One's Business Brief: Personalized > Volume

AI Business Tip: For cold outreach as a solo or micro business: Personalized > Volume.

I avoided cold outreach in all of my business for a very long time. 98% of all cold emails & LinkedIn requests I’ve received have been pure, unimaginative spam—and so I prematurely dismissed the whole channel, finding it hard to believe that ‘this actually converts?’.

Since I’d never really tried it, I always assumed it was a volume game. The cold email gurus were selling courses about setting up 50 email domains, warming them up, and all the tactics to avoid landing in the spam folder. I just thought it wasn’t for me.

But recently, I’ve been wanting to start more conversations with business owners about their main hang-ups and barriers to adopting AI in their businesses. And in the process of thinking through how best to reach them, it became obvious that, hey, I might as well send out a few emails.

I researched businesses that I thought would be most likely to have a need for / be open to implementing AI workflows in the first place.

I manually researched their websites, tried to understand or imagine which workflows and processes they’re already doing manually. Then tried to consider some unique ways they could translate some of that manual work into an AI workflow—it didn’t even have to be Bizway, I just wanted to help them think of ways to start using AI, more often, in their business.

I drafted each email individually, hit send, and what do you know?—people actually started replying. Over 50% replied to those hand-crafted emails. Which made me realize—ohhh, this is what cold emailing could be if you put the effort into personalizing and actually trying to help someone.

Naturally, I wanted to see if there were aspects of my own new outreach process that could be assisted with an AI workflow. I broke down each step, and asked if this was something an AI model could reasonably provide value with.

The AI workflow I ended up building looks like this:

• Knowledge:

  • Bizway’s product features doc;

  • Bizway’s vision doc;

  • URL of the business I’m reaching out to;

  • Example email for content structure and style.

• Instructions:

  • 1) First step is to brainstorm a list of 20 processes that the target businesses is probably doing on a weekly basis;

  • 2) Take that list and identify the top 5 opportunities that could be turned into AI workflows;

  • 3) Draft complete and comprehensive AI workflows that could realistically handle those processes;

  • 4) Write up a report covering the suggested AI workflows;

  • 5) Draft an email based on the example provided.

• Output:

  • Create a new document for the AI workflows report and the email.

Then, all I needed to do was provide a URL, read through the suggested workflows, select the 3 best suggestions (or take it as inspiration to write my own) and send this highly personalized email to any businesses I came across that might benefit from the Bizway platform.

Personalized > Volume: This is just my own data and experience, but when I’ve experimented briefly with bulk cold email campaigns, I’ve sent hundreds of emails with literally 0% response rate. What’s more, I’ve always worried about ruining my main email domain’s reliability by being blocked or sent to spam—and without seeing any clear results, I just avoided the whole thing like the plague.

But by taking the time to invest in highly personalized messages, even though it takes me 10X as long to craft a unique email for each business, it’s a major improvement that I plan on pursuing further.

Tying it together: Jensen’s quote about AI employees might sound scary at first. But what if it’s more like the workflow described above? It isn’t that my AI assistant did all of the work for me—instead that it was able to do more of the exploration and pattern-matching preparation, then I could start from something far better than a blank page.

If you’ve avoided cold outreach because: A) It feels spammy; or B) It would take too much effort to hand-craft each personalized message—I hope this gives you some ideas.

Gerrard
Founder, Bizway.io 

PS - If you want to use a similar personalized outreach email workflow, try typing into the Bizway workflow generator the following prompt: ‘I want a workflow that will help me do detailed background research on a target prospect based on a provided URL. It should then brainstorm a list of specific [potential problems/processes/costs for your target customer], and develop a report outlining [solutions you can offer].’