, first of all, you know, if you're going to a nightclub that you're, you know, and well, for me, maybe I could probably get in because I'm well over 21, but for somebody who's, you know, they're gonna check your ID at the door. I mean, it doesn't matter where you're going.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, I can't grow a beard, man. So like, I still get checked every time. Man, you definitely have a baby face. I got peach fuzz right here, but that's about it. And so I still get ID'd, unfortunately. It's okay, it's okay. I take it as a compliment, though.
Jesse Ouellette:
Busy nightclub, no ID, and you're trying to send robots in, or I guess another analogy might be like, you're going through the TSA, trying to travel to Mexico, and you're bringing a bunch of drugs and guns with you. I might be the extreme there, but it's like, okay. So that's what I see happening. So there's a lot of sales teams and they just send and they do it without any real conviction of that this is a quality message. And when I show it to them and I break it down for them, I'm just like, you know, let's look, do you have your ID? And then with that, I just check the, there's basic IT setup. Now the funny thing is I've worked at series D unicorn companies. I worked for a company, you can look at my LinkedIn if you want to figure out which one it is. I worked for a company that had a billion dollars of venture backed capital. And I was there in the C to D round, I was there in the D round, might've been closer to the E round. they didn't have DKIM on. And these are basic IT. It's literally a zero or one. It's not even, you don't argue it, right? It's on, it's off. There's no halfway. It's a setting that you need to have on. And checking that first is like the easiest thing. Companies have it off. Now, even if you have all that on, that's only having your ID to go into the doors of the nightclub.
Andy Mewborn:
Wow. Yeah. Well, and, I think the question that people are going to ask from here now is how in the hell do I do that? Right? Like if I'm like, where do I do that? How do I do that? There's all these terms, like what the heck? Cause this is what I asked you. Like, well, I knew the basics, but like, where do you make this happen? If you buy a domain, like, you know, like all that stuff, maybe I should just pull up where you set up like your deal. Yeah.
Jesse Ouellette:
You want me to show, I could show like. Yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
Show it, show it. So people would just get like a nice little touch of it. And I know we're getting a little nerdy here y'all, but like, We're getting nerdy because no one, everyone, when they do a cold email masterclass, they talk about here's the perfect template and all that. And don't get me wrong, templates are great. But your template doesn't matter if your inbox, your email can't even land in the inbox, right? Like you can have the best template in the world that says, I'm going to give you a thousand dollars to take a meeting and actually do that. But if it doesn't hit their inbox, it doesn't matter. So maybe we show how to set up in CloudFlare or something like that.
Jesse Ouellette:
Absolutely. I'm actually going to do something. You're going to hate me for this one. Uh-oh. I left the brand 30 email. Oh, gosh.
Andy Mewborn:
I'm really sorry to do that. Oh, shit. Oh, this is me.
Jesse Ouellette:
OK. Now, let's talk about this a little bit, too. I opted into this. So one of the things that's different from cold email versus marketing emails There's sort of three types of really four types of emails that come out of your company, right? There's the regular, like functional people that are emailing vendors, HR, this type of thing. There's the cold email people. There's the transactional email. Transactional email is the ones where you're like, forgot password, those types of things. Yeah. And then there's the, um, the bulk. Hold on, let me take a drink.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. There's, there's the water loop. You're good, man. Yeah.
Jesse Ouellette:
So there's bulk and this is right here. Right. Yeah. And what you do have here is, um, ah, excuse me. Uh, but basically you have, you have a header that you can look at and then you can, um, take this and look and see how it performs. Right. So let's look and see, um,
Andy Mewborn:
Okay. So you took the header. So you said you, you, so it's steps for people, you show original message in Gmail to see if you have this on. So you went to show original here.
Jesse Ouellette:
You got the header, which is. Let me just make sure that I'm pulling it out. The problem is I'm forwarding some of those emails. So hold on one second. I just want to make sure it came to the right email address. Where have I got an email from you?
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Everyone for, for those that just might've joined. Jesse is currently roasting my email deliverability live on this call. So yes, he's roasting me.
Jesse Ouellette:
So what you do first is you go here and you would, you would click on show original, right? This is an average system that you have. Yeah. And when you're doing that, you're going to see the information here, but let's just, let's analyze.
Andy Mewborn:
Pass pass. Yep. So I passed.
Jesse Ouellette:
So well, let's actually make it better even actually than this, right? So there's a little more to it than this. Uh, what we're going to do is we're going to go to MX toolbox website and I actually, um, believe it or not here. Um, hold on. Yeah. So basically in here, if you go into the area, you paste it in here. Yeah. It'll tell you really everything you need to know. Uh, because, yep. So you passed on every, ah, this is the hardest one to pass on.
