IAM2120 – Founder Helps Companies Get Clients Through Cold Outreach Campaigns

In this episode, we have Jack Reamer, co-host of the Code Outreach podcast.

Jack shares his journey of starting in freelance copywriting and transitioning to B2B email copywriting and cold email outreach.

He emphasizes the importance of adding value and solving problems for potential clients in cold outreach campaigns. Jack’s advice is to appreciate the growth process and savor each day, even during the challenging times, as it contributes to the journey of achieving success

The discussion highlights the long-term commitment and hard work required for successful outbound marketing campaigns.

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Full Interview:

Transcription:

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Jack Reamer Teaser 00:00

Imagine your prospect would thank you for your cold outreach, right? And yet it takes so much work to make that happen. You're not, we're not right all the time. And it's back to the drawing board and like doing the leg work required to make the absolute best campaign. I skip over that sometimes, but I think it's important to keep in mind like you can have a Grand Slam campaign without picking up some bruises along the way keep working at it because that's mild marathon mentality you talk about.

Intro 00:27

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:55

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jack Reamer. Jack, excited to have you on the show.

Jack Reamer 01:01

Thanks, Gresh, same here.

Gresham Harkless 01:03

Absolutely, super excited about all the awesome things Jack is doing, and of course, before we jumped into the interview, I gotta read a little bit more about Jack, so you can hear about some of those awesome things that he's doing. And Jack's agency works closely with B2B sales and marketing teams and books them more meetings by sending fewer emails, cold emails at that. If you've ever felt like spray and pray outreach attempts aren't working, you're not alone. Their clients enjoy 20% reply rates thanks to an ultra personal small batch LinkedIn and email campaigns. And I absolutely love having fellow podcasters on the show.

He's the co-host of the Code Outreach podcast, and it's always great to hear about all the awesome expertise and knowledge that he's been doing to grow. And he helps sales teams book more meetings with decision makers by sending fewer code emails. And the secret he says is selling to your network. And the problem is for most people still treat B2B sales lead generation like a numbers game when it's really a first date. Jack, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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Jack Reamer 02:02

Let's do it. Yeah, thanks, Gresh. Thanks for the intro. And let's make sure that everyone listening gets something out of this episode excited.

Gresham Harkless 02:11

Yeah, I'm excited as well too, because you have so much knowledge and information. I think everybody's trying to get their name out there and figure out how best to do that. But of course, I know we're going to jump into some really great information. I want to hear a little bit more on how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

Jack Reamer 02:24

Okay. So let's go back because I've been doing cold outreach now. This is my 10th year. All right. So I'm 35 right now. So we go back before that. I was over before Upwork was Upwork when it was still Odess. Yeah, let's go way back. I'm like a recent college grad and I'm making money by doing freelance copywriting and this is what year? 2012-2013 more or less and I'm writing everything from radio spots to my first copywriting gig. This is shameful, but it was a Craigslist Ad for a landscaping company. And from there, I just, I'm basically, my routine was like, go humble beginnings, man, I don't share this all the time. Actually, I go to the library. I check out a new old school copywriting book, Gary Hallberg, Joe Sugarman.

And I go through, I literally have a few on the desk and I'd be working on these freelance copywriting gigs and at first they were about as good as you'd hope. But with every week new projects kept adding up and I had no choice but to make these Ads convert and fast forward, I got pretty good at copywriting, but I decided to specialize in B2B email copywriting because frankly that's where the money was and that's where it felt like I had the sweet spot. Compare this, if you were doing an about page copy. Every client had so much feedback. They wanted it to be just about them. But when it came to B2B email, they're like, did you drive clicks and sales? All right, great. Keep doing it. Boom. Boom. So anyways, I did B2B newsletter copywriting for about a full year, working with good brands like with Curly, HubSpot.

I was like the guy for B2B copywriting and newsletters. It was really like small world, but eventually I started getting into cold email when it became a thing in like mid 2015, hooked up with the founder of quickmail.com around that time when he just started, which was like the OG, cold email software. And from there, I never looked back from reaching out to a cold B2B audience and getting them to become close paying customers with my clients. That's been my thing for 10 years. And it's so much more fun than proper B2B newsletters because there was always that like list building effort. Like, how do you get the right buyers? Like, cold, you just, you build your list of dream clients come up with the right way to start conversations with them add lots of personalization do a better job than the competition and you're off to the races it's fun.

