A No-Cringe Approach to Cold Outreach with Josiah Wright of Optrivo

Think cold outreach has to be awkward or spammy? It doesn’t. In this video, Josiah Wright of Optrivo—startup founder, sales pro, and SprocketWKY mentor—breaks down how to approach outreach with confidence, clarity, and zero cringe.

Want more? Josiah has a few free workshops in the SprocketWKY platform, and you can even book a mentor call with him. Just head to sprocketwky.com and make a free account to get started.

🎙️ This episode is brought to you by Kentucky Fried Creative—authentic marketing for the Common Wealth, from right here in the Commonwealth. Based in Paducah, they specialize in helping small businesses grow with smart strategy, standout content, and results-driven digital marketing. Whether you need a full campaign, a fresh website, or just someone to help you figure out what to do next, Kentucky Fried Creative fills the gap between “I don’t know where to start” and real business growth. Learn more at kyfriedcreative.com .

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Transcript

0:47

Hey, thanks for hopping on this video and for visiting this website. I mean, it's, it's awesome. I'm in this sprocket building here. It's awesome to be part of this initiative to help everyone in western Kentucky with their startup, with their current business. And so here I'm gonna talk about several things in these videos though, the one thing I'm gonna talk about today is cold outreach. Cold outreach is notorious for making people feel disgusting. They, you know, they don't want to be calling people on the phone randomly. They don't want to be emailing people. They don't wanna be spammy. They don't want to go knock on doors because it's highly uncomfortable for them. And so I'm here to really help with that. I help a lot of people with cold outreach on a daily basis. And really what the uncomfortableness comes from is a lack of understanding some core principles in cold outreach. Once you understand those, I've seen it time and time again. Once you understand these things, it's actually pretty comfortable. It's actually kind of fun for a lot of people and it's even comfortable for the person on the other side of the phone, on the other side of the email, on the other side of the door because of these things that you're about to understand. So one thing I will, I will say before you go through this, make sure that you've looked into Market Fit Lab. It'll be somewhere on this website. It's really important to make sure that you're starting off on the right foot before you try to sell your service, and it'll also help you figure out. If you even need to do this kind of cold outreach, you know, there, there are other ways of getting business. There's, there's advertising that doing paid advertisement. There's networking is a really, really good one. Most of my customers have come through a good, healthy network and I'll, I'll do a video on how to make a good, healthy network. But you, you know, if you have decided. Yeah. Cold outrage is something I definitely, definitely need to do. Whether it's cold calling, it's a cold email, it's a direct message, and some social media platform, or it's just knocking on doors depending on the type of business that you have created. Created. I'm gonna go through all of the principles you need to keep in mind. So now that you've decided, yeah, you need to do cold outreach. Let's just go through what is cold outreach? Why is it called cold? Why are there hot leads? Why are there warm leads? Why are there cold leads? So it's really just the way we talk about in sales or in marketing, the kind of the level a person is at in their wanting to buy your product or your service. So if somebody is a cold lead, that means they, they really don't know much about you. They, you know. You're, you're just coming to them out of nowhere. They've never heard from you before. And so that's a really cold lead. They're not, you know, ready to buy at all. You need to give them some reasons to buy. A warm lead is someone that you have kind of qualified, you know? This is a person that would really like the product. Maybe they've been looking at your website, you've got some tools to track that kind of thing. Maybe you've talked to them through email or you've talked to them on the phone and they're like, they're kind of interested. They, they, this sounds like a good idea to them. They wanna talk more. A hot lead is someone you've talked to, or maybe they responded really, really well to some of your outreach and they're ready to get rolling. Like they, it is, maybe it's just a matter of price. Maybe it's just a matter of timing. But they want this product, they want this service. So those are kind of cold, warm, and hot leads. That's just the way we talk about it in sales and marketing. So cold outreach is that first level of wanting to try to generate some interest in your product or your service. So the way you do that is there are several different methods and it's gonna vary based on the kind of business that you have started. So instead of going through all the different methods you could possibly do, which would take a good little bit of time, if you. You don't have any idea and you can't, you know, you've used some AI to try to figure it out. You've googled to figure it out and you've watched YouTube videos and you just can't figure out what type of outreach is gonna be good for you. Definitely just book a, a meeting with me on the mentor deck. I will help you figure out what strategy best if as far as, um, cold outreach goes. So, but for these things I am gonna talk about the principles to have in mind