Andy Mewborn:
Why didn't I pass? Why didn't I pass?
Jesse Ouellette:
This one is a little bit of a, so this one's not going to be that, that impactful. Uh, and I'll tell you why it's kind of going to see that you have your ID on the way in, but you might've dropped it. Okay. And by the way, it depends on who you're emailing, right? If you're emailing the Fortune 500, you're going to need your ID the whole time. It's like you're going through a more sophisticated, you know, bouncers following you around all the time, right? But in this scenario where you have it, you've actually are going to probably be fine. But like what it is, you're using this domain name. And what's happened is you probably have a conflict between your current Gmail and ConvertKit or whatever you're sending product. Beehive, I'm using Beehive.
Andy Mewborn:
Ah, yeah. To send my newsletter, I'm using Beehive.
Jesse Ouellette:
So when it goes back to check, it's getting a different signature from your other. So whatever else you're sending emails from on this system, it's sort of aligned to another system. Got it.
Andy Mewborn:
Okay. So this looks like a lot of code. Yeah, but overall I'm like good, right?
Jesse Ouellette:
Like I can like- You're good on this newsletter. Yeah. Sorry, the newsletter that had the one that you said, or this one, this one from andysnewsletter.com. Yeah, but I'm not good on the other one. The other one, I was forwarding the email so we wouldn't be able to check it. It's coming from- Oh, okay, okay, I'll get it. And then the other thing is the content. So one other thing you want to do now, I opted into this email. So I'm like, I already, I'm not like blocking it. It's got a fairly, it's probably, I mean, I opted in, right? It's a fairly high, you know, it's not going to, the biggest thing you want to avoid are report as spam. So if you can, if you can avoid getting reported as spam by the inbox, and that's what this is, if you were, I'm not going to do it to you, Andy, I promise.
Andy Mewborn:
Do not, come on, man. We're friends.
Jesse Ouellette:
I won't do it, man.
Andy Mewborn:
I promise.
SPEAKER_00:
No tacos for you ever, dude.
Andy Mewborn:
If you do that, no tacos.
Jesse Ouellette:
That would be what you don't want. You don't want the person doing that. So this is where I think the breakup email is dead because that email triggers people to do this more. Like guilt emailing, right? It's where you're like making somebody you don't know. It's sort of like on like Wayne's world where she buys a gun for him and he goes, I don't even, wait a second. I don't even, you're mental. Like, I don't even, I don't even shoot guns. I don't even have any guns, a gun rack. I missed that one. You got, you know, like, why would you, why would you break up with me if I'm, we're not, we're not even in a conversation yet. Like that's a weird one. And that triggers people to hit them before to spam.
Andy Mewborn:
Got it. Okay. So for those listening, let's, let's like dumb this down a lot. So if you are using, so whenever you're sending an email, let's call it like from beehive. And I know beehive has a support article on this. If you're sending a newsletter, if you're sending cold, let's start with newsletters. Cause I know some people on there have newsletters. Um, actually let's ask the audience. Hey, uh, y'all comment below. Like how are you, are you just doing cold emails or are you doing a newsletter? Are you doing both? Like, Are you doing transactional emails? What kind of cold emails are you sending? And if it's just basic cold emails from Gmail, that's fine too. But comment what kind of emails you're sending here for us. Let's see what we got. Go ahead and drop a comment. What types of cold emails are you sending? That way we're making sure we're kind of hitting everything. Go ahead and drop it there. Drop it in the comments.
Jesse Ouellette:
Do not send cold emails from Beehive.
SPEAKER_00:
No, no, no, no. Of course, of course.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, you're not separate. I don't even know if you can do that. But if you're using it, how you're using email, right? Drop that in the chat. Let's see what you're doing.
Jesse Ouellette:
It'll work really well for one day, and then it will stop working and you'll be thrown off the platform.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. So listen to Jesse. Don't do that. It will work.
Jesse Ouellette:
Like everyone's like, oh, yeah, no, no, no, it will work. It will work very well. And then they'll kick you off the platform because it's a it's a it's a it's a you know, you got to be careful. You can't go on like the nicest. you can't go move into the nicest neighborhood and then start throwing parties every night, right? You're gonna have the police there, you're gonna have everybody there watching you, right? You're impacted by who your neighbors are, and that's how they determine the value of your, and that's why it's a unique opportunity to look at Gmail and Outlook to send cold emails. And that's why it works is because everybody on Gmail is on the same block.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, exactly. Okay, okay, okay. So we got some people here. HubSpot for newsletters, Apollo for cold emails, and about to check out Clay. Cool. Nice. Nice, nice. So HubSpot for newsletters. I would check if you're from Maine, y'all, like search HubSpot, set up DKIMSPF.
