628: How to Craft Successful Cold Emails | Frank Sondors

Tune in and join us in welcoming Frank Sondors, the Co-Founder & CEO at Salesforge, an innovative AI-driven cold email sequencing platform. With over a decade of experience in B2B Sales, Frank has made significant contributions to renowned companies such as Google, SimilarWeb, Black Crow, and Whatagraph. Throughout his career, he has excelled both as an individual contributor and a leader, successfully managing and leading large sales teams.

Currently, Frank is devoted to building Salesforge.ai, a groundbreaking solution that empowers every sales organization to execute personalized cold email outreach at an unprecedented scale. By facilitating the connection of unlimited sender accounts and harnessing the power of AI with seller and buyer data, Salesforge.ai enables businesses to craft unique emails and expand their pipeline coverage up to 10 times.

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How to Craft Successful Cold Emails

Introduction

Welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast! Our show features successful sales leaders, marketers, thought leaders and entrepreneurs who will inspire you with their success stories. Each episode is packed with practical strategies, as our guests share their secrets to achieving their dreams. Listen in and learn the highlights of their remarkable accomplishments and get tips to revamp, rework, and reimagine your business. Whether you’re a small business owner, marketer, or aspiring entrepreneur, the Conquer Local Podcast is your ultimate guide to dominating your local market. Tune in now and take your business to the next level! 

I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Frank Sondors

Frank is the co-founder and CEO of Salesforge, an all-in-one sales execution platform.

Frank has over a decade of experience in B2B Sales, working for companies like Google, SimilarWeb, Black Crow and Whatagraph whether as an individual contributor or leading very large sales teams. Currently, he’s building Salesforge.ai to give every sales organization the ability to do personalized cold email outreach at scale to 10x their pipeline coverage by connecting unlimited sender accounts and leveraging AI using seller and buyer data to craft unique emails and to do it at scale.

Get ready Conquerors for Frank Sondors coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Jeff Tomlin: Well, it’s a pleasure to welcome Frank Sondors onto the show this week. Frank, how are you doing? All the way around the world in Lithuania. Welcome to the show. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company?

Frank Sondors: Hey Jeff, thanks for having me on the show. So yeah, my name is Frank Sonders. I’ve been in sales for well over a decade. In my last gig, I had a company here locally. I led a team of 50 people, a sales team. Exited the gig and decided to start my own sales company, a sales tech company, specifically focusing on cold email outreach at scale where we actually uniquely craft every single email to that specific individual driving a humongous lift in reply rate.

Jeff Tomlin: And so your company’s name is Salesforge.ai. Cool name. You’ve had some unconventional approaches to outbound. And so why don’t you talk a little bit about some of the unconventional tactics that you’ve employed that have given you an edge over competition in this space?

Frank Sondors: Yeah, I think I’ve been always in multiple companies, doesn’t matter whether right now at Salesforge or many other companies in the past, I’ve always been in a red ocean. So that means there’s a ton of competition. You have to compete against sometimes other sorts of 10, 20 vendors. And ultimately you need to figure out where your sort of potential customers congregate. And in a lot of cases, they will congregate in specific communities that are owned essentially by your competitors. It could be as simple as a Facebook group, it could be anything where they congregate. But you don’t necessarily have easy access to that particular community. It could be just a group or a website or directory of their clients really. So you need to figure out how you identify those groups and essentially has to be a large group so that either you go into that. You either, I don’t know, you would scrape the whole list or you would figure out how do you identify essentially the lines of your competition, right? And you would build that as a list, sometimes people build that manually. And you would essentially adjust that into Salesforce or whatever other CRM that you’re currently using. And then you would naturally then design specific sort of cold email outreach campaigns or LinkedIn campaigns specifically for that list. So in a lot of cases, you may have a significantly better product than your competition. Your price will be significantly cheaper. There’s other angles that you can play, but specifically right now that we’re going through a downturn, folks are willing to switch to other solutions and we are seeing that in the market as well. It doesn’t matter whether it’s with sales technology or anything else, but people want to become significantly more cost-efficient. They also want to consolidate their tool stack. So that’s what we’re seeing as well in the space.