when you're doing these kinds of cold outreach. So I'll give you some examples of good marketing versus bad marketing. Good marketing is something like Apple did with the, with the iPod when it first came out. So their advertisement was a thousand songs in your pocket. Amazing advertising, brilliant advertising. That was really, really good. And I'll tell you why here in a little bit. Everybody else was advertising. Here's, you know, a full gigabyte of storage. Here's, you know, all of these subscription services. Here's, here's all this different stuff. And it, it, none of us really remember what it was because it wasn't impactful. It was talking about the features of the product, all the cool things that these people had put in the product. It wasn't really digging into why the person, why the end user would really want to use the product. And Apple did that. They said, okay, people have. Hundreds of CDs stacked up in towers, stacked in the, the visor of their cars. They've got tapes everywhere. You know, let's, let's talk about how they can have a thousand songs right in their pocket and that just. Killed. It was amazing. It did really, really well. And they focus a lot of their advertising on the why, how the products make people feel, what it does for them. People are not truly interested in a product most of the time. There are some people that are really interested in how much RAM something has and how much storage it has, how fast it is, what kind of graphics it's got. But on a general basis, most people are just concerned about what does this thing do for me, for Apple? Most people and carrying around an apple, you know, MacBook Pro or having some AirPod pros or anything like, it's, it's all about status for me. I love the way it works. I love the way Apple works. It, it works really, really well for me. It's fast. It's like hopping in a Corvette after having driv driven, you know, some Toyotas, Toyotas are great. Windows is great, but. The Mac is just amazing. So for me, very streamlined, very, you know, the status is, is great and you feel like you're part of a family when you see another MacBook, but those are the things that the product does for me. I'm not so concerned about all of the, I, I don't even know how much Ram my computer has. I don't, I don't really care about it. I just know what it does for me. So that's an example of really good marketing is when the company is very focused on what the product does for their customer, what end result does it get for the customer and focused your messaging on that. Examples of bad marketing are, are really just the opposite of talking about all the different features that are in the product and all the cool things and how powerful it is. And you know, you see it all the time. You can go to, you know, out of a hundred websites. Uh, probably more than 90 of them are gonna be, we are this kind of innovative company and we have these amazing, amazing products and it's just, it's fluff. A lot of people really don't care about that. If you have created, um, let's, there's a, there's a really cool product I know about. That is for farmers, and what it does is it breaks down, breaks down the surface tension of the water that gets applied to the crops and makes the water go deeper, and it, it, it works really, really well and gets way more yield in the, in the plants than most other kinds of fertilizers. But the advertising for that, if you're focused on how it works and everything like that, a farmer is gonna be interested in how it works. But what are they actually interested in? Are they interested in how cool the product is? Or are they interested in getting more yield out of their crops? Well, definitely more yield out of their crops. And so you're, you need to focus on what does this actually achieve for my customer? What results are they getting? So that's kind of concept number one is what to really focus on. Now in order to understand that you gotta understand something. A lot of people don't put in the work to understand, and that is your market. You need to do some market research. Again, market Fit Lab is gonna do an excellent job of teaching you the concepts of what you need to do in order to understand your market. But. In short, you need to go study the people that are gonna use your product. You need to know them better than they know themselves. You need to know their pain points, their desires. You need to know what makes them tick so that when you talk to them about your product, you understand exactly what they're looking for. If you talk to your friend about playing a video game and you don't even know what kind of games they like, you can talk about it all day long. If they don't like roleplaying games, they're not gonna play your favorite roleplaying game. It's just not gonna happen. But if you understand, oh, they really like first person shooter games, and you can kind of compare your roleplay game to a first person shooter game, well maybe. They don't normally play role playing games, but now they're going to at least maybe try it, or at least give you the time of day because you understood what their favorite thing was. It's the same exact thing In business, you really gotta understand exactly how your target market thinks, what they want, what they don't want, what they're fearful of, so that you can really talk to'em about your product and how much it's gonna help them. This is gonna solve several problems. For one, you're gonna be more effective in your outreach. When you talk to people on the phone, when you talk to them at the door, when you're emailing them, when you're DM-ing them, you're gonna be way more