With the starting pistol about to fire on Back to School marketing campaigns, let me give you my top tips - things that have always worked for me over the years and get you on your way to tripling your cold email leads.

Yesterday I randomly received a cold email meant for a school - I guess I'm on someone's prospect list now, but they're going to be disappointed. I only have one 20 month old in the house - there's not much budget for their solution!

I've redacted the email below.

The sender signs off on this email with "Hope you find this useful."
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​To me, this reads like an AI written email. There's no personality or humanity in it, but if we're focusing on one thing, usefulness is what I'd focus. Beyond the obvious point that a 6 paragraph cold email is way too long, what's useful in this email to me?

Now that we've all got access to AI that can spit out copy like this for us, building connection and delivering up front value is more important than ever when emailing schools. With AI, schools are getting more cold emails than ever before and standing out from the crowd is ever more difficult.

🎁 What can you give away for free?

If you're a classroom resource, send your prospect a link to some cool resources they can use this month (don't attach them directly to the email - they email will get filtered out). Don't require the recipient to put their email address in or signup - that's too much friction.

If you're a back office tool or ops platform, link them to new funding streams, pots of money, or grants for their school. I promise you that no-one wants to talk about systems changes on the first week back in school (I say this as someone who sells a back office platform)

These are 2 quicks ones off the top of my head. Most companies are sat on a ton of valuable insights or things they can give away. You just have to focus to identify them.

If you look at the most successful companies selling into schools for the past few years, every single one of them follows similar principles, leading with value to build rapport with teachers.

And when you can do that repeatably, generating leads becomes easy.

I'll leave you with a great video with Gary Vee, one of the leading proponents of this value lead approach.

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Have a great week,

Jay

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Don't forget to pre-register for the School Sales Club if you haven't already. Lots of exciting, high impact tools and techniques are going to be shared there.