Engage And Grow with Rich Maloney and Cold Emailing with Ryan Peck

I’m glad you joined us because we have Rich Maloney and Ryan Peck. Rich is the Founder and CEO of Engage & Grow Global and Quality Mind Global. He’s an author. We’re going to find out about that book. It’s also a video book. Ryan Peck is the Founder of The Leads System and Care Ultima. He is the expert in cold emailing, so that’s going to be interesting.

Listen to the podcast here

Engage And Grow with Rich Maloney

I am here with Rich Maloney who is the Founder and CEO of Engage & Grow Global and Quality Mind Global. He is the author of Engage & Grow. I’m excited to find out more about that. Welcome, Rich.

Dr. Diane, it’s an absolute pleasure to be on. Thank you for having me.

It’s amazing that we got this to work because we’re clear around the world from each other. We sure found that out, didn’t we?

I’m from the Down Under in Melbourne. We do have a few times our own challenges, but I’m happy we got on top of it.

I know it’s challenging to get from Australia to the United States and get us connected. I was excited to see what you’re working on because I’ve had Mark C. Thompson, Marshall Goldsmith and so many great people on my show. I know you know a few of these guys.

We’ve co-authored a book together.

First of all, how did you meet them? How did that connection happen?

It started a few years ago where I was in Birmingham in the UK when I was on stage speaking to a thousand people there about engagements. Marshall was on the same keynote and so was Brad Sugars. We were all standing around for dinner that night. We said, “We’ve got all these great intellectual properties that we all share in different aspects of employee engagement and organizational culture. Why don’t we write a book?” I was like, “That sounds like a great idea.” We thought, “We’ll travel the world extensively. How are we going to do that?” Mark got involved as well. All of a sudden, four buddies got into a studio in Las Vegas. In front of the movie cameras and a green screen, we thrashed that ten chapters on the employee engagement, the crosses of it, the six steps and everything like that. It started over a beer at the bar.

All the best things do, don’t they? I’m wondering if you had always planned to have it be a video version. Is this a book or a video book? What is this exactly?

It was originally designed to be a video book because we know the world is now viral in terms of digital marketing. It gives them more than a read, it gives them extra visual experience on what we’re up to. We would advance it. We’ve transcribed it into a book too. There’s the video book, which is an online course now. We’re giving it away to your readers for free as well. If they want to get on and become certified as an employee engagement certification, which is on the course, you get the two and a half hours of us talking through ten chapters of employee engagement on the online course. Coming into next year, we will launch the book itself. There are two key aspects to give the world something a little bit unique and different than the regular hard copy book these days.

Engagement is such a huge topic. I know I looked into that with my research in Curiosity. A lot of the things that keep people from being engaged includes things like they don’t know how they fit into the overall picture. They don’t get enough feedback. A lot of question asking is involved. It involved curiosity in different aspects. Why do you think that we aren’t seeing numbers in engagement improving when we keep getting these Gallup surveys and we keep hearing what we need to do to improve? Is anybody doing what everybody tells him to do to get better or is that the problem, nobody’s doing it? What’s the problem with engagement?

It comes down to two major criteria. Engagement comes down to how good your leadership is. Quite simply employee engagement is a reflection of the leadership in the organization. When your leaders are people-focused and people first, profit second, with that mentality, you’ve got a high level of buying. If they’re all profit first and people second, that is an energetic flow down. People don’t feel as valued. To get people to step up into becoming highly engaged and engaged in the workplace, currently what we’re doing is we’re training leaders to do this. I go to school or training school or some course they may go on for leadership development. I’m saying those traditional ways don’t work anymore when you send someone out of the workplace to go and get trained up to be a leader. I’m taking one or two fish out of the dirty pond, which is the workplace and putting them into a new clean pond with new learnings, brand new ideas.

They’re inspired. They come back into the workplace as clean fish but come back into a dirty pond by themselves. It’s very hard for one or two leaders to create a cultural shift, to create a whole level of engagement from their education. Traditional training, in my opinion, is old and slow. I even say it’s dead when it comes to building leaders. There need to be new ways and that’s pretty much what we do with what we’re going about. It’s about getting everyone to clean the fish pond down together. They become leaders in their own right without knowing they’re becoming leaders. We have to motivate them to do that. That’s the secret sauce.

