151: How to Make Offers That Actually Convert

Welcome back to the Practical Prospecting newsletter!

Today I'm talking about the unfortunate reality of cold email: not everyone can create a cold email campaign that will consistently generate direct meetings.

Sometimes, you have to play the long game by leading with a compelling offer, not a meeting, and then focus more of your energy on the follow-up to convert those leads to meetings.

In this newsletter, I'll share what type of offers actually work for us and our clients, how to test them, and which ones make the most sense for you depending on the type of product or service you sell.

Agenda:

1. Are you selling a product or service?

2. Test the offer before you build it

3. Know which end of the CTA spectrum you're playing on

4. Have a real system for converting the reply

Step 1: Are you selling a product or a service?

The right offer looks completely different depending on whether you sell a product or service.

If you're selling a service

Almost always, your offer should be some form of giving part of what you do away for free.

Where people go wrong here is making it sound way too generic. "Free consultation" or “free audit” doesn't work anymore because everyone’s doing this and it says nothing about what you'll actually get.

Instead, figure out the exact level of effort you're willing to put in, upfront, in exchange for a meeting.

Not "should we offer a consultation," but "what specific thing are we willing to build or show someone before they've committed to anything."

For us, that's a sample list. We tell prospects if they're open to a call, we'll build them a real sample list and walk through it live, they just tell us what they want to see. That's maybe 15 minutes of actual work on our end, but we're positioning it as the meeting itself.

If you’re going the “free audit/consultation route” just make sure you share specific outcomes and credibility:

Here are some examples:

1. SEO Agency

   1. "We've optimized 2,000+ ecommerce sites since 2015. We'll audit your top 5 landing pages for technical SEO issues and keyword cannibalization, and send you a prioritized fix list in a 15 page report within 3 business days."

2. Recruiting or Staffing Firm

   1. "We've placed 400+ engineers in fintech since 2018. We'll source and screen 5 pre-vetted senior backend candidates matched to your open role, and send you their resumes plus a 1 page fit summary on each within 5 business days."

3. Bookkeeping or Accounting Firm

   1. "We've closed the books for 150+ SaaS companies. We'll reconcile your last 3 months of transactions, flag every miscategorized expense, and send you a cleanup report showing exactly what needs fixing before your next filing."

If you're selling a product

This is harder. You can't exactly offer a free "sample" of a consultation when there's no consulting happening. But a few things consistently work for us and our clients.

First, if the you’re vertical specific, the #1 thing I’d recommend is vertical specific benchmark data.

For example, one of our clients sells to consulting companies. Naturally, they have tons of data on that vertical.

So instead of asking for a meeting, we offered to show them how their rates and operations compared to others in their consulting niche.

Just look at the difference:

• Email A was the offer to send benchmark data on their peers (1 positive for every 200 leads).

• Email B was a meeting offer (zero positives)

If your product is fairly commoditized, meaning the buying decision often comes down to price, offering a “one-pager comparison” works for us.

One client sells a highly commoditized offer, and we simply ask, “can I share a one-pager on how our pricing compares to [competitor]? Just reply “yes” and I’ll send it over”.

That single offer generates a ton of replies. Part of the key is making it stupid-simple for them to respond with the “Just reply yes” CTA.

We also see success with free trials for our clients who have good trial > paid conversion rates.

Our strategy here is to write super short almost marketing-style emails with the CTA always being “Try it here for free: [insert link]”

The key point is we don’t hyperlink. We just add the simple link (no UTMs). People are far more likely to click through on a link they can see vs a long link or a hyperlink.

Step 2: Test the offer before you build it

Before you fully build out whatever offer you land on, test the idea itself in a small batch campaign first. Don't build the full pricing comparison, the full audit, the full sample list process, until you know people actually want it.

Brainstorm every idea you have, even offers that may sounds like a lot of work, and then test them to see what people respond to. If you don’t want to fulfill the offer, you don’t have to respond to the email!

If people say yes, go build the real thing. If they don't, you just saved yourself the work of building something nobody wanted.

For example, before we had the consulting benchmark data I shared in the previous example, we tested it first to see what the response would be. Once we saw the high positive response rate, then the client went and built the report.

Step 3: Know which end of the CTA spectrum you're playing on

Every cold email CTA lives somewhere on a spectrum, and it's worth knowing where you're playing before you pick an offer.

On one end, direct to meeting. You'll generally get fewer replies, but it can absolutely work. It just requires more from you, tighter targeting, more relevance, more personalization, because you're asking for a lot upfront.

On the other end, offer-led, what most people would call a lead magnet. You can usually run this at higher volume since you're asking for less upfront. The tradeoff is what happens after someone says yes, which is where most people actually lose the deal.

Neither one is automatically the right call. It comes down to your audience, your offer, and how much operational lift you're willing to take on.

Step 4: Have a real system for converting the reply

This is the most important part. A lot of people can come up with a compelling offer but then have no real system for what happens next.

If your conversion funnel after the positive reply isn't tight, none of the offer testing above matters.

Here's a visual of what we run on our end once a reply comes in:

Here's how it works:

When a reply comes in, it gets sent to Clay and sorted into one of four buckets:

1. Positive – the lead gets enriched with a phone number and sent straight to a sales rep on Slack, so they can respond and, more importantly, call right away

2. Negative, no context – we leave it alone.

3. Negative or neutral, with context (something like "we already use [competitor]" or "check back in a few months") – saved for a nurture campaign.

4. Referral, OOO, or "no longer at this company" – Clay finds the person referenced in the reply, enriches them, and drops them into a separate referral campaign.

At the same time, we trigger a HeyReach automation that sends a connection request: "Thanks for the email reply, just wanted to connect here and put a face to the name."

If the lead doesn't book right away, they get pushed into a Smartlead subsequence: 3 to 4 follow-up emails, plus 3 to 4 more calls from the rep, until they book.

We're also testing texting as a follow-up channel after that first positive reply.

This is what it actually takes to turn interested replies into meetings. Skipping this step means leaving pipeline on the table.

The good news is that none of this requires more headcount or expensive tech. It just requires the system existing before you turn the volume on.

Thanks for reading,

Jed