Jesse Ouellette:
HubSpot's tricky to do on the DKIM stuff. They've actually, it's, they've gotten a little bit better, but it's a little bit complicated and you might want to work with a HubSpot partner on that.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So there you go. Well, how I do it, like on beehive, they had an article, right? Y'all. So don't think you have to like figure this out on your own type of like beehive set up DK. I am SPF and they'll have directions for how to do it. You're going to like log in to your, um, your, your word domain lives name, cheap go daddy. I was going to say Google daddy, but, um, not Google daddy, go daddy. And then you basically add some records to your domain, right? Yep.
Jesse Ouellette:
And this is a good example. You can also plug it in. I do have a GPT. I was just thinking about this. I have a GPT that I put out there and it helps you set it up on your email for cold email. You can go into my GPT and you can paste your header and it'll give you, it'll actually score it for you. So if you want to do that. I don't know why I'm plugging people's websites other websites but I forgot I built this but this actually gives you a full report, and if you give this to your IT team, they will be able to help you fix anything that's a problem. I got pretty critical on this of everything it's pretty detailed but this is like. you know, what it is. And then I, of course, uh, you know, it's just helps you do that. And this is how, uh, you need to set this stuff up and test it. And this tells you if it passes or fails, uh, right away. Right. So, you know, that's a good way to look at it as well. Uh, and it, the only thing it will pick up is that DKIM issue, that alignment issue that we saw earlier on the newsletter.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And Jesse, we have a question here. Let's, let's, uh, is there a way to know if your email got to their inbox?
Jesse Ouellette:
Ah, this is where I think a lot of people don't like me. Because I've said this, everyone who asks me, I always get the same question, Jesse, I've got a good deliverability or whatever. And they're always like, everything's, and I'm like, open rates, they're talking about all these other things. I'm like, okay, but you don't know. if the person opened the email, or you don't know if it got to their inbox, you don't know where it landed. The only way you would know is if you had access to that inbox. That's why there's placement tools, but the placement tools only know if they got access to that one inbox, right? So they have to host the inbox. Now, if you're saying, well, I want to know if I got into, my target account is gone, I wouldn't know if I landed in Gong's email, primary email, unless I had access to the inbox that I emailed at Gong. So this is where everybody gets it wrong, and it's different for every company. Every company has different settings. Every nightclub is a little bit harder to get into depending on how much money they have usually, right? So, that's the same idea. You got to think about it that way and break it down like that. So, if you're like, I want to go get into the most popular nightclub and I want to show up without an ID and I want to show up with, you know, just me alone with a, you know, trench coat on or something weird, you're probably not going to get in, right? You know? You got to look normal and you got to look cool. Like, you know, and don't show up with a big signature of your kids and everybody else. Right. People want to have fun and party here. Right. Like when that signature move where it's like 65 lines of marketing branding, that's for social media and not for cold email.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Got it. Just in. Another question. Yeah, y'all, if you have questions, put them in the chat. Right. Yeah. Someone said this is a fire hose. Absolutely. We're throwing a lot of stuff at y'all. But y'all, this is like. Where it all starts, right, like you can have the best as I'll say it again, you can have the best template in the world, but does not matter if it does not land in the inbox. So this is the stuff the other gurus will talk about. They'll talk templates all day. Right. Guess what? The email ether bots out there that are checking all your emails, they don't care how good your template is. They just care about if you have some of these things set up correctly. So awesome. Jesse, someone asked, what was the prompt? You can probably just paste the header.
Jesse Ouellette:
So the prompt is actually, there's a GPT. If you've gone into their store, if you just look up lead magic, I check my email delivery, there's an option when you go into it, so it'll just sort of, you can, you can go, you go into the, it's called the GPT store, and you type in lead magic, and it's a lead magic. It's called mail mentor. It's an AI, basically chatbot that I've prompted what's the prompt that you don't even need to know the prompt because you just click a button that says paste in your, your details so it just says submit your header so if you do the same thing that I showed you there where you show original, you'll be able to go in and then send the header in and then it'll score it for you and give you the analysis of it. It actually analyzes some other stuff too. And then I also have one in here that will analyze the actual sequence and try to help you out. to write better sequences as well. So I've added that in there too. And if you want to use it, it's totally free. And I actually don't even get to know who uses it. I haven't implemented that either. So enjoy, use it privately and as much as you want. Burn as many credits as you want through OpenAI.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Look at this, y'all. So check that out. I think we might be boring people now because we're getting into the email deliverability intricacies and all this stuff. Chad did say very fascinating stuff. Guys, I had no clue about this. That's a great point, Chad. So first, I want y'all to like, like get some awesome takeaways from this. Okay. First takeaway is if you're doing your own creator type stuff, newsletters, sending from convert kits, sending from anywhere, go make sure your DKIM, SPF records are set up, right? You're going to go into where you bought your domain, go get daddy name cheap. And then you're going to set up, you're literally just going to put in like, uh, like they look like URLs. They're just called, they're called records. and look up whatever provider you're using the sending from, like if it's Beehive, type in Beehive, or if it's ConvertKit, ConvertKit setup SPF, they'll have the values that you put in there. Okay, that's the first thing. Second thing, if you're working for a company, make sure that, like ask your IT or your sales leader, hey, do we have DKIM, SPF, and, you know, our records set up properly if we're sending from Apollo, if we're sending from Outreach, if we're sending from Group, Ask them and your sales leader might look at you and be like, what the hell does that mean? That's totally OK. Yep. Yeah. So that is totally OK. I've been a sales leader. My wife, if I ask my wife, she's a sales leader. She's like, I have no idea what you're talking about. So that's OK. Make sure the IT has a set up or whoever owns like your your sales engagement platform. Make sure they have this set up on your domain so that when you're sending, you have a better chance at landing.
