Big Deal Depeche #3 — Personal Reference Openings.

Hi there,

And welcome to the new issue of the Big Deal Dépêche.

Let’s take a small break from the technicalities of account research and talk about using those hard-earned nuggets of intel to stand out in your prospect’s inbox.

The lowest-hanging fruit on our outreach tree that still works pretty well. Check out the Language part of the LinkedIn profile — and if there’s something exotic like Mandarin Chinese or Farsi, use Deep Translator (which does a much better job than google translate) to create a subject line relevant to your offer.

Many of us are sports freaks, and this passion can be an extremely reliable hook for outreach. Let’s say the target exec is a Manchester United fan (like yours truly). It will take 20 seconds to learn about the recent scandal with the expulsion of Cristiano Ronaldo, which can then be sawn to a wide array of business subjects (i.e., sequences of sloppy statements).

Clues about sports preferences are spread all over social accounts.

Pro-tip: buy an item with an authorized sports star’s autograph via Sports Memorabilia or a similar service and use it as a grabber for the direct mail package.

And here is a step-by-step case study on how I used a similar technique to engage an unreachable C-Level exec in a VERY conservative market.

One more low-hanging fruit — if your prospect went to a university with a rich history, use some “internal lingo” for an attention-grabbing opener. Those things can be found on Quora or Reddit in no time.

Look at the prospect’s hometown (better to double-check this datapoint via Facebook) and write a region-specific reference. Here is a killer example by Kevin Keane from Clari who played the “Drake” card in an outreach to the Toronto-based exec (and here’s my LinkedIn post with an in-depth analysis of this tactic)

Mention a recent interview or webinar the exec took part in. It’s important to really study the content piece and make a very specific observation.

Here’s an example:

Pro move: -- make a dedicated LinkedIn post with the recaps of the content piece tagging the target exec. You can follow the hashtag #dansrecaps to get some recapping inspiration.

Save this email as a quick reference for the times when you get stuck with your outreach.

But I urge you to treat the tips as a force multiplier for a relevant value hypothesis, not the substitute.

Thanks for reading and see you in the new Depeches!

— Dan Gridin

Let’s connect on LinkedIn

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