In July 2021 I was in a penthouse at the Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas with Alex Berman. We had a mastermind that night, and before it started I kept my phone rolling while Alex and I nerded out about cold email. I'd already shot a quick clip of him and Pablo recording, and I couldn't help myself. I had to ask him how he actually does it.
Start with who you email
Alex said it comes down to lead quality first. You want to email people who actually want to buy from you. His sweet spot is companies doing over $5 million and under $150 million in revenue.
I call those the golden geese, because they're small enough to still have the decision-making process of a mom and pop, but they have the budgets of the enterprise.
They pay a lot and they make quick decisions. I agreed with him on the spot. For B2B, that's a great target.
Pitch one project, not everything
Most agencies still say they do everything. They're a "holistic development partner" doing Android apps, front end, back end, you name it. Alex said what works instead is pitching a specific project to a specific person. If you built a big retailer's website, you email similar companies about that website and tell them you can build one for them too.
What you don't do is ask, "Do you have any web development projects?" That's what most people send, and that's the problem.
Four or five sentences
Then the email itself. The subject line is usually just "quick question." Open with something specific about them, like a compliment on their latest campaign. One line on what you do. One example of who you did it for. Then ask, "Are you around later this week?"
That's it. Four or five sentences is all you really need.
My version: lead with "you"
That's really close to the formula I use when I reach out to anybody. I start with the word you instead of I. Not "I think you're so cool," but "You said this one thing and it made me think of..." People see the word you.
The next paragraph is a straight-up testimonial: here's what listening to you did for me, and why it hit me differently than everybody else. Then I add, "Feel free to use that as a testimonial any way you'd like." I leave that as its own paragraph. Only after that comes the ask.
Alex laughed, because he gets the opposite all day. "Alex, your cold email training was a game changer for me. Also, I sell social media services. Do you want to buy?" If he could just copy and paste the first part, he'd at least get the dopamine hit. But it's always followed by the ask.
Sugar, salt and fat
Here's how Alex explained why the short version works:
You don't go to McDonald's to eat good food. You go to McDonald's because you want the sugar, salt and fat. So you're not buying from us because you want some art. You're buying from us because you want leads. You want clients.
Talk about the thing that's most valuable to them, and you can skip all the BS around the sales process.
Clone your best client, one campaign at a time
One of the other guys in the room produces what he calls internet talk shows. He takes one hour a week with a client and turns it into a YouTube show, a podcast, email, a blog and a couple dozen short clips. He said he could sell it to anybody, and he asked Alex how he'd go after it.
Alex's answer was to start by cloning the most successful client you have. His best one was a real estate investing company, so pitch other real estate companies in that $5 million to $150 million range: "We're doing internet talk shows for these guys, and they got this result in this amount of time. Does that sound like something you'd want for your company?" Build a list of 100, optimize the campaign, and see how you do.
And you don't have to rebuild your whole business around it. A lot of agency owners hear that and think they have to become the real estate podcast company. No. You just think about the next 100 emails. If they don't buy, pitch something else to somebody else in another vertical.
Borrow case studies if you don't have them yet
Alex shares his whole business model online, and I told him that's his moat. Nobody can clone it, because you need the case studies to back it up. That's also why this works best for scaling, not for brand new businesses. You start with smaller clients and work your way up.
But he had a trick for new agency owners. Call bigger agencies and offer to sell for them on commission. Now you can use their case studies in your emails. You've jumped the line. Case studies that could have taken you 10 years, you're getting in 10-minute calls.
A whirlwind with a destination
I asked him where his emotional intelligence came from. He said I was the first person to say he had any. To him it's just adding value. But knowing you have to lead with value is emotional intelligence, whether you call it that or not.
The last thing he said stuck with me. The path is never direct. But if you know what you want to be doing day to day, you can take a squiggly path and reverse engineer your way there. For Alex, that was the agency world. At the New York agency he could be meeting with a food brand one minute and a university the next, then running the agency's social media. I told him he seems like a guy who likes chaos. "Well, I'm a whirlwind," he said. That morning alone he'd reviewed his LinkedIn course, sent about 50 tweets and launched a new course.
All of this came from a handful of phone clips I shot that night and almost didn't. That's why I'm turning my phone video into a content factory.