Jesse Ouellette:
And just have all your ducks in a row when you're trying to go into these hot nightclubs, right? You know, if you want to get into the best and the fanciest restaurants, you know, it's even restaurants, right? Reservations. You got to book ahead. You got to plan this stuff out. I think your IT team needs to be a partner in this. I see companies that don't partner with IT or they don't have IT, right? They kind of sass up everything. And what they do is they'll sometimes go to market too fast and they won't have all their infrastructure in place. Huge problem. It's really bad, actually, because a lot of times they'll come in and email their old clients and their old references, get referrals. Well, guess what? You're not getting through any Fortune 500 or any big company or any even high growth software startup company. I've helped a lot of founders really do it. And I mean, there's some more advanced tactics that are coming along. But just focus on this right here for now. Don't, don't like everyone's talking about all like the other stuff, like the inbox rotation and all the other stuff, that stuff does work, but you're probably not ready for it yet. At this point, get this stuff in check, get the, uh, the DKM, get the authenticated emails ready at that point. Then, you know, later you can talk about all the fancy stuff that the new kids are doing. Right. But it might not be for your company either. There's other, there's other considerations there around security. And if you don't have a lot of experience in it and you're not like somebody who wants to learn it, you might not want to do it, actually. So I always tell people, caution yourself on some of the new stuff coming out. And I know how to do all of it. I've been doing a lot of it, so it's fun. But I'm not the guy who says every single company should be starting their business with 7,500 domain names and doing that. I think it's actually the exact wrong strategy companies are doing today. it creates another problem later, and sometimes even a security issue, actually, if you do it incorrectly.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. And Mark has a question in here. Y'all, this is great. Mark, thank you for asking the question. If you have any questions on this stuff, drop it in the chat right now. Drop it in the chat. And then we're going to try and answer it here, because part of this is like learn together. So Mark has a question. How important is it not to send emails from your main domain email address? Okay. It's a great question, Mark.
Jesse Ouellette:
Great question. Great question. So here's my thoughts. Everything that people opt in for, you can send from your main domain. You want to use a subdomain on market emails. Or on, you know, transactional. Now, let's talk about your main domain. Okay. Now people are always say don't send from your main domain, I say this too. However, the reason I say it is in the context of cold email. And what I'm assuming on cold email is that you're going to get report as spam. And if you think that number is going to happen, and I, you think, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna, by the way, Andy, I'm gonna keep you sweating this whole thing.
Andy Mewborn:
Man, come on, dude.
Jesse Ouellette:
I rolled that button.
Andy Mewborn:
We talked about this, man. I pre-shot this right now. We talked about this, dude. All right? But if I hit that button... I'm watching all y'all too. No one report that. I'm watching all y'all. It's part of the newsletter. I know. I see you. I see you.
Jesse Ouellette:
That newsletter is pretty good, dude. I read it every time. But that'd be your own problem. You wouldn't get it back either. You would never give it back to you if you reported it. So anyways, the point is you don't want to get those reporters spam. And what ends up happening is if somebody reports it as spam, it triggers another action. Google then starts to market. I'm going to give you the numbers. If you get one on 1,000 emails, you're considered high. Now, some teams are 100, maybe 200x over that. And by the way, in Google, you don't know, they will not give you the feedback loop for a lot of reasons. I don't wanna get into all those, but they're not giving you really, they do give you a little one now, they're starting to inch some data to you, but they wanna be careful because remember, every time that they do that, they help out people like that wanna send more emails. I don't know who does that, but anybody who wants to send a lot more emails out of their Gmail, anytime that feedback loop gets better, we can get our feedback. The people who take advantage of the feedback are usually the, You know, people who really want to get in that inbox and we're looking for feedback loop on that. And they don't always tell you at the top nightclubs. And when you want to go for the top nightclubs, if I wanted to get an email into Gong or GE or, you know, any of Amazon, any of these companies, I would have to have all my stuff ready to go when that bouncer says name and ID, please. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What are you going to do here tonight? Are you going to get a table?
