BradleyJ

Digital Sales Representative

CTA in the first outreach?

When reaching out to a cold prospect do you use a CTA in the very first correspondence or do you first ask if there is any interest instead?

I've heard people say a clear and specific CTA is always best but have also read that asking if there is any interest first receives more positive responses since a CTA can cause the prospect to immediately get defensive with their time.

What do you do in your very first outreach?

CTA in first outreach?

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💌 Cold Emailing

7 comments

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CadenceCombat

Tycoon

Account Executive

My outbound cadences usually start out with zero mention of my product / solution.

If you’re interested in my approach, check out my post, Prospecting the CadenceCombat Way:

<removed post>

ATX

Good Citizen

ENT Sales / Risk Management

@BradleyJ , one area we had success with was putting a CTA as the first line of the email (assuming that most are reading from their phone). If there is a document, press release, etc that you think might align to their interests, it's worth sending something like:

"[name], would you like a copy of the [name of report, data sheet, etc]? This document [quick 1 sentence about the contents].

I thought this would align to your interests, and wanted to check first before sending anything over"

Could be worth adding a CTA for a meeting at the end, but the key point I'm trying to make is to have that CTA in the first sentence to get positive engagement, and then a reason to follow up 1-2 weeks later

BradleyJ

Digital Sales Representative

Thanks, that's an interesting approach. I'll try that out and see how it goes. I'll just have to condense my initial email a bit then.

salesnerd

WR Officer

Head of Growth

I'm a fan of the CTA in the first email as someone who gets a lot of cold emails. If you do the whole like "let me ask you a question: how do you handle your business expenses?" I know it's gonna turn into a pitch, I'm not an idiot.

Tell me what you do and why you want my time.

BradleyJ

Digital Sales Representative

That's a good insight into how it can be interpreted, thanks!

champchamp

Arsonist

Certified Savage

There was a study by SalesLoft or Outreach saying that interest CTAs had higher response rates.

I usually ask "Would you be interested in learning more about x?" or "would you be open to seeing how "x" could help your team?"

These two and other similar ones have worked well for me.

DungeonsNDemos

Big Shot

Rolling 20's all day

If no CTA you just took up their time for no reason

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BradleyJ

CTA in the first outreach?

CTA in first outreach?

7 comments

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