Gresham Harkless 04:58

Yeah absolutely I appreciate you so much and sharing your journey your story I think so many times when you see the success or even just see, oh, that email had X amount of success, whatever that is, you don't see the humble beginnings. You don't see that process in those steps. And I imagine every single part of the process of you reading the books, of you writing the actual copy, all those things build up into the successes you're having. But I don't think we sometimes see that journey.

Jack Reamer 05:22

It's like the… did you watch the social network?

Gresham Harkless 05:25

Yes, I did.

Jack Reamer 05:27

So there's like a montage of 90 seconds where the idea is made and the 90 seconds later it's like a billion dollar cut. Exactly. It's not montage 90 seconds. I shouldn't. It really takes 10 years, but yeah we don't talk about it.

Gresham Harkless 05:41

Yeah absolutely. What's the quote? The secret to overnight success? It takes 10 or 15 years, but you don't see that because it's not sunshine and rainbows. It's messy. It's layers of mistakes. There's things that don't go according to plan, but I think that's the beautiful thing about when you find experts, people that have committed to their craft and our experts, when you're able to lean on them, you're not just leaning on what they're working, what they're doing. You're leaning on that journey, that knowledge, that information, the things that went well and things that sometimes didn't go so well either.

Jack Reamer 06:06

That's right. So if you're listening, you're like really focused on driving business growth. I think if this was me listening 10 years ago, it would have been so much helpful. So peaceful is the word to know that settle in, enjoy every day, getting a little bit better at your craft because this is the long haul. And that I think is the vision. Like we all want overnight, but the reality is you got to mentally prepare for that long haul journey that's going to get you to the top.

Gresham Harkless 06:37

Yeah, absolutely. We start to realize that these tactics, these things, these tools, all these things that we have in place are really a way for us to amplify that human connection, that human spirit. I think it starts, we start to look at the entire process in a different way. Is that a lot of like how you're working with your clients and you're making that impact? Do they come to you trying to figure out how best to get their name more out there and you're able to put in and have that understanding of what they're doing, how they do it.

Jack Reamer 07:06

So every client comes to us saying we need to make more sales when you grow our sales pipeline. Okay and that's the overarching theme of our relationship. Now in order to achieve that we have a number of levers that we can pull. And depending how hard it's been to break through the noise, to get, if you're going after CFOs or CTOs or what's a, CTOs are pretty tricky. Yeah, exactly. These are cream of the crop prospects, big deals. What are you willing to do that your competitors haven't considered that will allow your message to break through and get that CMO to say, this is actually refreshingly helpful. Let's see where this goes. When we're talking about cold outreach, getting growing your business by getting strangers to say yes to what you're selling. Why don't more of us think about this in terms of a marketing expense?

How much does it cost to send a LinkedIn message, a cold email? Essentially, it's free, right? You buy the tool maybe, but you don't even need, you could do it manually for 0 cents. And yet, I think because it's so cheap to send these messages, we forget that they're really just advertisements or essentially gifts to the people we want to be earning their trust and working with. So I would encourage, if you're listening to this, think about more ways that you could add serious value in these messages. If you're tired of 2% reply rates, maybe it's because the message you're sending is really not that valuable. How can you invest a little bit more for these high value clients and get a whole lot more in return.

Gresham Harkless 08:48

Yeah. I love that you use that word gifts, but it seems like you have this ability to, it might be your secret sauce. The thing you feel that you're part of and makes you unique is that you're able to understand that, understand that it's not just what we're putting out but it's also less of value to the client or potential client that you want to work with and be able to navigate that. Do you feel like that's part of your secrets?

Jack Reamer 09:10

Yes, absolutely. So I think when you do an outbound marketing campaign at its finest like at the very best result what's gonna happen is you've built something where somebody suddenly becomes very fortunate to find themselves a part of your campaign. And look, here we are talking about the best practice. And I do believe that is attainable. Like the campaigns that work the best solve serious problems and deliver a lot of value to the folks part of these campaigns. That's why it works. But I also want to like come back to reality and say these inspiration, these highly successful campaigns take a lot of work to execute, to test. We're not right all the time, right? You can like, and that's why when we build a campaign, we always have 2 or 3 in the mix eggs in different baskets, trying different things.

So hopefully you're listening and hearing where cold outreach can be like the high level of like imagine your prospect would thank you for your cold outreach, right? And yet it takes so much work to make that happen. You're not, we're not right all the time. And it's back to the drawing board and like doing the legwork required to make the absolute best campaign. I’II skip over that sometimes, but I think it's important to keep in mind, like you can't have a Grand Slam campaign without picking up some bruises along the way. Keep working at it because that's that mild marathon mentality you're talking about.