Andy Mewborn:
And this whole like freak out that Gmail, Google caused. Remember, there was like the whole. Oh, yeah. Some people are. That's part of it. Right. Where they said, hey, like if one in 100 or one in 1000 gets reported. Then you're kind of on the chopping block.
Jesse Ouellette:
So it was, uh, so they, they came back and they said three on a thousand, right. It was the feedback loop was 0.03, which is three on a thousand because they measure it on a thousand because you can't do it on a hundred because it's 0.03. So what, what happened there was, and then they, what they kind of did is like, it was, it was kind of like a miscommunication, I think somewhere internally. And what happened is they sort of backtracked a bit and they said it was only personal emails. So it was like everyone at B2B was like, Oh, thank God. Right. You know, but it like the biggest thing is this, this is going to change, right? So Microsoft just announced a couple of weeks ago, they're, they're doing a lot of big things next year. So what's so they're, they're, they're all gearing up for. And the other big thing is that unsubscribed thing. They're asking people to put it in there. Now, I will not advise anybody on if they should put it in there or not. On cold emails, I do not put it in there. I'm not going to tell you why I don't do it, and I'm not going to go against your vendors. If you have vendors now that tell you to put it in there. We personally don't put the unsubscribe link here. Because of a lot of reasons, I don't have to share why I don't do it. But I do follow all of the rules and regulations of all of the countries that I'm responsible to. And I send emails, and I leave a very, very easy way for people to opt out of emails. And I just don't feel that Google runs email, right? They're a brilliant company, but they don't Email has been around since 1968 or whatever. It's one of the greatest ways to get ahold of people and generate... 1968, huh? Yeah, something like that.
Andy Mewborn:
I didn't know it was around that long.
Jesse Ouellette:
Yeah, it's been around for a while and it's the best way to get B2B buyers if you're good, if you know how to get those IDs working and you want to send your people to the really... Yeah, it'd be good though. You can't be, you can't be dead. I mean, don't send crap like you send crap.
Andy Mewborn:
No. Yeah. And, and here. Okay. So Jesse, we're breaking this, I think breaking this call into three phases is what I'm, what I'm kind of thinking about here. Right. We talked about the first feature. So like phase one, which was like email deliverability, all the back end boring snooze fest stuff for most people. But it's actually the most important, believe it or not, even though this stuff is not like the most, you know, like, oh, my gosh, yes, I'm going to set up some records for my domain. But the most important, I think phase two, what we should get into is now content for emails.
SPEAKER_00:
Right.
Andy Mewborn:
OK, so we did deliverability. Now let's do phase two, which is the content. Right, and Bharat is gonna, and sorry if I butchered your name Bharat, I'll say B for now. But he has a question, do you use AI to personalize your outreach, right? Yes. With Clay or custom workflows?
Jesse Ouellette:
Yeah, so we've used Clay, we have Clay, I use it more of a visual layer before things go out just to see, I am using the strategy.
Andy Mewborn:
Can you show us how you use Clay?
Jesse Ouellette:
Uh, yes, I can actually hold on one second here. Yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
Take your time. I think we should, cause a lot of people are hearing about clay. This is not sponsored by clay is not sponsored by anyone. Uh, this is if anyone is sponsoring this, it's sponsored by distributing lead magic, but, uh, it's just a, clay's a great product. So let's see how you're using clay, man. Cause there's a lot of talk on that and how you're using it to personalize.
Jesse Ouellette:
Yep. Yep. So, one, a couple things about clay and you'll see it on the screen here in a second I just have to prepare make sure I don't always get doxed on these things I've had some. So I just have to make sure, you know. Yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
And I know I'm putting you on the spot, dude. No, no, no, no, no. I gotta, yeah. So. I personally just want to see it too, you know. Yeah, yeah, no problem.
Jesse Ouellette:
So what, one of the big, one of the big automations that I do on Clay, uh, is I, I find one of the best triggers in sales and I'm about ready to turn on the screen here, but one of the best triggers in sales for me over time is if companies are hiring or not, right. That triggers. Okay. So I want to, so if I'm, you know, I'll give you an example, you know, some, there's always some role in your company or some role in a company that they could be, uh, you know, if you're selling a tool or whatever, it's usually there's some other action that's happening to try to solve that problem. So I'm about ready to hear, uh, you know, this is going to be a really, really good demo for you. So I'm in lead magic and I want to go in and I want to actually, uh, so for me, let's just say, you know, I run lead, Let's just say a company's hiring SDRs, right? Maybe.