So it’s not just on the sales side, but it’s also the marketing side. We’re seeing the same similar trends. There’s a lot of research out there by Salesforce as well on this sort of topic and that’s ultimately what we’re looking to capitalize. But the way that you know can aggressively really compete in a red ocean, you need to be able to figure out who are the clients of your competition and go after them, but in a strategic way really. From a messaging standpoint, from a pricing standpoint, sort of contractually how you’re going to be buying over those contracts. So, yeah.

Jeff Tomlin: Outbound is one of the hardest things in sales and it’s a challenge for any organization. And even organizations that have really effective inbound strategies as they scale, if you want to scale and become a really large company, there’s no getting away from outbound. Because at some point no matter how big you are, you have to go out there and start choosing your clients rather than just relying on them finding you. And definitely one of the things that we’ve realized here. So this is a muscle that you got to flex and you got to become good at.

And one of the things we’ve also found is that there’s no one single bullet. You have to optimize a lot of different aspects of the outbound approach in order to get the results that you want. One of those biggest things is personalization. And sometimes it’s challenging to be able to personalize something and get scale because the amount of scale that you can reach is a big determining factor of your ultimate success. And so maybe talk a little bit about that. You guys have found a way to personalize messaging and be able to do that at scale. So talk a little bit about how you’re able to do that.

Frank Sondors: Yeah. So it’s something that I observed back in my days, whether I was an account executive or as a head of sales. I mean you always saw the problem of, hey, I can personalize these particular emails or LinkedIn messages, et cetera, but it does take me a bit more time. Same with videos and stuff like that. So yes, your conversion rate does go up, but then you’re missing the volume piece. So really, you still have a hard time to attain your target because you don’t have enough activity essentially, even though you are personalizing. And when folks start to scale generally speaking with let’s say cold email campaigns, they do resort to using templates. And templates don’t convert because users just generally have a sort of fatigue. When they look at an email, you can see it’s a template. You can see that it hasn’t been personalized to you to your maybe specific titles to your potential pain points, anything that they may be on LinkedIn or a Twitter handle, et cetera, or maybe the website really. And you can see that and that’s the reason why your report is gradually sort of going down over time. So the only answer today is, especially because Google doesn’t like anybody doing cold email outreach. So if you’re looking to send essentially more than 50 emails a day as having a single inbox and Gmail, then what ends up happening, you end up starting landing more and more in spam. That’s because people start to flag you that this is spam email, they start to blacklist you, et cetera. And this happens when you have a lot of sort of volume there. So we thought to ourselves, how can we solve this problem as in still provide the ability to scale cold email outreach, but also ensuring that every single email is personalized. So we came up with the idea with a team that we will give the ability to connect an essentially unlimited number of inboxes into your software. So instead of a usual sort of SDR having one single inbox, imagine them having 10 inboxes, 20, 50, and 100 inboxes that they would operate out of. And then that means you know, you don’t have to worry about when Google or Microsoft, et cetera, when they penalize you for sending more than 50 emails a day. So that allows you to scale through multiple inboxes essentially, and collect that to a single software and then replying across multiple inboxes as well in a single software. And doing that in a way that’s efficient for the sales organization. Because most of the software out there right now are charging for every single inbox that’s being connected, whereas we don’t do that. We charge simply for consumption, meaning the more emails you send, the more we charge that particular user. Now the second piece is that email copy, right? So as I mentioned, folks use a lot of templates these days and we believe they will die over time. So you’ve already seen with the rise of ChatGPT and previously, this technology allows you to personalize at scale. So the problem is if you did try to do a lot of that stuff right now in ChatGPT, it does give you a really bad output. Meaning from an email standpoint you wouldn’t send anything like that because it does look like a marketing message, it doesn’t really look good. And the problem with that is what I would call prompting engineer. You really need to feed a lot of information for essentially large language models to work. So what does that mean? So in our case, what we do is we do the marrying of seller data and the buyer data. So the seller data is essentially Vendasta for example, so we would as part of app onboarding, ask multiple questions about, hey listen Jeff, which industry are you in? What’s your ICP? What are some of the pains that you’re tackling? What’s the solution? What’s the cost of inaction? Who’s your competition in this space? And then we would essentially create a profile in the backend about you that we’re then going to use for crafting sort of every single email. So now we’re missing then the buyer data. And the buyer data comes from publicly available sources. So this is what usually the SDR does. They enter essentially the LinkedIn profile of the person trying to find a hook to personalize and kind of trigger that response back. They sometimes may go to Twitter website, et cetera. So for now we’re doing LinkedIn. So we’re essentially accessing in real time the profile of the person and we’re using all the contents that’s on their profile. So the about section, usually the headline. What’s their title right now? What’s in their job description? What is it that they do right now? Because a lot of folks do mention some of the pains that they have in their current jobs, what is it that they do, some of the targets, so you know what historical performance. And we also look at the last post that they’ve written as moments in.