Gresham Harkless 10:39

Yeah, absolutely. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have. I know you mentioned the book influence, but is there another CEO hack that you lean on that makes you more?

Jack Reamer 10:51

I do. I do. So, my life changed my, I would say like my work life changed when I got one of these right here, just regular old notebook and I start my day with a outdoor workout. I like sunshine in the morning and for whatever reason it's not for my body it's for my brain I just I'm a different person after I sweat and the next thing I do is grab my cup of coffee and I'll write out my day. All right. I've never been good at long-term CEO planning. I don't know why. I just, I don't think 5 years ahead, I'm more of like short term. But the funny thing happens, Gresh, when like you're there just writing out the day you want to have as if you've already done it. It's so powerful.

And I'll go from the client work I need. I'll do the marketing initiatives I want and I'll keep going through what dinner am I going to cook, make sure I throw a salad in there and I'll just talk about a great get my kids in bed on time and when I've written that it's funny. I will take like here attention like basically like I got my own kind of chicken scratch here. I'm intentionally not holding it too close. But yeah, I put like random stuff on there, but I'll just underline the to-dos that come out of this stream of consciousness. And then I don't know if you use this app is called a BeFocus Pro. It's like this map. Basically, it allows you to store your to-dos and I just, I click play when I'm working on those.

Gresham Harkless 12:21

Yeah, I love that. So I wanted to ask you now, one of my other favorite questions, which is CEO nuggets. So this might be something you would tell to someone that's coming to you from sales bread, or if you were to hop into a time machine, what piece of advice might you tell your younger business self?

Jack Reamer 12:37

Ooh yeah, this is good. All right, let me give you an emotional answer to that. And I would say, okay, it has to do with appreciating the day that you have while you are sometimes aggressively struggling to achieve a certain goal and it's sometimes it's not fun to grind it out it isn't and I think back to those Upwork freelancing days like it was hard work it was like you're learning something new. So you are awkward at it. You're kind of like learning to walk and it's hard. And I think the best advice I give myself back then is look, man, while you're not the CEO that you envision today, it does not mean that this is not a beautiful process. And it does not mean that when you cut to two decades ahead, or in my case, one decade ahead, it doesn't mean that you're gonna look back on these days and say, man, I, that was a period of tremendous growth and I really appreciated it. And so savor this day, even if you're doing 50 cold calls. So seriously, like just life short, do something important and enjoy doing it.

Gresham Harkless 13:46

Yeah, absolutely. So how would you define my absolute favorite question, the definition of what it means to be a CEO? Our goal is to have different quote unquote CEOs on the show. So Jack, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Jack Reamer 13:55

Solving the problems that I deem to be most important and having that freedom to pursue said problems is what it is to be a CEO. Meaning, I guess twofold. First, when I'm thinking about sales spread and the vision for the company, even though it's not years ahead, I do get to decide what part of sales are we going to really hone in on, master this craft and deliver solutions to people struggling. Where are we going to be? And then also for CEO, it means, okay, within that journey as CEO, which parts of this do you want to be very involved with and which parts are you going to hire and have other people own so that you really get to have a fun day at work most of the time.

Like a good example. Yeah, there's parts of, okay, an easy one, accounting. I don't feel like doing accounting. That's a really easy one to answer. Emith talked about the first hire was a bookkeeper. There's a lot of truths to that. So as CEO, you don't have to do bookkeeping if you don't want to. And what a beautiful thing, right? Like here we are to get to build a team to really unite against a common problem that we all want to solve.

Gresham Harkless 15:08

Yeah. I love that. Jack appreciates your time, of course, even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to say if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best we can get a hold of you, find out about the podcast, all of the awesome things that you're listening and you are trying to get outbound to work, or you just wanted to work better.

Jack Reamer 15:22

I'll tell you what, if you go over to salesbread.com, click that contact button. Say you heard this conversation through Gresham's podcast and here's the, send me your cold email, send me your cold LinkedIn message, send me something. I'm going to review it for you. Just go to salesbread.com, click the contact button. That should be helpful. So if you just Google cold email outreach podcast it's on Spotify or whatever the way you listen to podcasts it's on YouTube as well so if you just want like good tactics and techniques see what's working with cold outreach that would be another good resource yeah.

Gresham Harkless 16:02

Absolutely and of course to make it even easier we'll have the links and everything and the show notes as well too, so that everybody can follow up with you. And I hope you have a phenomenal day.

Jack Reamer 16:09

Yes, sir.

Outro 16:10

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO podcast powered by CBNation and Blue16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Check out the latest and greatest apps, books, and habits to level up your business at ceohacks.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless, Jr. Thank you.

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