Andy Mewborn:
So now you're searching it. So you're in lead magic. You're searching job title to see who's hiring SDR. Ooh, dude, you have all this and oh, this is amazing. Okay. Cool.
Jesse Ouellette:
So then I would do that. And then what I would do is I would say, OK, well, any company I also want to go get. So I want to get that list. It costs you $5,900. That's like a penny a record. Just depends on how many you want. You can limit it, stop losses, whatever. But so it's like you might want to get 500 companies that are hiring for a certain role. Now, I did worldwide, so there's a number there. We'll do that. That's going to create the list. It does that and then you know we'll do the Martha Stewart, sort of like, you know, one here but it starts to get the list here it scrapes all that now what I did is I built a scraper that goes to the actual company website so it actually goes into the companies. What we do here, I'll give you one that's already done. So we give you back the Google Sheet. You can go into the Google Sheet and you can see all the companies hiring for SDRs. I did not know this demo was happening, so this is on the fly. Totally. That's how easy it is.
Andy Mewborn:
Cool, man. Yeah. I like to do this shit, so this is cool. Yeah.
Jesse Ouellette:
Now, I have a push to Clay button. What you have to do in Clay is you set something up called a webhook table. It's a very easy thing to do. I've got a video on the site on how to do it. What happens is there's a thing called a webhook here. You go in there, you grab that URL, and then you put that into enter Clay webhook.
Andy Mewborn:
And then it pushes the table that you created in your system to the table in there.
Jesse Ouellette:
Now what happens in Clay is it starts to populate live and that's live job data. So that's the most accurate data that you could possibly have. And now you've got all of the features of the jobs that you're looking up and you can easily say, okay, I want to go get the LinkedIn data. I want to get the company name. I want to go get the, you know, some of them have, The, the, you know, spirit, you know, whatever you want to do, you can build that workflow. Here you can you can call that job out and you can find the people that work. You can do that. Now, here's what's going to happen. At this point, you can say, OK, now we have an API that will save you a lot of money if you use our API. We're working with Play right now to get into their app store. They do have it in theirs. We're just going to show you the company enrichment. So let's go into the company enrichment. We have an API that you could use. This costs one credit. That's about $0.04. Our API is about one. So it's one penny. So if you use our API, the problem is you have to put it in manually. I'm working with their team. I'm giving their teams the time to do that. They have the docs. I have a share table that you could actually just do this with. So in here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, well, if I'm reaching out to that company, what I really want to get is the headcount because I want to know what type of company it is. I want to get the description, all of that. Found it. Let's put the description. Great. Now I'm going to run 10 rows of this data. And what that's going to do is that's going to trigger me to run all of the, so now I've got a spreadsheet that has some of the information that I need to write that email.
Andy Mewborn:
Wow. Okay. So to recap, these are all the companies that are hiring SDRs right now, right? And so you, you are pulling the company names, the employee counts.
Jesse Ouellette:
Now I'm going to pull the employees next. I'm going to pull the employee who would be hiring.
Andy Mewborn:
Oh, you're going to pull the actual people next. So you can reach out to.
Jesse Ouellette:
Exactly. What do you do is you find you would use the LinkedIn and I did a couple of master classes on this happy to come back to doing showing more workflows and this is how you can use distribute to get content to people faster to which is even better. Right, so, so let's go here, then you go in and you find you basically would the one you use next. is you would want to go find contacts at the company.
Andy Mewborn:
Okay. Can you set like ICP of which contacts?
Jesse Ouellette:
Yeah. So what you would do, you would go, let's say here, not this one. So then you would go to the, hold on, let me just do it, the ad enrichment, and then we want to do LinkedIn people. Okay, just make a small UI tweak here. Okay, so find contacts at the company. We'll go, we'll go with the, Yeah, so actually, sorry, I had to do the other one. There's two. So it's the person data. And then I would basically do the, I would do the find, hold on, where is it? LinkedIn. So you would take that, and then you would find, you would do the find and enrich from Google search, right? And that will allow you to, that will allow you to do the, the, That will that will be like so if I want to go, let's just say I go. Uh, what I would do next is just, I, the role one, you gotta do it the right way. I just, there's two ways to do it. I just have to remember which way it is. So you gotta, you know, these tables, you gotta be putting me on the spot here, but I love it because I can actually do this stuff. So I've got the domain name. So the best way to do it, the most accurate way to do it, I've tested these tables a thousand times. You go in and you do the company name and you use the find from Google search one. And you would say, let's say I was looking for a Chief Revenue Officer at the one there. And then I would say, and actually, we'll even do something else. SiteLinkedIn.com and Chief Revenue Officer.