So we didn’t say, hey listen AI pick anything that we have here and then let’s marry that with the seller data and let’s craft really unique personalized email to that particular person. So then imagine a single SDR can send thousands of personalized emails via email for now that’s our only channel. And then we are looking in the future to do that also via text.

Jeff Tomlin: So on the one hand you’re solving for the deliverability of the emails with multiple inboxes. And on the other hand you’re solving for the personalization with the messaging on that side. And I guess at the end of the day you get much better results.

Frank Sondors: Exactly. Yeah, I mean that’s very important because I think personalizing is good, it can increase the conversion rate, but you still need to increase the volume. So this is what we knew that it’s a big, big issue. So because some sales organizations either going to go with the volume approach. The other ones usually in enterprise sales will go with the personalization approach. But there’s a lot of companies out there that would love for somebody to essentially bridge the gap between the need for volume and the need to personalize. That’s why the idea came to build Salesforge to enable that. The technology’s there, it’s just nobody in the space, especially the incumbents are not looking to do that. We do believe it’ll hurt their top line revenue and their margins, which is the reason why they’re not looking to drive that drastic productivity increase. Whereas in our case, we’re really looking to figure out a way where we go to every VP sales or every CFO out there and say, “Hey listen, whatever the target is that you have on your bag, we’ll be able to attain that with the least number of reps.” And I think that’s a very sexy value proposition out there to folks. It’s a no-brainer, especially if the software is able to deliver that. Because if you look at a lot of organizations nowadays, they have to become significantly more cash efficient because it’s not any more growth at all costs. It is back to profitability, back to profitable growth. And that’s what we’re looking to unlock for a lot of sales orders out there.

Jeff Tomlin: So that’s very cool. Obviously, as a CMO, I’m always looking for different technologies that we can plug into our sales and marketing stack to get an edge and improve our conversion rate optimization and the reach and scale that we have, the powers of revenue growth. Oftentimes the tools that you use, they’re only as good as the operator. Just like a race car, you can have the fastest car on the track, but sometimes it comes down to the driver that’s behind the wheel more times than not. And so talk a little bit about your training and coaching strategies. Because you’ve indicated that coaching and training is critically important to the whole process and there’s a lot of different elements that go into that process. So talk a little bit about your approach and those elements that have provided some of the success for you and your team.

Frank Sondors: Yeah. So naturally there’s plenty of parts in sales that cannot be sort of automated or where it’s hard to use AI. So one of the jobs I believe will never go away is the job of an account executive will never go away because folks do want to talk to a person on the other end. And being able to deliver really a stellar experience for the buyers, you need to train your folks from the moment potentially when they become an SDR over to their promotion over to be an AE.

But how do you do it in a way that you can align the whole sales organization? So I thought to myself, there has to be this framework. And everybody has their own framework. But in my case, I would look at things like performance. So in sales performance is critical, but it’s not really the only thing and it carries through everything. So I have four pillars in my mind and every pillar carries 25% weight. So performance, is very straightforward, are you able to attain your quota? What is it that you’re doing to try to obtain your quota? What’s your game plan?

