Do you hate to make cold calls or at least dread doing them?

How would you like to generate leads with the biggest companies in the world without having to make a single cold call ?

When I started my companies LiveVoice and Order Solutions a few years ago I felt terrified of making cold calls.

The fear of rejection , The inefficiency. Plus I realized that you could never get the right person on the phone

Big companies and executives never would answer their own phone.

At the time I was in college at the University of Colorado where the other students were focused on partying I was focused on building a business because I didn't’ want to get a job and wanted freedom

I wanted to be able to travel, 2 weeks of vacation sounded depressing, trying to move up the corporate ladder sounded like a nightmare

I had to find another way and that path was by becoming an entrepreneur

Now over the years I transition from selling to small businesses to big businesses

Both of my companies were in the business services space except Order Solutions was selling to just one vertical which was the restaurant industry

And it was focused on selling to big companies instead of small

I realized that I could sell my services to big companies but the contract size could be 10x bigger and I could have just handful of clients and actually make more money compared to needing hundreds or even thousands of small business clients to make the same amount of money

I’ll never forget the day I realized there was a better way to get in the door with big companies

I asked a friend of mine Zach at lunch who was also an entrepreneur and his company was crushin it they were the fastest growing startup in Boulder at the time.

I wanted to how his playbook to landing big client and how he was generating leads.

We sat at lunch eating and I just couldn’t contain myself and how to ask.

How are you guys growing so fast? How do you get clients?

Zach responded confidently and said we do direct sales

. I responded so you must have a bunch of people cold calling?

Zack was like were not making any cold calls actually.

Shocked and intrigued I responded so you have a big sales team of some sort.

Zack with a smile and said actually no he had said we only have two guys.

Now at this point I felt annoyed and just blurted out well them what do you guys do?

He said we send automated cold emails and LinkedIn messages in an extremely personalized and targeted way.

We speak the language of whoever we reach out to no matter what the role or industry is and we don’t ask for a meeting we ask for a referral

Zach’s answer turned my frustration into excited and I resonated a ton with what he was saying. I felt hooked in seconds. In my mind I saw the path to a new future and I could see how this could work for my company as well.

Zach spent the afternoon helping me craft the message and showing me the software they were using to automate this. He introduced me to Apollo.io for automated cold emails and Dux Soup for personalized and targeted LinkedIn messages. I was obsessed.

I realized that if I could master these tools and the skill behind them, I'd never have to worry about not having leads ever again—and not just any leads, but leads with big enterprise customers.

So the next week I bought the software started testing and but at first nothing worked. No responses. At least I didn’t get yelled out to stop calling over the phone I thought.

But it didn’t stop me I still I believed in that I could figure out. My business idea was a centralized call center for restaurants

When I was a kid we’d call in for pizza and the phone would ring off the hook in the restaurant

My idea was what if we could set up an at home call center model where people could make extra money by answering phone calls for large restaurant chains. I thought I could charge $2 per order and scale up to to take tens of millions of orders per year. Most restaurants missed phone calls and were overlooking all of their missed revenue by not answering the phone.

So then what I finally decided to do that changed everything was ask for feedback instead of sell.

I walked in a local pizza shop on the hill of what they called it in Boulder. And I told the restaurant owners told them I was a founder and about my idea and wanted to learn how they did it internally and what the problem were

The owner started getting excited and lighting up and telling me about all of these buzzwords in the restaurant industry like you could increase my throughput, could you teach your reps to up-sell, I’d love to up-sell soda, bigger sizes, appetizers, and sizes, I bet you could really increase my average check size

I wrote these terms down furiously really not knowing what hey meant at the time

The owner invited me to come in and work for a day and see how they did answered the phones

I was shocked what I learned and even though part of me felt like this was kind of embarrassing and a waste of time

Little did I know that what I learned that day would help me make millions of dollars just months later

I learned how to talk like an industry insider, explain the benefits, explain the problem and then I started using it in my cold emails and linkedin messages to book meeting with executives Fast forward a few months later I started booking meetings with Papa Johns, CPK, Dennys, Famous Daves, Outback, papa Murphys all on autopilot with automated emails and linkedin messages I went from 0-300 employees in 24 months and processing over 100M in off premise order revenue four our clients per year

It all boiled down to #1 Focus on big companies instead of small companies #2 Focus on 1 niche or vertical to be a specialist #3 Learn how speak your verticals language #4 Use automation to scale up your volume of messages but target each role with specialized messaging #5 Target the C-level and ask for a referral Number 5 Iactually learned from the book Predictable Revenue it was the same strategy that Salesfoce.com used to grow their business

You get higher response rates when your emails and linkedin messages say who is the best person to speak with instead of when can i set up a time to chat

The strategy is because C-level is actually above the real decision maker and executives love to delegate. So the VP level for me was the real decision maker. And if your boss tells you to talk to someone you typically will. So those the 5 key strategies to generate big meetings without cold calling

Hopefully you found this story helpful and if you did I have a free workbook that helps you implement these and goes deeper into these strategies

To get it just click the link below or the link in my bio and get free instant access