I love the analogy. It makes it very clear. You hear so many cultural discussions about companies wanting to change, but then the leader doesn’t buy in and then nothing can get changed. It’s so frustrating for so many companies, for so many employees, because they want to do certain things, but their hands are tied because of the culture. How can a CEO know that they’re the problem causing the dirty pond?

It’s not sometimes the CEO, it could be the team he or she has around them. You’ve got to have a united leadership approach, all about equality, all about unity and all about everyone being accountable to their job roles. At the same time, and this is most important, is you’ve got to have a people-first approach. If your leaders don’t have a people-first approach, then they’re not creating more leaders because the role of a leader is to create more leaders. If you don’t have leaders actively creating leaders, they’re not delivering in their jobs. They’re managers. They might be good at management, but you need solid people influencers at the top. Make sure that your team is very clear. They need to be judged on how many people are going to them throughout the year asking them to be mentored on leadership. That’s the catalyst to find out if you’re an accomplished leader, how many people are coming to you each year asking to be mentored by you based on your leadership actions. If you’ve got a united leadership approach like that, then you’ve got a very strong culture.

If you’re not having anybody come to you, then what do you do? What’s the first step?

You need to have a check in and find out where your focuses are. Your focus could be on building revenue. Your focus could be on trying to keep the ship afloat, which is fine but you need to have other people look after those areas whilst you build people. It’s all about people. At the end of the day, you check in and you got to reassess where your focus is. The most important asset is in your businesses, your human, then it creates a financial effect. You’d need to invest in your people to invest in your people.

It takes a lot of work. The one thing I know is that you’re working with some guys that work hard. Marshall Goldsmith is one of those guys that I get tired watching what he does. He’s written twenty books the same year. He’s in every country. This man never stops. The MG 100, everybody who I’ve met from that group is so inspirational. I’ve had Mark C. Thompson and others. Every time I meet one of you guys that are involved in Marshall’s groups, you guys inspire me so much because you meet a lot of consultants and people out there that are money first and not the whole like, “What can I do to help you bang?” It’s refreshing to be around people who care. Can you tell a little bit about your coauthors? A lot of people know Marshall Goldsmith. In case there’s a chance they haven’t heard, a little bit about each of them?

Marshall is recognized as the number one leadership coach in the Western world. He has been for the last couple of years. He’s coauthored multiple books, a New York bestseller. Marshall is a huge contributor to global growth when it comes to people. He’s inspiring. Marshall got us the idea to give this away for free. He’s a giver. We were on the same page. We’ve got Mark C. Thompson, who’s a very close friend of Marshall’s. Mark traverses the globe inspiring people about sending out the love. The business is all about love and all about receiving love and spreading love. He’s on the corporate stage or the keynote-speaking stage and pulls big crowds. Mark is a seasoned professional in everything he does. We got Brad Sugars who is renowned as the number one small business coach in the world, Leads Action Coach, which has over a thousand franchises in 80 plus countries. Brad is an Aussie and now lives in Vegas. He’s got twenty books himself. To be amongst the level of intellect and energy with these guys is inspiring. I’ve learned a lot from them and continue to. We’ve got a good friendship and a good understanding. We all bring different strengths to this Engage & Growth book and that’s what makes it exciting.

The producers from the movie, LEAP, was on my show where Marshall was featured in that. It’s interesting to see what all the people who have been on my show, what you guys do and your other facets and what makes you so successful. You were talking about this certification course you’re offering. I’m doing something similar with my Curiosity Code. It was interesting to get the term certification and all the things that I did along with it. I’d never dealt with doing a certification. Is this your first certification course?

Engage & Grow is a global licensing company, so we license employee engagement advisors in 80 plus countries. We’ve got 300 plus of them now in the last four years. My background is up-skilling HR, LMDs, and business coaches with our intellectual property to hit the market. I have an understanding of what this is. This is a certification, so it’s more of a knowledge dump and gathered the information of the inspiration from these co-authors. It’s not the first and it won’t be the last either, but we want to give people something that they can go to the workplace. They’ve done Marshall’s course, my course, Marks’, Brad’s and they’ve learned something from it. They could continue to build their armor of knowledge when they go to helping us change the world into a happier, more inspiring place.