Pillar number two is really the commitment. So are you committed to really getting better and better over time? Do I see that driving you? Do I see you helping the rest of the org to succeed? So it’s a very important commitment. Because you can see, it doesn’t matter whether it’s sales or other orgs, but people, they aren’t just driven. They just don’t want to be here. They’re not really committed, they’re just clock in and clock out essentially. And that’s not the type of people really you want around because it impacts the business. Number three is really competence. So people join companies with a set little skills and competencies. But what I’m really looking for is like, hey listen, we’re going to have all this training for you, all this coaching and mentoring in the organization. But what is it that you’re doing outside of that to become so much better at your job? So do you go and attend different webinars? Do you speak to other peers in sales? Do you speak to marketing in your own org and also outside? Do you try to improve your essentially competencies? And the last one is culture. So culture is super important, especially in sales. And there’s a saying, one bad apple can ruin the whole lot. And that’s exactly what happens not just in sales, but I believe also in other teams. And it is important that there are a lot of hard days. You get nine nos out of 10 and you need to be able to self-motivate and also motivate the rest of your team because there’s a lot of hard days that you have in your job. But you need to embrace it. You need to be, yeah, I mean, yeah, I’m not going to talk about culture. I think a lot of folks pretty much know what I mean. So those four pillars are super important. So I give 25% weight to each one of them. And whenever I do performance reviews back in the days, I would just use a sort of simple traffic light system to each one of them. And I would expect every single rep to score sort of yellow or green across those four pillars. And if somebody scores red for a couple of quarters in a row, then we would need to have a sort of more serious conversation really. But yeah, that’s how I would go about performance management in a very simple way that everybody kind of gets it and trying to be transparent with everybody naturally.

Jeff Tomlin: As you’re walking through those. I was thinking of a book that I had gone through called The Sales Acceleration Formula by Mark Roberge, who’s the former CRO at HubSpot. And in his book, he talks about first and foremost figuring out how you’re going to build and scale a sales team. And one of the things you have to figure out is what is the ideal profile for a salesperson for your organization. But it strikes me that there are sort of some immutable attributes of an ideal salesperson for a lot of technology companies. Almost regardless of what you’re selling, whether you’re an agency or some sort of tech firm, immutable attributes. The coachability regardless if that’s important. Curiosity, and empathy for customers. And so it strikes me as you go through your key elements and the pillars that you have that aligns with a lot of things that I think that no matter what kind of organization you got to look at.

Frank Sondors: So everything that you mentioned usually fits under one or the other pillar. So even though I mentioned just four pillars, there are subcategories there that we look into. So being coachable essentially is one of them. And that’s something that we can discuss on a quarterly basis with every single rep and trying to understand where they are on that particular topic. But yeah, coachability and multiple of other aspects, just like in any other tech company, are really important to improve and get ahead really.

Jeff Tomlin: One of the things that I do is I work really closely with our sales enablement team and also our sales operations. And as we build out metrics here, when I think about metrics, I think of sort of a stair-step model. Where the basic metrics you need to know are whether you’re just winning or losing. Is the light green, the light red? You are winning or losing? And the next step in analytics is insights and how to optimize your approach. Then the next step after that is where you can get predictive analytics that help understand what’s going to happen next. And it’s a different level. And now you guys leverage predictive technologies in your approach, which can be extremely powerful. Can you talk a little bit about that and how it impacts success with you guys?

