Overcome cold-email procrastination

It's child's play for me to write & send sequences on behalf of my clients. When I write for myself, I struggle. This article is meant to help future me, the next time I'm cold emailing for myself.

Desired Outcomes of This Checklist

1) Procrastinate as little as possible while putting together your list and sequence.

2) Feel good about your progress from the moment you've started, and never get stuck

3) Send to your 1st prospect as soon as possible, starting the virtuous cycle between your effort <> replies <> sales calls <> new business <> cashed checks.

Go through the following list and pick the easiest ones. Do the ones that feel easy to you. Check them off as you go. Don't do them in order. The idea is not to do all of these. It's to do anything at all.

Sequence Writing

• Write 1 email, in gmail, to 1 prospect. Don't send it. Instead, load it into Quickmail, and start a sequence on that solitary prospect.
• Write 1 email step, and continue writing email steps as long as they flow from your fingers. Stop once they stop flowing. Don't force them out. Write to only one person. Don't try to write to both CTOs and CEOs.

List-Building

• Pick your 1st customer or your highest grossing customer
• Google for lists of their competitors
• Ask Fancyhands to find emails for all of their competitors

List-Cleaning

• Separate the different types of prospects that you researched. Don't fall prey to the temptation to write one email sequence that works for more than one type of prospect!
• Clean 1 prospect. Add them to your sequence.
• Repeat.

Amazing work, you've sent your 1st Quickmail to your 1st prospect

Take a moment to celebrate. Great, now it's time to send you second email. You're probably stressing right now about how you want to say something slightly different. That's okay.

Handling Infinite Variations

• Clone the old variation as a new variation that's exactly the same in Quickmail.
• Pause the old variation.
• Delete the sections of the old variation that you want to customize and replace them with variables. Gotcha: make sure to add them as custom variables.
• In your spreadsheet, make new columns to match the new variables, and put what you deleted from the old emails into every single cell of the corresponding column. These are your defaults, for when you're too lazy to customize and want to send anyway.
• For this second prospect, customize the appropriate columns to match what you want to say.
• Preview that prospect by searching for their name in Quickmail, then click sequences, then choose your sequence.
• Looks good? Send it.
• Voila!

Now you've sent to two people, and you're equipped to make any edits you want without messing up emails you've sent to past prospects. And you didn't have to make the decision to throw out any past writing.

Keep repeating the above process until you're done with all your prospects. Or, send to them with the defaults, that's perfectly okay too!

Yours,
David Trejo
EngineerOverflow.com

PS Want exact instructions on how to ask all your friends for referrals using Quickmail?
Buy my book. The referrals chapter also includes the exact sequence I used. It's a considerate 2-step sequence and got me 30% reply-rate.