There are major messages in this that I saw. You got three major messages that you’re trying to deliver. Can you touch on those?

There’s 300. There’s so much in here. It’s hard to put the three. You’ve got years and years of experience here with Marshall, Mark, and Brad. The key message from us is the traditional training doesn’t work. When it comes to building leaders, culture, and engagement, traditional training is slow. You still made traditional training for up-skilling when it comes to your role. What’s the new way? That’s what we have in the course and the strategies. The second point is activities and strategies that people can use the very next day, which helps you motivate people and employees neurologically without knowing you’ve done it. That’s the secret to this message is we’ve figured out a way. Many years ago, I was working in a league sport when it came to building a culture and fast-tracking success. We had an awful lot of success here in Australia, which made me wrote the book, The Minds of Winning Teams. I moved all that information to the business world organically and then we found a way to activate people’s minds without them knowing. The other key point is giving you tools and techniques to get people in the workplace to move in the direction you want them to without telling them how to do it.

A lot of these books, they tell you what the problem is but they don’t tell you how to fix it.

We give you the six steps. One step, you got to evaluate. Number two is how to get people to buy in collectively and be held accountable to it and get them to buy into their working environment. That’s the most important part. After that is unifying them, and then aligning them, and after that is engaging them and then letting the company grow. There’s an actual activity that you can use. We don’t get a lot of how, we get a lot of what. We give you those process and places of intellectual property to help you along the way. That’s why we’re giving it away for free to help the world blossom and help leaders lead. The school is all about helping leaders lead far more effectively because leaders should be rewarded to taking on that deposition.

It’s hard for some leaders to know there are so many training programs. There are so many books. There’s so much to read. There’s content overload. How do you limit to the most? How do you find pick and choose, and cherry-pick the right things to know what they’ll help you? Do you think that’s a challenge? Do you hear that from leaders that they get overwhelmed?

We’re in the hundreds and hundreds of companies in all cultures. The first thing we are asking you is what are the three things you want to fix? Let’s very clear on the three KPI’s that we will go about fixing it. They range from accountability to unity. They range from silos. Once you know what the three areas are, then we go in with a customized approach. You do one thing at a time. Let’s be honest, if you’re a leader that’s struggling and you don’t know where to turn, you got to turn within. You’ve got to figure out how you can influence other leaders. The best organizations simply have critical massive leaders. Leaders that are authentic and proactive. That’s it. Authentic and proactive, get that right, and then you don’t have to call yourself a leader. You just be good at what you’re doing. If you get a lot of them in your organization, it’s going to make your job a lot easier.

It’s interesting to see how much people will follow a certain leader based on how authentic they are. I’m fortunate to serve on the Board of Advisors for DocuSign and Keith Krach, you’ve watched the people follow him. It’s so inspirational. I’ve learned a lot from being around people like that. They’re humbled. They don’t try to say they know everything. They surround themselves with people who know the things that they can’t know everything. Sometimes a lot of leaders are afraid to admit that they don’t know everything or they don’t want to look like they should know more or whatever. What you’re touching on is what a lot of leaders need is this additional input as to how we can get people more engaged because if we’ve got a third of the workplace, if that’s what numbers you go by, engaged and everybody else isn’t, that’s a huge amount of money. How many hundreds of billions everybody is losing?

It’s interesting because according to Gallup, 87% of the worldwide workforce is disengaged.

I always looked at US figures, but that’s interesting. How is it in Australia?

We’re at 14% engaged, so that’s not far off place. We’ve gone down from 24%. This is what’s astonishing. If you look at the cost of a disengaged employee, what they’re saying now is 34% of their salary is wasted. If you’ve got 100 employees, in America, I’d have to have a look at the stats but say 87% are disengaged. Look at the money companies are losing. It’s absolutely crazy. What I’m saying is the traditional way is not working. The cost to replace employees these days is ridiculous. To replace a technical leader that’s been in your company for maybe five to ten years, it’s 250% of their salary to replace that. What we love about what we do here, Engage & Grow, is when you activate people’s minds, there are so many dormant people in the workplace. There are so many superheroes in your workplace right now but something has upset them, something along the way has triggered them to be low performance.