Frank Sondors: Yeah, so what we touched upon is the A.I technology of large language models. There’s also the old school AI which is machine learning models and predictive pieces of tech. So a lot of predictive kind of modelling et cetera came really from advertising from a sort of Google, Facebook, when they try and predict various things happening in the auction, et cetera. So I used to work at Google as well back in the day. And so we used to buy various machine learning models, whether that has to do with advertising, attribution modelling, et cetera, et cetera. And then I also used to work with this company called BlackCrow.AI based in New York. And we used to predict, well they still do that, essentially conversion intent in real time on every single page load by crunching over 400 non-personally identifiable signals about that particular user. And then we used to do a lot of interesting stuff by feeding that information into Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Facebook. And then we used to do bidding against the real-time conversion intent of that particular user rather than using rules-based audiences such as you know whether the user has been on a checkout page or not. And I thought to myself, hey listen, nothing like that really exists in the world of sales. And one of the problems why no machine learning exists is because A, there’s just not enough data that usually companies have in sales. And the second problem is like it’s not structured, it’s not labeled. So like machine learning really needs that. And the other problem is even if companies would go to say a machine learning agency to try and build some predictive models, maybe lookalike opportunities and extract XYZ, et cetera, it costs a lot of money. It’s usually a seven-figure undertaking.

And I thought there has to be a better way. So what we are actually doing at Salesforge is behind the scenes we’re actually labelling every single company and the ICP, so the ideal customer profile that they’re going after. And by being able to label that, what we’re doing is we’re essentially putting companies into a cluster what exhibit as similar traits. So imagine, I don’t know, FinTech companies going off to e-commerce in the US. That would be a cluster for us. And by clustering companies, you are using an approach in machine learning called federated learning. And by using federated learning you’re able to train from silo data sets which means you have enough data you’re doing sort through that approach and then you can start predicting stuff.

So in our case, what we are really predicting in real-time when for example, we should send that email. So we send a lot of emails. But one of the biggest issues is when should we send that email. Should be on a Monday? Should be on a Friday? What time should we send that email to have the highest open rate, to have the highest reply rate? And for that you need machine learning to decision that. What should be the follow-up email in this sequence? Should be after four days, five days, or six days? And a lot of folks just guessing. They read some reports online, and look at some averages that you should be sending after five days, but nobody really knows. So that’s just one example where you can apply machine learning in a very smart way to drive conversion rate even further by having this sort of cluster approach. Training machine learning models based off that cluster and then feeding back into this cold email software that we have access to with our predictive capabilities. And then in real time machine learning decides what time to send that email or which time of the day really.

Jeff Tomlin: Do you have a sense of what type of uplift you get on conversion rates when you start thinking and using this type of approach? Because I’d say the vast majority of companies are probably not using predictive technologies in their approach with their email. So do you have some sort of sense or any case study where you had got a benchmark on the uplift on conversion rates?

Frank Sondors: That’s a very good question. So generally speaking, we would run a large-scale AB test to figure out, hey, what would be the lift in performance? The dilemma that exists often in outbound or cold email outreach or also on an advertising side of things is that you need to process a lot of volume generally, and there’s a lot of variables that can impact the test. But if we just talk about it, let’s talk maybe DEI part. So if you do personalize emails, there we’re seeing about a 3X lift in reply rate. So that means if your reply rate right now is 3%. We’re probably looking at nine, to 10% reply rate by using AI. By just simply personalizing every single email. On the machine learning side, I would say the reply rate by sending at the right time can increase by 10, to 15%. That’s what we’re seeing on our end. Now there’s other connectivity that we will be predicting in the future. When to do something at which particular time of the day or day of the week on LinkedIn front for example, maybe other channels like Twitter, et cetera. And it becomes very complex very quickly. But the answer is we do expect to see at least 10% improvement in the sort of reply rate, which is the conversion rate for us. But really what we’re optimizing as a business is towards having as many meetings attended as possible. So that’s really our sort of macro conversion in our head, how we’re optimizing sort of the whole system. Yeah. So there’s a lot more that we’ll go into that in the future.

Jeff Tomlin: That’s huge in order to get that type of uplift. And I remember giving a talk a little while ago. This is probably a few years ago we did some math on taking a look at an entire inbound, at that time it was an inbound, not an outbound funnel. But optimizing multiple steps in the entire funnel. And if you can increase the effectiveness of one part of the funnel, it has a compounding effect all the way through the funnel. And so if you can get a 10% increase here and a 25% increase there, it’s actually not that far. You can tweak a few knobs, you can get a 10X improvement at the end of the day just by improving a few things a little bit. So I mean that’s really cool and pretty awesome.

