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.

1. Exotic language.

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.

2. Mention their favorite sports team and tie it to your product

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.

3. The alma mater reference

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.

4. The hometown play

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)

5. The content reference play

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.

Final thoughts

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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