It doesn’t take much to activate that mind again, but what happens if we don’t find out what that problem is, we end up putting them on the scrap heap and off they go. The biggest issue, especially in America in particular, is you’re losing about 10,000 baby boomers a day from the workforce because of engagement and maybe because of the millennial issues and all these sorts of challenges. That’s a significant cost to the American economy because they’ve got all the relationships. They got the technical mass and they’re going. The biggest challenge, the issue with work tomorrow is talent management. If you can’t hold your talent, you will not be the best. That is where everyone’s focused on employee experience, employee happiness. I know if they lose their talents, their opposition will get them and they’re going to be beaten up. That is where everyone is going and that’s the cost of it. That’s what people are looking to do things differently.

It’s so interesting because that ties in so well to what I found for the curiosity and training and everything I’ve done to research that. The factors that are keeping people down in terms of curiosity, were environmental. That would lead to engagement if you can focus. I can’t remember how you said it exactly, but it was the factors that have taken these people who had naturally been very good. Maybe they were shut down when they said something in a meeting or maybe their ideas weren’t rewarded with more work or whatever it is. What you’re talking about is exactly what I’m talking about and it’s so important. I love what you guys are doing because you spelled it out so well with all the statistics of why this is so important to organizations.

I love when we walk into an organization. They say, “Rich, we want to start the program, but what we want to do first is we’re going to exit three employees and then we’ll start the program.” I’ll say, “Let me start the program now. I will not run programs anymore, but our team does. Let us start the programs now and I can guarantee you that two of those three are the talent that you’ve been looking for. They are the ones that explode with energy once you activate, the ones that our cultural king or queen hidden underneath the surface.” Usually, a lot of them are millennials that have baby boomers or Gen X-ers that have their foot on their head. Once you release this energy and once you release that activation and it’s not through traditional training. It’s taking them on the process, the precession of twelve weeks, then you made this new level of energy hit the place.

What we’re doing is lightening up the density, getting rid of the depths of that heavy energy that had ruled organizations but people’s minds. That’s the power. My dad used to always ask, “Rich, what is culture?” Because my dad went to the Vietnam War when he was young, in his early twenties. When he went to the Vietnam War, he was quickly promoted to look after the culture, believe it or not, in a war zone environment. When he came back, he’d always ask me this question, “What’s culture?” It’s guessing and so forth, but the culture at its best, in my opinion, is when everyone is hitting and thinking in the same direction. That’s culture as opposed to a poor performing culture where everyone has their own ideas on how things should be done. How many times do you get in a company where everyone’s got their ideas on how things should be done? There aren’t a lot. Where does this come from? The leadership and then activating people to buy into that vision going forward. When you get that, it’s so exciting.

There are so many people out there who don’t have any idea what they’re doing, how it impacts overall goals of the organization. They are doing tasks and tasks. If they don’t see what they’re doing is important, if they don’t buy into the overall goals, then that’s when you’re getting these zombies to work. They aren’t thrilled by what they do. People want a sense of purpose. What you’re talking about is so important. I could see why the four of you did so well to get together for this because you all have that same focus. Are you guys planning any future books? Are you going in different directions? What’s next for all of you?

We’ll keep you posted on that one. We’re letting this loose into the world. There have been preliminary discussions about what’s next. As you know with Marshall and Mark, their schedules are intense. We’ve got melting pot happening at the moment. There’s a lot coming. Put it that way, just stay tuned.

I’m curious now if anybody wants to get this free program and what you guys are offering and connect with you. Can you share how they can do that?

Definitely head to our website, EngageAndGrowGlobal.com. You’ll see on the headings the video book, and see the front slot, head there and access and putting the code RM1, Richard Maloney, RM1, use that code and you’ll be given free access for a limited time and enjoy. There’s a second good content there and get your certification and come back and let us know how you went.

How long does it take to go through the program? Do you watch it in a day? How long does it take you to do to improve things, do you think?

It will take you roughly two and a half to three hours to finish the certification, so not long. There is a questionnaire at the end of each chapter to open up the next chapter to make sure you’re on track. There are lots of case studies and there’s quite a bit of interaction all the way through. We’ve made it so it’s not arduous. We’ve made it impactful and straight to the point. If you need assistance with it, yell and we can give you further guidance as well.

When should they start to notice a difference at work after they implement your ideas?