effective. You're gonna get way more positive replies by just understanding what they need. The second thing is you're going to weed out a lot of people that don't actually need your product. And if you try to sell somebody something that they don't actually need and they don't actually want. But you happen to be good at sales, either naturally or through building up some skills. You might actually sell them that product and then they're not happy with it either they give it some negative reviews or they at least they've taken some of your time and some of your resources and they're not a positive impact. They're not talking about your product positively'cause they didn't actually need it. So just understanding your market really well is gonna help you target better, is gonna help you talk to them better, is gonna turn into more converted sales. It is all around better. So you need to understand your product, you need to understand your market that the product's gonna go into. And then you need to understand some messaging frameworks. So lemme get some water here and we'll go into that. So in your messaging, there is a common thought process in marketing and that's that people are lazy, that. People have short attention spans and so that you need to keep everything super short. You do need to keep stuff super short unless you can't, you know, there, there are some ways to think about this that are much healthier than just thinking everybody's lazy and has short attention spans. Are you lazy? No, most likely not. If you're starting your own business, you're most likely not lazy. Do you have a short attention span? Maybe. But I have discovered something else that's actually the problem. The problem is we have so many different people and organizations trying to get our attention all day long, and so we are much more guarded as a society against advertisements and people trying to get our attention. We, we guard our attention very closely because it is. Pretty much as valuable as time. It's a very limited resource, and we have to be very careful where we put our attention. And so if your messaging and your phone calls and your door knocking is really applicable to your customer. And they see how it's applicable from the get go. They're gonna give you all the time that you need. We watch two hour movies all the time. We'll binge watch for hours, different kinds of shows. We'll, you know, we'll listen to a three hour podcast, or at least I will. Maybe you won't. But I see it as important. I see it as relevant. I will. I will read a book for hours and hours and hours because it's relevant to my work, it's relevant to my life. And so if that is the kind of messaging that you're creating. That's the kind of phone script that you're creating is something that's really tailored to your target audience and it's really applicable and they really need it, and they just don't know about it yet, once they see how it's relevant, they're gonna give you all the time you need. Whether that takes you three lines in an email or 30 lines in an email, as long as you take only enough space as is necessary in order to to get them some interest, get some interest in your product. You're gonna be just fine, so don't worry about the length so much. Definitely use as few words as possible. Don't use more words than necessary, but don't feel like you have to keep it super cramped in order to keep their attention or make it super exciting to keep their attention if it's applicable to them, and you do a good job of explaining that. They're gonna be pretty excited. So that, that is the first concept to understand, uh, actually it's kind of the second concept in this video. The third concept is how to actually structure your messaging. This is mostly if you are doing some text-based outreach. So you're sending emails, you're sending, um, direct messages in social media. You're gonna wanna use something called the Rule of one Rio. So. In copywriting, which is just the writing of advertisements, is the writing of emails, the writing of sales pages, just the words that are generating interest in your product or service. There's a rule in copywriting called the Rule of one, and I, I won't go too far into it, but I like to go a step further for messaging, and I like to talk about the rule of one Rio, RIOA. It's not unique to me. I stole it from somebody else. They gave it to me, I guess, and it works really well. So the rule of one Rio OA is one reader, one idea, one offer, one action. So one reader, let's take you own a gym, for example. And in that gym you've got coaches that can help men and women gain weight. Lose weight train for power lifting events. They train for bodybuilding events. You, you've got all this stuff going on in your gym and so you could send an email out to a lot of people saying, Hey, we help men and women gain weight, lose weight, train for power lifting, train for rock climbing, you know, all these things. It's not gonna be super effective messaging. Trust me. And you probably get these messages quite a bit, where somebody's talking about all these different ideas and they're talking to multiple people, not just you. And it's not very personal. In today's market. People want genuine, they want something tailored to them, and they want it to be relevant to them, and they don't want it to be fluffy or spammy. So one reader. So say you do own a gym, you serve all those people. Yes. But in this messaging, you want to target men for weight gain. I like that topic because I want to gain weight. I'm a skinny guy, so target the one guy Target weight gain. Uh, and I'm getting a little bit granular here, so. Target