In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share my 5 steps to creating prospect curiosity in your cold outreach.

If you can replicate this process, you’re going to catch the attention of your prospects and get them to stop in their tracks to learn more about what you can do for them.

Unfortunately, most SDRs don’t have a solid understanding of what motivates prospects to reply, so they keep sending the same, product-oriented messages, and being ignored.

Creating curiosity gets prospects to keep reading your messages.

Without curiosity-inducing elements in your messages, there are a number of problems that arise:

Problem 1: Your message doesn’t stand out. Prospects quickly dismiss your outreach.

Problem 2: Prospects only scan your message. Your message isn’t even fully read.

Problem 3: Your message gets ignored. As a result, prospects move on and keep doing what they were doing before.

You can overcome all of these problems by creating curiosity-inducing elements in your cold outreach.

Here’s how I do it, step-by-step:

Step 1: Understand their problems

In a previous newsletter, I share my 3-step process to understanding your prospects’ problems.

In short, this is what you need to do:

1. Understand their goals and metrics

2. Find their initiatives and the problems they face

3. Study the exact symptoms of these problems and highlight them

Once you’re done with these 3 steps, you’ll have a better understanding of what keeps your prospects awake at night, and you’ll be able to put yourself in their shoes.

Step 2: List existing resources

Now that you know what problems your prospects are facing, you can start listing resources to solve these problems.

If your marketing colleagues are doing a good job, they should have plenty of content available to address these problems. They often have eBooks, whitepapers, long-form blog posts, podcasts/webinars.

For example, my customer at SeedLegals help founders raise money faster.

They know founders face difficulties raising money in an economic downturn, so they have created a long-form blog post.

Here are some places where you can look for resources:

• your website resource page

• LinkedIn/Twitter from a thought-leader targeting your ICP

• partner website

Step 3: Build a resource plan

Now that you have a list of resources that can be used to help solve your prospects’ problems, you need to do a bit of curation.

If you share a long-form post or a 45-minute podcast in your cold outreach, prospects will ignore you. No one has time to go through these resources, without knowing what they’ll get as a result.

You can curate the resources you have listed by summarizing the top 3 – 5 points of the resources. Here’s an example with SeedLegals post:

In today’s newsletter, I’m going to share my 3 steps to gaining a clear understanding of your prospects’ problems.

If you can replicate this process, you’re much less likely to get ignored by prospects and much more likely to get replies and book meetings.

Unfortunately, most SDRs don’t have a solid process for understanding their prospects daily struggle, so they are constantly throwing USPs and features, and getting no replies as a result.

Getting replies is about showing you understand your prospects’ problems.

Without a proper understanding of your prospects’ problems, there are a number of challenges that arise:

Challenge 1: Prospects can feel they are in a sequence. They know you’re sending this email to everyone else, and they hate it.

Challenge 2: Your messages are ignored. Prospects don’t even read the entire message.

Challenge 3: You destroy relationships instead of building them. You are seen as an annoyance and your email parked in the spam folder.

You can overcome all of these challenges by building a better system for understanding your prospects’ problems.

Here’s how I do it, step-by-step:

Step 1: Understand their goals and metrics

Prospects are typically evaluated on a set of 1 to 3 metrics. They get promotions or get fired based on their performance against these metrics.

When building a new sequence, I list the metrics my prospects are evaluated on. Here are a few places where I look for information:

• Podcasts/webinars where my Ideal Customer Profiles are interviewed

• Job descriptions

• SDRs/AEs I have trained in companies I worked with (or similar)

When I have an idea of the metrics my prospects are evaluated on, my next step is understanding their goals. I ask myself the following questions:

• Are they trying to maximize or minimize this metric?

• What happens if they miss it? What are the concrete consequences on their jobs/lives?

• Do they have stretch goals?

Step 2: Find their initiatives and the problems they face

Once their goals and metrics are clarified, I start digging into their initiatives and symptoms.

What are they working on right now to achieve their goals? What are the tools/training sessions/services they are evaluating to avoid missing their goals?

Now that I know more about their initiatives, I can start listing problems they would typically face.

Are they having a hard time finding/implementing the right tools? Did they try training their teams, without success? Are they going to miss their goals because they can’t find a service provider to do a job they are incapable of doing?

(Note: if you’re interested in doing this exercise, step-by-step, go check my Cold Message System.)

Step 3: Study the exact symptoms of these problems and and highlight them

Finally, I list the exact symptoms of these problems, and I highlight them in my cold messages.

Problems are often not enough to get a reply. They tend to be vague and full of jargon. For example, “Not having an upsell playbook” is a problem a lot of my prospects have.

Symptoms of this problem are:

• AEs are missing on easy expansion revenues

• Customer Success Reps are only order takers, they have no sales skills

• Expansion metrics are missed, quarter after quarter

I like to compare this with a doctor consultation. When you say “I have a cold”, you’re mentioning a sickness (a problem), but when your doctor asks you about your symptoms, you’ll say you:

• have a runny nose

• have regular headaches

• feel exhausted

• have fever

Think about what is more vivid in your mind? Problem or symptoms? It’s the same with prospects.

When you have a clear list of symptoms, you can highlight them in your outreach, like below: