84. The Power of Research: Turning Cold Leads into Warm Opportunities
3 and 5.
Keep those numbers in mind as you read this post.
They helped me land a pilot (and access to 5000 managed units) with the UK’s number 1 auction house.
I started prospecting for block & estate managers in January.
My approach was simple (but time-consuming):
Research the ARMA (Association of Residential Managing Agents) list for London & the Home Counties businesses. [LINK]
Scrape the contact data into a Notion database.
Search for the KDMs (Estates Directors, Heads of Property Management) and Key Influencers (Block Managers, Property Managers) on LinkedIn and connect.
Use the Apollo.io web extension to scrape their contact data. (Watch this)
Start cold calling and adding them into an email sequence.
I spent 4 weeks contacting the list before introducing 6-week sprints. It resulted in 3 new clients.
But the biggest opportunity came off the back of an OOO email.
Let me explain.
In today’s email:
Prospect Review
Context Research
The Message
👇🏾 Listen: Hunting big accounts? Listen to this.
THE BIG IDEA
Prospect Review
Allsop is the UK’s number-one property auctioneer. It’s also a top 20 property service business with award-winning developments under management.
When the name showed up on my lead list, I went through the steps outlined above.
After landing on their homepage, I checked their services and scrolled down to the Residential Lettings & Management department.
It also has a ‘Meet the Team’ page that outlines the department's work. “Handy,” I thought, “saves me a bunch of time researching Key Decision Makers and Key Influencers.”
That page was a treasure trove of useful information - contact details, roles, experience, recent projects and key clients.
Bingo.
I spent 30 minutes reviewing 14 profiles and learned two things:
Which roles to target based on the information in their profiles; and
Their key clients were mostly institutional investors like Barings, Goldman Sachs and Mitsubishi.
As a result, I identified the following roles to target:
Chief Operating Officer
Head of Operations
Mobilisation Manager
Portfolio Manager
Asset Manager
Next, I needed to find a reason to reach out, a problem that needed solving.
Time for context research.
TIME: 30 mins
EMAILS: 0
Context Research
I spent another 60 minutes researching one of their main clients - Barings, the $409bn global asset management firm.
I wanted to find a hook, something I could reference in my messaging. I landed on Sustainability.
Sustainability encompasses ESG, and reducing waste is a key component of a successful ESG strategy.
I first learned about the importance of ESG scores after watching this video:
ESG scoring measures environmental, social, and governance issues in a company's day-to-day operations.
A poor ESG score can affect a business like Barings in many ways, including the ability to access finance.
With that in mind, I downloaded their latest Sustainability report. Using the keyword “waste” (command F), I reviewed all relevant references to understand their key objectives regarding waste.
I spent another 60 minutes researching ESG in property management to tie everything together.
Surprisingly, I only found a handful of articles from Allsop around sustainability and ESG.
Regardless, this preparation gave me the context I needed to craft my message.
TIME: 2.5hrs
EMAILS: 0
The Message
The first two emails I sent didn’t mention ESG at all!
I started by calling the COO and leaving a voicemail. Here’s the follow-up email I sent:
Not my best email, but we’ll leave the teardown for another day.
Despite identifying the roles to contact, I wanted to find out the best person to speak to about waste. So, I reach out to one of the Mobilisation Managers with this email:
I received an OOO message, which gave me the chance to use one of my best-performing email templates:
I applied all of my context research and sent this message to both contacts in the OOO reply:
Fifteen minutes later, I got this response:
I was off to the races. A couple of emails later, I had a call booked in for the 14th of February at 2 p.m.
As I write this post, I’m in the final stages of arranging a pilot to collect bulk waste at one of Allsop’s 250+ unit schemes (more on that later).
And it all started with 3 hours of research and 5 emails.
TIME: 3hrs
EMAILS: 5
Thanks for reading!
Matt @ The Growth Lab
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