No Network? Use Cold Outreach to Grow Your Business
By far, the best method of Marketing when you are starting a side hustle is cold outreach.
Cold outreach is simply reaching out to an audience that doesn’t know you (hence the cold part) and trying to drum up interest with them. You can skip straight to hard selling them on your services, but this is less effective because they need to think on the spot, and most of the time we are programmed to turn someone down if we don’t know them. You’ve got to have a killer pitch or super broad product in order to effectively cold outreach with a hard sell effectively.
✅ Why Cold Outreach is Great
There are a few key reasons you’d almost certainly love cold outreach if you are starting out your side hustle.
You don’t have to have an existing network. You are, in effect, building your network by going out and putting your business in front of them. No prior connections required.
It’s not reliant on finicky algorithms. You and I both hate how easy it is to be rewarded and punished by what we post on social media. There’s a huge element of succeeding on social that is luck. Not so with cold outreach; where you simply need to show up and do the work.
You will certainly find customers… eventually. If you are willing to put in all the effort it’s going to take you to reach out to tons and tons of people, you will eventually succeed and find someone that wants to hire you. Of 8 billion people in the world, you only need a few to say yes.
It keeps your tactics hidden from your competitors. Not that this is a big deal in the beginning, but once you start getting good at what you do (and start making decent money), you don’t want your competitors to be able to iterate on what you’re doing. Best way to ensure that is to keep all your techniques away from the general public.
🗻 Hardest Part of Cold Outreach
The hardest part of cold outreach is, by far, getting rejected. Simply put. We are so hardwired as human beings to recoil at being rejected that most of us can’t stand the thought of being told “No.”
I’ve heard it said that “Hearing ‘No’ is when Sales really begins” and I think there is a lot of wisdom in that sentiment. I’m not advocating that you bludgeon people until they agree to do business with you, but I am telling you that you may hear “No” from a particular customer a few times before it finally turns into a “Yes.”
Of course, the deeper reason hearing “No” is difficult is because we don’t know if that “No” will eventually turn into a “Yes.” So we either need to:
Persevere in the face of failure; or
Give up and move on to the next prospect.
You will learn which one to do the more you get out there and try it. There is no slick answer I can give you here besides “Trust your gut.”
🍀 Forms of Effective Cold Outreach
I mean, any way you can reach out to potential customers is a form of cold out reach. That includes direct messages on social media, phone calls, emails, and so on.
Here are two that I believe are the strongest:
📧 Email - Email trades overall effectiveness for quantity (which may still be a net positive for you). As opposed to using the phone where you have an immediate opportunity to respond to a customer to overcome their objections to buying, emails are easy to not engage with and ultimately delete. However, if you’re simply playing a numbers game, email is hard to beat. There are still entire books being written on the subject of cold email outreach, so don’t think it’s dead. The false truth about cold outreach though is that you don’t actually do the selling through email; all you can hope to do is intrigue them to want to meet with you for a proper Sales call.
📞 Phone - Nothing beats the effectiveness of a phone call, but you have to have the courage to get rejected verbally over and over again (and some people you call may not be very nice). Emails get deleted, but on the phone you stand more of a chance of being belittled than you do simply being hung up on. That being said, if you can tough it out, phone prospecting is still likely the single most effective cold outreach method there is. Especially because, as we covered at the end of the last one, eventually you need to get on the phone with them anyways. Phone calls can take more time than emails, but if they’re more effective, it likely balances out.
4️⃣ 4 Approaches to Maximize Your Chances of Success
I’ve got four different techniques to help you improve your chance of succeeding with cold outreach.
Offer the lead magnet first; not your main product. Instead of just going right in for the hard sell, try to get them interested in whatever lead magnet you’ve developed for your business first. This lowers the amount of commitment you’re asking for and makes it easier for them to dip their toes.
Warm them up at least a little first. If you’re cold outreaching through social media direct messages or the like, try to interact with them a few times before you actually reach out. This could be leaving some meaningful and memorable comments, could mean sliding into their DMs just to make a connection, or having a mutual connection introduce the two of you. If you can make them familiar with you before you try to sell them something, you seem much more like a friend than a snake.
Follow up with them; especially if you’re reaching out via email or DM. You’d be impressed at how many second or third follow ups eventually get returned. People might forget that you reached out or they might’ve been too distracted to respond at the time. Most people respond well to persistence, so if you can follow up a number of times, you increase your chances of getting a call back.
Get really targeted when you reach out. I would never, ever recommend just copying and pasting a generic email template to 100 people and BCCing them all. What a way to show that you aren’t really invested in any particular one of them. Instead, get really narrow on who you want to target. Use their name in the email. Write a comment (or, better yet, compliment) about something recent they’ve done online to demonstrate your investment in them. If you can, go the extra mile and offer them a free, personalized sample of whatever it is you’re selling. This may not guarantee you win the business, but I bet it will increase your success percentage.
Whatever technique you find for cold outreach that works, exploit it for all you can. Don’t feel the pressure to follow any particular script or playbook from anyone else just because they look successful doing it.
Every industry, every client, every service provider (you!) is different. You can’t get an exact answer of what will work for you until you go out and find out on your own. Hopefully some of these techniques will give you a head start in the right direction.
