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advice How to Perform Outbound Sales with Mike Robertson - Part 1: The Basics

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Outbound domain sales can be an effective means of producing cash flow for your domain portfolio. Rather than simply relying on buyers to come to you, outbound marketing relies on contacting specific potential buyers to try and secure a deal.

When it’s performed properly, outbound sales can create business, but it can be a difficult art to master. We have teamed up with @Mike Robertson, Director of Business Development at Fabulous.com to produce a four-part series, giving you a whole host of tips and advice for outbound sales in 2019.

With Mike recording domain sales totaling in excess of eight-figures including BTC.com, CBA.com, and Perch.com, he has plenty of advice to share about outbound sales.

In part one of our outbound sales series, we’ll be looking at the basics of outbound sales including the email address you should use, your email signature and your CRM.

It should be noted that outbound sales should always be undertaken at your own risk.


Your Email Address

One of the most important initial factors for good outbound sales should be the email address from which you send your targeted emails. Would you be more likely to buy a domain name from [email protected], or [email protected]?

A professional custom domain name could be a good way to add legitimacy to your sales emails. Google, for example, offers custom email addresses on custom domains using the Gmail interface for a small monthly fee.

As for free email providers such as @gmail.com, @hotmail.com or @yahoo.com, Mike has some basic tips: “Free emails don't instill a lot of authority or trust. If you have to use a free email, I think Gmail is more commonly accepted as a legit email. And if you are doing so, ensure the email address doesn't include hyphens or numbers. Try to make it look as professional as possible.”


The Email Signature

In conjunction with a professional email address comes the need for an email signature on your sales messages. According to Mike Robertson, “All opening emails should include an email signature. It's an opportunity to build trust and confidence with potential buyers you are approaching.”

You have likely received hundreds of emails that contain an email signature, with each signature likely including slightly different content. There are several vital parts to an email signature, as Mike explains, “Mandatory fields I would include are Name, Title, email, phone, website. Other fields I would consider including are a LinkedIn profile and social media links, so long as you keep active and updated profiles on the various platforms.”

Email signatures can be created in your email provider, or you can use a third party email signature generator such as WiseStamp or HubSpot Signature Generator.

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Email Tracking Software

Email tracking software, or read receipts, simply allows you to know when one of your emails was opened. Services such as HubSpot or Streak allow users to track a small number of email opens per month, but is it a feature you should consider using?

According to Mike: "I've never used email tracking software [...] I can understand the need for email tracking. You can get some pretty cool data, how many emails were opened, who opened the email, how many times they opened the email. If you are playing around with different email subjects and email content, I can see it being important as you can gauge what works and what doesn't."

That is a very good point from Mike. If you are beta testing various email subjects and sales emails for read rates and response rates, email trackers can provide helpful data. Of course, email tracking isn't entirely reliable, but data can give you a good indication of what's working and what isn't.


CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) software providers are abundant. Salesforce, Zoho and Hubspot are just three of the hundreds of CRM providers. Does a domain investor need one of these? Mike thinks not:

"To be honest, I have never used a CRM in all my years of brokering. I'm very old school and use spreadsheets to keep track of prospects. I consider myself to be an organized person and find that I can effectively manage my brokering assignments using spreadsheets. I set reminders for myself on when to perform follow ups and I'll even use physical sticky notes for important notes, a daily reminder that I might need to action something."

Whether it's a spreadsheet or a CRM, the message is clear, it's vital to keep track of who you send emails to.

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Next: Part two of this series concentrates on the techniques you could use to find potential buyers and what you should consider doing before you send any outbound sales emails.
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
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Hello,

Can you please tell me what email template I shd use when I'm contacting a VP or Marketing Manager for a company to sell my domain name?
 
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Thank you so much for this!
 
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@Avinash S - there have been many discussions about e-mail language/templates for outbound here on NP in the past - so just search. I even found a good one from 15 years ago!

For the most part, what James is saying here is make sure you have a professional signature and are using a trusted e-mail address.
 
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Hello,

Can you please tell me what email template I shd use when I'm contacting a VP or Marketing Manager for a company to sell my domain name?

This is just the first of 4 parts. @Mike Robertson will help us out with aspects of what you could write, etc, in later parts. There’s a lot of testing etc that needs to happen to perfect your process though.
 
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Hopefully it will include how to remind the end user that a domain costing low $xXxX is still a small cost relative to what they spend on IT costs, marketing, business travel, legal fees, etc Too often they seem to believe asking more than $50 is robbery.
 
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Thanks James for this!!!!! I really need this for my current daily domaining!:tightlyclosedeyes:
 
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Nice one...Thanks.
 
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Good read. Thanks for the info :)
 
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Good information and what makes it better is that you also provides some solutions
Oh ! I can't wait to read the next episode.
Cheers

@James Iles Thank you so much
 
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Thank you James for bringing this up.
I would love to learn (in next parts) how to determine end user.
 
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@Avinash S - there have been many discussions about e-mail language/templates for outbound here on NP in the past - so just search. I even found a good one from 15 years ago!

For the most part, what James is saying here is make sure you have a professional signature and are using a trusted e-mail address.

I agree with you, I had searched a lot and found some sales templates, but they are common, basic ones, I believe then when you're approaching a VP or Marketing Manager for a big company, the mail should be a bit different but not like the normal basic template one which we send to regular end users! So that's what I'm asking, what points shd we make there?
 
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New to this forum. Hoping to learn more valuable tips for taking domaining to next level.

Be blessed!
 
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I just learnt something new. Good job
 
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Just goes to show that it's all about your sales ability and relationship building, not fancy tools and CRMs. People get too hung up on the minute details when "old school" email and spreadsheets work just fine.
 
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Wasting your identity just to be able to sell domains may not be a good idea. Say, you are son of president of a poor country, and you learn that you can make money from domains without doing anything unethical. Then you realize you have to do outbound otherwise you can't make profit. Then to be able to sell , you need to reveal your identity to lots of "inferior people". And then some of them share your messages on social media. and call you a loser. People who would normally respect you, don't do anymore, and you don't know why. What a shame, just because you have signature you lose respect. Should I also write my name on my tshirt, so people can trust me more?

I don't think signature is a must. I could use a fake signature if it was legal, because it doesn't matter who the seller is. People will buy my domain, not me. When I was getting inbound messages, I would reply without signature, and buyers wouldn't care whether I have signature, and whether I say Dear Mr. Whatever.

My outbound messages never receive a reply, but I think signature is not the reason that they don't reply or care. Main reason is, I think, they are not ready yet. They were not thinking about it, and suddenly I tell them I will sell you a quality product at a very cheap price..and their initial reaction would be: go away, or, come back later I'm busy now..
Another problem, I think, is diffficulty in reaching the right person.

Convincing potential buyers would be difficult for sellers, when buyers are hand selected by sellers.
 
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Thanks for sharing :xf.smile:
I 'm finding this useful outbound sale technique
 
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I agree with you, I had searched a lot and found some sales templates, but they are common, basic ones, I believe then when you're approaching a VP or Marketing Manager for a big company, the mail should be a bit different but not like the normal basic template one which we send to regular end users! So that's what I'm asking, what points shd we make there?
Could you please share the email templates you used so far to sell the domains
 
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I love the Mike Old school way... fuck AI or bot that do tasks automatically.
btw i think CRM can be better than just spreadsheet, I consider myself organized too but CRM software are easier to be managed than spreadsheet
 
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