Who should I cold email?

Who should I cold email?

Good question. Who do you want to talk to?

When cold emailing other businesses, there’s two parts of this question you have to answer. Which company(ies) do you want to email, and what job titles do you want to speak to at that company.

The first part is a little easier. It’s best to define the company you most want to work with, not the general description of any company you want to work with.

So for me, yes I can work with any B2B company. But ideally I want to target the owners of marketing agencies with less than 50 people.

The catch is that until you know a little about the companies you’re targeting, you can’t know who to target within it – more importantly, you don’t even know the right job title to target.

For example, if you’re targeting marketing agencies to sell a sales automation product, you have to know how large the agency is to determine if you should go after a VP, a director, or even the owner.

If you’re targeting enterprise companies, the CEO doesn’t want to hear about your new CRM.

In other words, just because you target one title at one company doesn’t mean you should target that same title at a totall different company.

That’s why when you build lead lists, you need to first segment the companies and then target titles based on which segment they are in.

That might sound like a lot of work, but here’s how I do it in just a couple clicks.

Lets say I want to target the owners of small Marketing Agencies.

I could set up a search like this:

And that will keep me from emailing the CEO’s of any giant marketing companies.

That being said, I think 50 employees might even be a little too big – in fact I would probably be just fine talking to sales leaders at companies from 10-200 employees.

I could set that up like this in just a few more clicks.

Easy, right?

This new setup will let me target much larger companies and still get a response while preventing me from reaching out to sales directors at 3 person companies who won’t have a budget for what we want to sell them.

The key here is carefully segmenting your lists both by company size and seniority.

You’ll also get a better response if you send you send these lists more segmented messages but that’s the subject for a different post.

If you want to try this for yourself and build your own segmented list you can sign up for Lead Engines and use the promo code “ICP” to get 100 free leads.