the the one reader. So you may service all of those people. Just choose one. You can do different campaigns for each type of person, but just choose one per message. So one reader and then one idea. So you help men, yes, you maybe you're gonna choose men, you're gonna target them. You one campaign and you're gonna target women in another campaign. Maybe there's old and young. So you're gonna target young men in a location. For this campaign. That's good. You've chosen the one thing. Don't do more than that. Just one, one idea. So there's the IR for reader, I for idea. So you can help, uh, men in their sixties, lose weight. Gain weight, train for power lifting, train for rock climbing, right? There are people out there that do that. And so you could say, Hey, we help people with all of these things, but more effective messaging is gonna be, Hey, we help. Men in their sixties lose weight. That's a pretty specific thing that's gonna make the person feel very cared about if you're targeting them correctly. And you're gonna get way more responses if you do that. So one reader, one idea, one offer. So a lot of times I'll see people create an advertisement and they don't have an offer in their advertisement anywhere. So an offer is. Buy one, get one free. An offer is, Hey, we'll win this case for you, or you don't pay. Those are offers. An offer is, Hey, do business with me and this is what you'll get. Or there's some risk aversion in the offer, so make sure that you have one offer. A lot of times I don't see people have more than one offer. Most of the time I see that they don't have an offer at all. They just talk about what their product is and hope that somebody responds. But an offer gives somebody some actionable idea of what is this gonna look like for me? What are the risks? What, what am I gonna be getting? What am I risking to lose? Is there any loss risk? And I'll talk about offers in another video, but make sure that you have one offer. So you can see on billboards, for example. Um. Maybe they, they're targeting personal injury, uh, victims and they want to help people with that. So they have, um, a slogan or a saying on the billboard, uh, are you injured? And then so that's talking to people that have received injuries. That's one reader, one idea. Mike's got this, I saw this one a thousand times on the way to Kansas the other day. Mike's got this. And so that's the one idea. Mike has it. Mike's gonna help them with this thing. But there's not a, there's not an offer on there, there's no guarantee, there's nothing like that. Some really good law firm billboards that I've seen have a guarantee like, Hey, if we take this case and we don't win, you don't pay. Right? So that's, that's an offer. It's a cool offer. It gets your attention, but a lot of people don't even have an offer to begin with and that, you know, when you compare it to other companies that do have a good offer. They're gonna get the business over you. You can have everything the same, do everything right the same way that they do. But if you don't have an offer, they're gonna get the business and you're not really important to have an offer and a really good offer at that. And we'll do another video on it, making a good offer and some resources you can look at. Um, again, market Fill Lab is gonna do a really good job of helping you with this. So, um, and then one action. So again, on billboards, I've seen this a lot, so. You'll see that personal injury law firm. Maybe they say, are you injured? Mike's got this. Um, maybe they do say, you don't pay if we don't win. But then the dude's picture is so big and the phone number is so small and you're driving so fast that you can't see the phone number. The phone number is the call to action. Call this number is the action that you need to take. Go to this website, Google my name, you know, those kinds of things, or scan this QR code. Those are calls to action. And um, sorry if you're a real estate agent or a lawyer, but real estate agents and lawyers are notorious for having their pictures so big that it covers up the phone number or the website. And that means that even if that person likes everything that you're saying, but they don't know what to do with that information. They're most likely not gonna do anything with that information. So it's really important to have one reader, one idea, one offer, and one call to action. One re oa. One of every one of those things is gonna make your messaging very good, very fine tuned and combined with understanding your market and what they actually need is gonna be amazing. You, you're gonna be able to send out a hundred messages and get one or two clients for every 100 messages that you send. And that's not even counting any kind of automation or, or some, you know, clay personalization or anything like that, which I could get into on a personal mentor deck call. Anyway, there's so much more to this topic. There's a lot of resources out there. But again, make sure you're going through Market Fit Lab because it's gonna help you be at the position to, when you do cold outreach, you pretty much know exactly what you're gonna say to the people that you talk to. So. That's it for this video. Don't wanna make it too long. There's so much more to talk about on cold outreach, but hopefully that gives you some good frameworks that makes it way more comfortable. If you understand who you're talking to and they really do need your product, you're gonna be excited to talk to them and they're gonna be excited to hear it. If you talk about things in a way that's easy for them to understand all day, they're gonna really appreciate that you called them.