It comes down to the maturity of the workplace. We always put a survey, a nine-question survey. It takes about 60 seconds to find out the happiness level of that place. We’ll give you a percentage score on how many people are emotionally connected to your company or your department or your business. We can measure from there but generally speaking, we see a shift within three weeks. We see another shift at week seven and then we see another big shift at week eleven. We’re in companies for two or three years because I know now that engagement isn’t a once off fitness junkie decision. It’s a long-term fitness approach to create a cultural shift. It’s like you can’t go to the gym and do bicep curls and get ready for summer.

This was so much fun, Rich. Thank you for being very flexible with your schedule. This was a lot of fun. I hope everybody checks out your program.

Cold Emailing with Ryan Peck

I am here with Ryan Peck, who is the Cold Email King, Lead Generator, Business Consultant and Founder of The Leads System and Care Ultima. It’s so nice to have you here, Ryan.

Thank you so much, Diane. I’m glad to be here.

Your results have been featured on the Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, ABC News, Fox News and NBC News. I could list those for a long time. When I say results, I want to know what you’re doing, but first of all, I want to know what your background is before we get to what your results are all about. Can you give me a little background?

I’ve been in the entrepreneur industry for years. It’s my genes or my blood. My father was an entrepreneur. He started his own business years ago. In 2001, he started a family business. He was the CEO. I have four brothers and a sister. Eventually, all of us ended up working with my father for a period of time. My mother worked there too. It was interesting, a lot of friends. I got introduced to the business world. They do insurance and investments. That’s how I got my feet wet with entrepreneurship and business in general. I ended up getting my degree. A little later I went back to school as an adult. I got my degree through BYU Idaho in business entrepreneurship. I ended up partnering and starting some businesses. Starting my own businesses and now I’m the owner of three businesses. That’s where I’m at right now. I love it. It’s a great industry. I love what I do and I’m excited. Life is great.

You’re this cold email expert. You’re probably the only person in the world to partner with Amazon through a cold email. Tell what that’s all about.

That started years now. That’s where a lot of my journey shifted course a little bit. I ended up getting sick. I’m 32 and about years ago, I ended up getting blood clots in my legs that traveled up into the arteries in my lungs. I’ve had five of them. I had no idea. I woke up in the middle of the night, I couldn’t breathe. My wife is an NP and so we went to the ER. Sure enough, they did scans and whatnot and said, “You’re lucky to be live. You had five blood clots in your lungs. They’re restricting the blood flow, and very fatal.” I’m lucky to be alive. I was on bed rest for a couple months. It was a very humbling experience. It was a unique life-changing experience for sure and put me on a different path. At this point in time, I ended up starting a business right before that and now I’m on bed rest. Now I’m recovering from an illness. I can’t leave. I can’t go to the office.

I had to figure out a way of how I can market my business, not let it go downhill from the comfort of my own bed and/or couch, which where I was confined to a period of time. Things went down the hill for a little bit. At that time, I didn’t have a marketing budget. I didn’t have anything to advertise with. I couldn’t leave the house. I was in my bed. I tried to find a way how I can make that happen and grow my business without having any of that. I was researching and researching until I stumbled across cold email. I figured, “I have nothing to lose,” literally nothing to lose. I have no budget, so I don’t have a choice. I couldn’t go and advertise anywhere else because I had no budget. I started emailing away, cold emailing.

Cold emailing, if people aren’t familiar with it, it’s basically you send out an email to a recipient and they know nothing about you whatsoever. It’s a brand-new message. There’s no prior relationship. I started cold emailing away on behalf of my company and started finding some success and building upon it. Eventually, I shot for the stars and went big and started emailing Fortune 500 companies. I ended up getting a response back. I emailed Jeff Bezos directly, the CEO of Amazon. I said, “I have nothing to lose, might as well.” I got a response back from his secretary on his behalf and said, “We’ll take care of this.” Sure enough, long story short, I ended up partnering my company with Amazon. I don’t know for sure, but I would like to think and most likely I’m the only person in the world to partner with Amazon through a cold email which is exciting.

You are not to be the only one, everybody’s reading this. They’re going to go, “That works.” It’s amazing what you can do through email. Do you have any worries about spam and things like that of what the rules or do you have to look into all that?