Andy Mewborn:
Ah, OK. So you're basically saying, give me all the people who have Chief Revenue Officer in their title.
Jesse Ouellette:
And I'm doing it at that company. So what I'm doing is I'm going to pull it from the name of of that actual company. I'm going to pull it out of I'm going to pull it out of that company. So I want to pull it out of. That company really quickly here, and then I would be pulling it there. And then I would get the data and then I would just kind of check. I do a spot check on the first 10. You got to be careful in clay. You can burn through credits like a madman. And each one of those is 4 cents. We've got an API that makes it only a penny, but those are the people that you would want to reach out to. Right. Melissa is the chief revenue. You know, okay. They've got a weird role there. There's one, there's a little bit of, um, There's a little bit of finding that goes on here. You gotta find the- Yeah, you gotta tinker with it, right? Yeah, I do actually have a table here. I'll pull it up in a second here, but there's a table that I have that allows you to, and a lot of the Clay people share their like tables, meaning I've built a lot that I have, like I've shared with people and you can do a lot of different like, Aspects, you know that you would you would pull from there right and you would look for those people, you would find those contacts at that company. And then. Nice. This table, what you could do, actually, this is the one, I'm sorry. This is it. So you would go in here and then you would basically grab, the title would be, let's just say, Chief Revenue Officer, right? Now you will be able to look up the company identifier and I wanna find that. That's gonna allow me to go pull that name of that person and all of that. Now I'm gonna go pull that, save it, and then run it on the first 10 rows. And then I'm gonna get the real, person. And then that gives me, you know, it's a spreadsheet that fills itself out. It's like what their investors will tell you, right? Like you just have to get that stupid, uh, you got to get the stupid title, right? So the, so there was only a couple of companies that had the actual, uh, chief revenue officer. So you'd have to do VP of sales. Okay.
Andy Mewborn:
For those listening, how many people we got? So for those listening, have you used clay before? Drop, drop in the chat. Have you used clay? Drop in the chat, yes or no. Have you used Clay? Just drop in the chat here for us if you've used Clay. I'm honestly getting a lesson myself here on how to use it and get data. So this is amazing.
Jesse Ouellette:
And you can even do two titles, and then it'll put whichever one. So it's actually, so there we go. Right, this is the person. So this would be the person. Now what I just did. So if you want to go back to the beginning, we started with a problem. Companies that buy lead magic typically are hiring sales development reps. Great. Now I'm taking this I scrape all of that this data is already done for you so this data can be pushed in as well. See it's already done that was the live data, this is real time so it's, it's actually live. And you can see the files done right we've just scraped it that only took like a couple took like a minute to scrape 6000 different job boards. We push the data into Clay, the Clay webhook goes in here, the webhook goes into here, it starts here, then you spread it out here, you enrich the companies, and then you find the people. These are the people that you want to email. Then the AI part comes. Ready for that? That's the finale. Okay, nice. That's where the finale shows is you can now write the email with, you know.
Andy Mewborn:
So here's how to write the email with AI. Nice.
Jesse Ouellette:
But remember what you're doing. You're taking into account all of that information. This is where why I posted about this the other day. This is why certain companies are getting 10x out of AI and building content, because they're able to pull relevant information one to one. Every email feels like it was crafted to that one person, as if they spent 20 to 30 minutes researching it, each email. That's why a lot of the gurus are like, oh, I can write better emails than AI. Well, you'd have to spend 20 or 30 minutes researching it to do the same level of that I can do in one second, right? That's why they can't. That's why they're going to continue to be eradicated from their own companies and feel weird. But it's never too late to start learning new tricks.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Yeah. And so now, once you have your table of your data, you can use AI here to write the emails for each person. Instantly, Smartlead, Apollo, whatever you're using. Shout out to Smartlead and Instantly, but Smartlead, be what's up.
Jesse Ouellette:
But this is where you write the email will just kind of show you here, but this is a table here I've done a lot of, you know, and always happy to come back to your audience dude I respect what you're doing over there but you can grab one of these, you just, the cheapest way to do it would be to use the just write it with open a the open AI. one in here, you could do that. There's some people who are getting a little more advanced, they're writing with a model, different models. But what I would do is I would just go in here, just do the AI one, and then we're gonna do like a chat completion. There's also another one, they have an agent, which will actually do even more. It'll go out to that person's website and do even more. That's what a lot of people are talking about. Wow. You know, now you can write the prompt here. You are an expert at writing. I have a good prompt for this, but I don't have it with me. I can share it with you if they read your newsletter and don't believe it.
Andy Mewborn:
Now this is the prompt for writing for you.
Jesse Ouellette:
You're an expert at writing cold emails and you are writing to a chief revenue officer or VP of sales regarding the position
SPEAKER_00:
Your company is a lead generation SAS product and you are.
