Episode 24: How to Utilize Cold Email to Fill Your Sales Funnel with Shawn Finder

In today's episode, we delve deeper into the elusive holy grail of sales – the cold email that pays off. The general advice is: keep your email short, sweet, and to the point, and don't try too hard to sell yourself. But how exactly do you get your wordsmith skills to that point, and how to create a call to action that effortlessly galvanizes the reader? Our guest is Shawn Finder, who is a tennis aficionado, author, co-host of the 0 to 5 Million podcast, and Founder of Autoklose. A clear jack of all trades, Finder chats to me today about the challenges and goals of prospecting emails, and shares his top nuggets of gold for getting your foot in the door. It's a pain point for so many salespeople, but he smoothly outlines ways to be efficient and manage it all, amid an inundation of technology and the responsibilities of multichannel networking. We talk about creating a routine for personalization, with learnable examples of using current events to create positive feelings and that elusive initial connection. We also get a concrete list of principal do's and don'ts – specific word count, the 3 second rule, and more – plus actionable advice for upping your click rate and making it easy for the person to answer a call to action. Intent data, the divided opinions on the use of gifs, it's all in here. Just click play and let's dive in.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Some background on our jack-of-all-trades guest, Shawn Finder.
• Discussing the catalysts for the pendulum shift in emailing and data.
• How Finder went straight from professional tennis player to a director of sales position.
• What has changed for better and worse in the industry.
• How inundation of digital tools can also hinder the efficiency of sales.
• Where cold emailing stands right now, and why it's the number 1 channel.
• Finder's advice: don't send an email unless you have 2-3 nuggets about the recipient.
• Great examples of openers that take advantage of current events.
• How Finder approaches the balance of ICPs and personalization.
• The principal do's and don'ts: ideal word count, the 3 second rule, and more!
• Discussing the most effective style for your call-to-action.
• Finder shares a genius hack – this one will blow your mind!
• Are you using your tools to their full advantage?
• The pros and cons of videos and gifs, and how to use them – if at all. 
• Finder outlines the exa