Frank Sondors: Yeah. I mean I do also have quite a bit of experience running inbound as well for companies. And I would actually say on inbound, three things really matter. So one is the process. The second one is the number of leads or MQLs or SPLs that are coming in by inbound. And the third one that people don’t usually look at is the speed. You probably have signed up to various demos out there in the US. And sometimes people reach out to you after a week only. So to give an idea, what I’ve done for one company here in Europe is we implemented SLAs. So where we had to call that particular lead within 15 minutes. So Twilio does for example in the US which is the number one work platform in the world, they call it prospectus within two minutes from them signing up. And that speed is crucial. And the reason why it’s crucial is that especially as you operate in a red ocean market, imagine you’re signing up, you get a sign-up for a demo or just start a trial. But because there’s also a lot of other options out there, whether the person just looks for alternatives right now on Google, et cetera, they may go with your competitor. But because you were potentially very quick to get them on the call, et cetera, you push them through the funnel. You push them through the funnel so deep that they just decide to go ahead with you because they really appreciate the service as in your quick call, and quick demo booking and they were able to sign the contract super quickly. And that experience, that swift fast experience is something that they really appreciate. And it’s not something that a lot of tech companies are able to deliver these days.

Jeff Tomlin: I can vouch for that insight because internally here we found that one of the biggest factors that improved our overall conversion rates was time to lead. So I can exactly relate to what you’re saying. What I was going to ask you, email fatigue. So what can you do to combat email fatigue? Do you guys see that as an issue still?

Frank Sondors: Yeah, so it a bit relates I guess to what I mentioned about sending templates. So most companies out there, or majority emails, like 90 plus percent in cold email outreach are templates these days. Everybody uses them. People are, generally speaking, looking for templates on the web, then they’re applying as part of the sequences and then off they go.

But when I receive a lot of emails and I receive don’t know, a hundred emails a day, I guess. You can see that like 99% of them are all templated. There’s very barely any information about me, my potential pains. Nobody has looked at my LinkedIn profile, nothing like that. It’s a very simple template maybe with a bit of a rules-based personalization as in they see I work at Salesforge and that’s about it. But that doesn’t fly these days. And usually just have, just like with Zoom, they have fatigue looking at these templates and hence why the reply rate is really so low.

So the bar is really low in cold email outreach these days. So I do believe that actually one of the most efficient ways that tech companies can scale these days is through cold email outreach. Because in LinkedIn it’s very tricky because LinkedIn caps you. In advertising, you are participating in the auction. There’s a lot of software out there trying to fight for the attention for the user. So it becomes very expensive very quickly. But by sending personalized emails at scale, that’s still one of the most efficient ways from my perspective when I’m scaling up. Also Salesforge right now for me, dogfooding our own software, it’s going to be the most profitable way for us to acquire clients. Yeah. And we all know that there is this fatigue with those templates. So the answer is personalizing these emails either with text naturally. The other approach is naturally sending videos so you can get Loom or Vidjar and then you send a video on top of the LinkedIn profile. But that’s not very scalable as well because it takes you a fair bit amount of time. And it’s okay if you’re in enterprise sales. But what if you’re not a high-velocity sales org? What if your deal sizes are tiny? You aren’t able to really to do that. So what we’re already seeing in the space is actually where companies, there’s a company in San Francisco called Tavis. And they already start doing what I call T-face, essentially. You record your face. You record your voice once, and then you’re actually able to personalize videos at scale already. So you already won’t be able to distinguish whether that was a real video or whether that was done by AI. And that’s essentially where we are. And that’s essentially how the world will morph from these static videos, unpersonalized videos maybe or these templates that are being used over to more of the AI stuff. And I do believe the companies will become significantly more efficient and the population will get used to it eventually. It’ll take a few years for sure. But yeah, I always get this sort of question from either that’s the investors or the users. And they say, “Hey listen, maybe one day AI will be talking to AI.” It’s like probably that will be the case. You’ll be using AI to prospect and then your prospect will respond with AI back to you. And at the end of the day, AI will do business with AI. Potentially that will be the future in about 10 years, not now though.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, I could talk about this for a very long time with you. Always trying to optimize our approach here and figure out how we reach our target audience in more efficient ways. You covered a lot of ground. So what are the top two takeaways that you want to leave the audience with?

