In the cold email space, there is a pervasive ‘script’ culture where everyone wants to see your script, and want to borrow your script, and/or your subject line like it’s the evasive bastion of success that’s been eluding them.
It makes you ask yourself: When was the last time these people got laid?
Here’s the truth, fellas… Scripts suck. They don’t work.
More specifically, copying scripts that are working for someone else – or which worked at some point in the past – is not a winning formula.
Now, obviously… You can overcome any sales copywriting woes with volume; you’ve heard me (and Alex Hormozi) saying, again and again, that volume negates luck, and we all know the saying, “even a broken clock is right twice a day”.
But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re talking about scripts, and why the feeding frenzy of sharing subject lines needs to stop.
Every offer is unique. Opportunity exists in each of any number of industries, which each contain any number of verticals, each employing any number of management, each facing any number of problems, which can each be attacked from any number of angles.
And your offer is one of those angles. So is the person who’s sharing their script with you.
On the surface you might think, “great they’ve done all the hard work of getting the messaging all lined up”, but what happens when you hop on a sales call and all your verbiage is wrong, leaving the prospect with a bad taste in their mouth?
What happens when they respond to your outbound message with more questions, and your Wizard of Oz messaging turns out to be an old guy hiding behind a curtain?
This is one reason your offer needs to be your angle. Your script needs to be your angle.
But that’s not the worst of it. Scripts burn themselves out after a few weeks to months, and you need to re-jig them to fit the changing audience’s demands.
(Alex Hormozi talks about this in his spectacular book $100 Million Offers, and about how to keep them fresh without reinventing the wheel, but I digress)
If you’re chained to the industry, having to bake cookies or provide sexual favours in order to have their latest script, you’re going to burn yourself out (or end up with a nasty STI).
So how do you get around this? What replaces the script?
*Structure enters the chat*
In-house, we use structures. This gives us the freedom to hyper-personalize our outreach, while maintaining an over-arching approach structure that’s been proven to work over time.
So instead of a word-for-word
Hey {{FIRST_NAME}},
{{PROFESSIONAL_COMPLIMENT}}
{{RELEVANT_VALUE}}
{{SOFT_CTA_GAUGE_INTEREST}}
{{SIGNOFF}}, {{INITIAL}}
This might end up looking like:
Hey Chris,
I’m a big fan of Cyber-Security Inc (hung out with their guys at HackConf this year) and saw you work with them.
Our monitoring software saved a competitor of theirs $150,000 in downtime last week by mitigating a website takeover.
Does Milworm Tech have a strategy in place to deal with website intrusions?
-S
You can see how using a structure like this, instead of a strict script allows the salesperson to inject their own personality while ensuring the person on the other end gets consistent messaging.
We use this ‘structure over script’ philosophy all throughout the agency; for our cold outbound, content creation, social media creation, webinars, video sales letters, PR campaigns, pitchdecks, proposals, etc. The list goes on and on.
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