Jesse Ouellette:
seeing if they have an opening, right? Like you can provide some context here. They have a couple of them here. Here's one that's actually already built in the platform. I forgot about that. So then what you can do in here, you can use one like, I'll just use one that Eric, I think Eric even did this one. So you could put all of that stuff in there. And what you would do is if you ever wanna go and edit that to make it so, watch this. So you pull that out, you delete that. And then now in here, you could use the information that you're getting from like anytime you use the slash command, you can pull in other fields from those tables. And, you know, they've got a couple of templates that they've already written. I'll just, so if we just do that, you know, and then we'll say, which is the education from, okay, which one's the LinkedIn field. So you would just take that one, you know, Clay, they can do a demo with you or show you how to set this up, but, and then you would there, then you might write the email. I mean, A lot of us have super secret templates that we don't share with anybody. We never will, but maybe with you, man, you will share, but.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, I have a few secret ones too. I have a lot that I share, but there's a few go-to that are the moneymakers. I gotta be honest.
Jesse Ouellette:
Go-to's, man, you know it. And then that's really what you do.
Andy Mewborn:
You've probably received them, y'all, but yeah, that's that.
Jesse Ouellette:
Last thing I was gonna show you, this would be the last thing. You have to be able to add it. This is where you would add it to your outreach campaign or your Apollo campaign. That's the last field you have to create. You have the email in one, and then you have it in your Apollo campaign. Those are the two last things. I'll share this table with you, Andy, and you can give it away to your subscribers. And if they sign up, they can get 1,000 credits on the Lead Magic's platform for free.
Andy Mewborn:
Cool, y'all, amazing. Well, Jesse, dude, thanks for hopping on, man, and showing the ropes.
Jesse Ouellette:
It doesn't get much better than that, man. That was like, that might've been one of my best, you know, webinar performances for just throwing it out there and showing people how it's done.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, well, dude, you know, I'm trying to get it out of you so we can make sure it's tactical. So great stuff, y'all. Let's recap, Jesse. So two things, email deliverability. Make sure your DMARC, DKIM, and SPF are all set up. It's actually pretty easy to set those up on most platforms though. It sounds like HubSpot's a pain in the butt, but check that. Second, if you want to do kind of be a data nerd, there's lead magic to grab data. There's clay to make spreadsheets out of that data. And then of course you have your sending tools, Apollo, Outreach, Instantly, Smart Lead, all that fun stuff. If you have questions, you can DM me as well, DM Jesse. Put a thumbs up if Jesse and I should have another one of these and take it to the next level.
Jesse Ouellette:
Anything you do, man. I'm all on board here, man. Let's do it. All right, let's freaking do it.
Andy Mewborn:
Put a thumbs up here. Brock wants us to talk nerdy to him. Yes, Brock. But put a thumbs up if you want us to do another cold email masterclass in the future and we will, Plan something here will buy do something a little bit different. Maybe we talked more about content or or like different systems, you can use besides the the the Apollo's and the sales loss and all those But yeah, put a thumbs up if we should do another cold email masterclass here. Thank you, Jesse. Thank you. Thank you.
Jesse Ouellette:
I really appreciate everybody really all the support and everything has been amazing. So thank you everybody.
Andy Mewborn:
Last thing I'm going to do. We're going to do one of these every single week. So we're going to do what we call go to market made simple. We're bringing on Udi, the president of Gong. We're bringing on Anthony who runs Fletch product marketing. We're bringing on Adam Robinson next week actually to talk about founder brand. Yeah. So if you are interested in that, um, I am going to put the link to register, um, for the weekly sessions here in the chat. Um, maybe I'll message it to Brock and he can put it in or here. Let me see. Can I do it from here? Shit. Um, comments. I'm going to put it in the comment. Boom. Go to that page there to zoom page, register. You'll get a weekly invite on your calendar. So that you can actually join us from there. All right. So again, that is in the chat I just posted it in there also send it out in my newsletter So that you can do this weekly. All right and join us weekly We're gonna bring on all the pros that are kind of the non BS pros That will tell you exactly how it is all the best tactics all the best stuff I'm gonna be learning as well with y'all. So I Register on that link there if you want to join us weekly, so you'll have it on your calendar.
Jesse Ouellette:
I love this, man. This is a great format and everything you're doing, man, distributes awesome. If you haven't got that product yet, I don't know why. Go try it out. It's awesome. We use it. We love it. Go do it. Make content with it. You'll have it.
Andy Mewborn:
Thank you, everyone. We'll see you next week. And follow Jesse for all these insights on cold email, deliverability, Clay, all that stuff. And then we'll see you next week, y'all. Everyone have a good one. Thank you so much.
