Case Study - Mylance Lead Gen

Does curated outreach work? When done right, yes. 100% yes.

With only 27 contacts, Jenny got a 79.2% connection rate on her requests, a 37.5% response rate, 4 booked calls, and 2 clients!

Let’s go in-depth to see how she did it. For confidentiality, her name isn’t actually Jenny, but we’ll call her Jenny for reference.

Jenny came to Mylance with experience in big tech and consulting but struggled to build her pipeline and find her next client. Sound familiar?

Here are the 5 steps we worked through to land her clients!

Step 1: Craft our outreach note

Great outreach gives the recipient a compelling reason to respond and jump on a call with you. That intro call leads to a proposal and then a closed client.

So, what makes outreach compelling? Compelling outreach has 4 components:

1. A polite introduction
2. The reader feels heard in their pain
3. You legitimize yourself through your accomplishments or an example
4. You have a compelling CTA

A polite introduction

This is a quick intro with your name and what you do. It doesn’t need to be your whole niche. It should be short and concise. You do not want to lose the reader’s interest here. Good examples include:

“Hi Bradley, I’m Jenny, a fractional CMO that works with founders like yourself.”

“Hi Bradley, My name is Jenny and I work as a fractional growth & operations leader for early-stage start-ups.”

Keep it simple and don’t overthink it.

The reader feels heard in their pain

This is where the work is done. This doesn’t need to be overly fancy, but this work is incredibly important. Let’s use an example to work through this.

“I wanted to ask - how are your marketing efforts going? Are you personally managing a lot of the efforts or do you have someone else leading the charge?

“My priority is to be surgical with your marketing efforts, and leverage your current resources to maximize your reach.”

These are two incredibly resonating sentences from the same note directed at founders of super early-stage companies. It resonates because it hits perfectly on the founder’s pain, which is that they’re doing all the marketing themselves, and creating new content and resources is incredibly time and energy-consuming. So this person hits on a founder’s stress and exhaustion that they’re doing marketing all alone and feel overwhelmed at the thought of a robust marketing plan.

So if I’m the founder, I’m hearing that you totally understand where I’m at, AND I work with you, you’re going to leverage my existing resources! That’s perfect. And I feel very understood.

Legitimize yourself through your accomplishments or an example

Short answer, I want to know that you’ve been there and done that. That you’ve solved this problem for other people. You could use a sentence like

“I use the same methodologies I developed to grow CloudKitchens' Direct to Consumer business to $10M in revenue in under 9 months. I’m happy to share some learnings from these experiences to help your company grow.”

or something as simple as

“I’m a fractional CMO that works with founders like yourself. My priority is to be surgical with your marketing efforts, and leverage your current resources to maximize your reach.”

Even though the second one doesn’t cite a specific example, it seems like the expert has been there and done that with similar companies, and given she understands my pain so well, she’s legitimized in my mind and I’m likely to take a call with her.

You have a compelling CTA

Again, don’t overthink it. Ask for a call or offer to share your advice on a call. Examples are:

• Casual: “Open to connecting sometime?”
• More formal with a booking link: “If you’re up for it, I’d love to find some time for us to chat to see if we’re a good fit. Could you send over some times that work for your schedule? If it's easier for you, you can also use my booking page: ”
• Offer to share learnings: “I'm happy to share my learnings on this topic over a call if any of this resonates.”
• Offer virtual coffee: “Are you up for a virtual coffee (I’m buying!) to chat through how I can best help you?”

Put those 4 things together and you have your outreach note! Two examples are:

More formal

More casual

Step 2: Set up your campaign

With Jenny, we set up a 3 note sequence: the main outreach note and 2 follow-ups.

The follow-ups were responding to the initial message with a quick one or two lines. The first one was

And the second was

The full sequence looked like: initial outreach, then wait 3 days, follow-up #1, wait 4 days, then follow-up #2

Step 3: Upload your contacts

We took Jenny’s lead list from Mylance, selected 3-4 contacts from each company and then reached out via LinkedIn to connect. Once we connected with the contact, we'd send a follow-up message.

Step 4: Test your campaign

This is crucial! We tested the campaign by sending ourselves test messages to make sure the personalization was working, the links were correct, and everything read how we wanted.

Step 5: Press Go!

For Jenny, we limited sending to 10 messages per day because they were so personalized and niche, and we kicked off her campaign!

Here were her results for her first campaign:

• 27 contacts, 79.2% connection rate, 37.5% response rate, 4 booked calls
• She turned 2 of the calls into clients and hit her goals for the month!