In the beginning, I had no idea. In the beginning, I was like, “I’m going to start emailing.” I didn’t have any software. I didn’t have any links or download, or I don’t know what the rules were. I didn’t even know there were rules. I started emailing away. I didn’t find out there were rules until our law is up until a couple years later. I was that far into it. A couple of years later where my account got banned on behalf of Gmail. Gmail banned it. I was like, “What in the world is going on?” I didn’t know Gmail, you’re making them ban your account, but what am I doing wrong? I got it fixed. A short time later I got banned again. I got suspended for a period of time. This is the primary work email that I do business with. That’s my work email. I have to do this email on a daily basis. What’s going on here?

I started researching. I was way into the game already, I came across like, “There’s a CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 regulated by the FTC. They do have rules on what you can and can’t do. I started looking into it. At that point, I started becoming compliant and started following these rules and know what you can and can’t do when it comes to cold email. I learned the hard way. Fortunately, nothing happened to FTC. I wasn’t doing anything like bad or going back and looking at it. I wasn’t even breaking too many rules. That’s how it is for 99% of entrepreneurs or people out there. If they’re using cold email, they didn’t even know that there are rules like, “There’s a law for this? I didn’t know that.”

Some of us know that there’s something, but they don’t know what it is exactly. What were the biggest rules that you think people should know about?

The biggest rule that people needs to know about is clickbait. Clickbait, it didn’t say a word for word clickbait in the law. If people aren’t familiar with clickbait, it’s an untruthful subject line or proposal, in the beginning, to get them to click on it. For an example, if I emailed you that, “Diane, you won $1 million,” in the subject line, you’re like, “My gosh.” You click on it and it’s like, “Just kidding. Do you want to buy my product?” It’s untruthful. It’s misleading and that’s called clickbait. That’s probably one of the biggest rules that I see a lot of people breaking is they do clickbait a lot. They’d put untruthful step, basically, anything in the headline to get a click and open, not knowing that they’re technically against the law. Having an opt-out too, it’s so simple to have an opt-out at the bottom, but a lot of people don’t have any opt-outs.

They’re like, “I didn’t know I needed an opt-out.” It’s like, “It’s a law.” You have to have an opt-out at the end of your emails. Those are probably a couple of the biggest things that I’ve seen that people are breaking. I was breaking the opt-out rule for a couple of years. I had no idea. I even did some clickbait in beginning not knowing what I was doing. I admit it, but I’m compliant now. Everyone I’ve talked to or teach, I make sure I say, “You don’t want to get fined,” because the fine can be it’s around $40,000 or $41,000 of what it can be up to. It’s crazy. That’s per incident. If you send out a thousand emails a day and each one of those, they’re noncompliant. That’s a thousand incidents. Technically, it can be up to $40,000 per incident. That’s a lot of cash right there.

The opt-out thing is interesting. I’d like to hear a little more about that. Say somebody has a Gmail account like you had and they wanted to contact Bezos or somebody else. If they don’t know him, and they want to ask him to do business as you did, do they have to have opt-out at the bottom of their email? How do you set that up? Do you know?

They would, yes. If they’re soliciting business to business, they would definitely need an opt-out at the bottom of an email. It doesn’t say you have to have an actual link. I have a link now. I use a software and the software company about six months to a year ago, they automatically start including a link at the bottom of your emails for you and on your behalf. I don’t have to worry about it if it’s included on my behalf, which is nice. The law says along with the lines that you have to have a very clear explanation at the bottom of how they can opt out of getting emails from you in the future. In the beginning, before I had an opt-out link, I would do like, “PS, if this is the wrong person to email or if you no longer wish to get emails from me, please respond and I won’t email you again.” Because the law doesn’t say you have to have a link, it says you have to have a message that’s very clear, an explanation of how they can stop getting emails from you in the future.

If they have a link, it sends them to unsubscribe basic page. They click out and that’s the end of that.

The link is definitely the easier part. You don’t have to worry about it. They click on that. The software will take them off your list for you. For those who don’t have the link, which is probably the majority of people. I would do like at the bottom of like little PS or a little asterisk at the bottom, but not in like five-point print. It needs to be very clear. You’re not hiding it. A very clear, concise explanation saying, “If you don’t want to receive emails, let me know and I’ll be happy to take you off my list.” It’s simple as that.