Frank Sondors: I guess the number one, capitalize an AI. So if you’re not going to capitalize an AI, your competitors will for sure. So embrace it. It’s important to embrace AI as an organization and then see where you can drive efficiencies. Some people want to delay that topic, but I assure you your competitors are probably going after it and trying to figure out ways of how to make, whether let’s say sales work or marketing significantly more efficient. And the more you delay, the more you’re going to fall behind. So definitely capitalize on that. And the other thing is, think about your email deliverability. So I still see the most companies big and small don’t think about this huge problem that exists and nobody talks about it a lot that a lot of your emails just land in spam. And it’s not just on outbound, but it’s actually also inbound as well. And the quick big question is what do you do about it? Are you doing anything at all? So the whole huge topic about email deliverability. Because a lot of your transactional emails could be landing in spam. A lot of your support emails could be learning spam. And really what I would, my big advice is kind of review email deliverability across your whole org. Because I see that’s a humongous problem, not just with cold email, but also when I sign up to some newsletters or when I sign up actually as a user on a particular site. Even once I signed up for a demo and the invite went to the spam even though I got invited by Google. So it was the URL from Google. So even that. So landing in the spam, it’s a huge problem these days. So I would urge companies to investigate, as in whether they’re doing a good job on that front. And just simply ask the clients or the prospects whether the email land in spam and you’ll be able to realize that very quickly whether you have an issue or not. So yeah, I think these will be my two key takeaways.

Jeff Tomlin: Well, I think that those takeaways are very notable. I’ll vouch for you on that. And lastly, before we break, Frank, if people want to find out more information, they want to continue the conversation with you, how do they reach out to you?

Frank Sondors: I think just like anybody else out there, you’ll reach out LinkedIn, Frank Sondors, Salesforge.AI very quickly to find us. If you want to check out the platform, just go to Salesforge.ai, sign up and off you go. Otherwise you can see me at different conferences and particularly in Europe. I do fly over to US time to time as well, so you can catch me there. But yeah, LinkedIn is the usual I think.

Jeff Tomlin: I will say thank you, sir for joining us on this episode of the Conquer Local Podcast. It was a pleasure having you on and I look forward to having you back on in the not-too-distant future, to talk about how things are going at your company and the changes that you’re seeing. Because what we see here is that things are changing really quickly and you have to align yourself with companies that are reacting to that change. And it certainly sounds like you’re doing that. Pleasure having you on, and I wish you a very happy and healthy summer.

Frank Sondors: Thanks, Jeff. You too.

Conclusion 

Frank, shared some valuable insights. Two key takeaways from his discussion include the importance of capitalizing on AI and personalization in sales, as well as prioritizing email deliverability and addressing email fatigue.

Frank emphasizes the need to leverage AI and personalization to gain a competitive advantage. And by strategically identifying and targeting competitors’ clients, businesses can effectively compete in the market. Personalizing emails through customer profiling and real-time insights can significantly enhance conversion rates and engagement.

Addressing email deliverability and combating email fatigue are also crucial. It’s important to review and optimize deliverability to ensure messages reach prospects’ inboxes. And utilizing tools like videos and personalized recordings companies can increase the effectiveness of cold emails and mitigate email fatigue associated with generic templates.

By embracing these 3 things: AI technology, personalization, and deliverability, businesses can improve their sales performance and stand out in a very crowded marketplace.

If you’ve enjoyed Frank’s episode discussing How to Craft Successful Cold Emails Keep the conversation going and revisit some of our older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 534: Old School Closing Strategies with Benjamin Bressington or Episode 237: Cold Calling from our Master Sales Series. 

Until next time I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!