There are so many mistakes people make, but you’ve had a lot of successes. Was Bezos your biggest success? Do you have other that you want to share that were equally interesting to you?

Bezos was definitely my biggest success. I get a response back from his secretary and then partnering with a Fortune 10 company. It’s definitely super exciting. I’m humbled and blessed. I’ve been fortunate enough and to be able to get in contact with dozens of Fortune 500 executives and that’s including CEOs, presidents to CFOs, the VPs to directors and all kinds of positions. I had tons of meeting with a lot of them and right now we’re creating a new partnership with another Fortune 500 company rolling out. I’ve had communications with tons of executives from Costco, Sam’s Club, Walmart, and General Electric. The list can go on. Those are all huge successes, but I’ve found with time that as I was finding a lot of success at the highest levels and there are other things I wanted to accomplish, I started finding ways to use cold email not just to land partnerships and fill my calendar up with prospects, but to use it in other ways too, which blows a lot of people’s minds.

I use cold email all the time to fill my calendar with meetings, prospects, and create partnerships. I also use it to get free hotel upgrades. I’ve gotten numerous, even presidential suite upgrades. I use it all the time. Every time we travel, my wife and I will email the GM beforehand and sure enough when I get there, 99% of the time, they have a nice room upgraded to a suite or even a presidential suite. They’ll send chocolates up. I don’t drink wine, but they send it up. That’s one of my favorite templates. I love it because I use it all the time. It emotionally feels good. I reach out to the general manager. You go as high as you can and the psychology behind it, general managers, their number one thing is they want to make sure that the customers or the people that go to the hotel are happy. They want to provide a good service, a top-notch service. They want everyone to leave happy. They run that hotel, but they want to make sure everyone is happy and treated the best they can. They don’t get the opportunity very much to interact with their guests because they’re busy doing other stuff. I go directly to them because when they do get the opportunity when I’m reaching out to him, they’re usually way excited to go above and beyond to do that customer service because that’s the whole goal is to have excellent customer service.

That’s the psychology behind it. I email them. I do research beforehand where I’m going and who it is and if he or she and I say, “My wife and I or my son,” or whoever it is with family or whatever. I say, “We’re coming to your hotel. We’re super excited.” Either we have been there before, or we haven’t been there before or whatever it is and “We’re coming there for this reason,” whether it’s an anniversary, whether it’s a family getaway, whether it’s a birthday, whether it’s for leisure, “but we’re looking for a good experience.” I let them know exactly why we’re there. In the end, I do my CTA or call to action, in the end, I say, “If you can do anything to make our stay at your hotel a better experience, it will be greatly appreciated.” That’s pretty much it. Even presidential suite upgrades, I’ve done it at five-star places all over. It’s great.

I’m curious about the subject line you’re using. I assume you can’t say, “I gave you the worst review on Yelp.”

I know that’s a good one. The subject line I usually do, I narrowed it down, as I usually put, “A happy guest,” or like, “A delighted guest.” The reason for that is because when they open it, either if I stayed there before and I’ve liked it, I’m returning. I’ll say, “I’m a delighted guest. I’ve stayed here before.” I go into my pitch. If I haven’t stayed there, I’ll be like, “I’m an upcoming guest and I’m delighted to stay at your hotel.” It’s not misleading, the subject line has to tie in somehow what the email is about. I’m very clear and I explain in the email what it’s about. It’s not misleading at all. They open it. The GMs open it and they respond. There are times where I’ve shown up and I checked in. The person at the front desk is like, “How do Mr. so and so? How do you know Miss so and so? They have upgraded you to the presidential suite.” I’m like, “Yes, okay. All right.”

You have a three-step process, did you cover all that? Let’s make sure I got your three-step process for doing a cold email.

The three-step process that I do, I teach everybody is simple. They have it in mind when you’re crafting the whole sequence. It’s open, read, and respond because lots of times if you have to do one by one, so first you have to focus on the open. I almost imagine a chain link and there are three chain links. You have the open, which is the top link. You have the read, which is the next link. You have the responsibility, which is the following link. The first thing first, if you cut off the first link, the other two are going to follow. It’s pointless. It’s not going to happen. You have to focus first on the first link which is open. If they don’t open it, then the rest of the email is pointless. It doesn’t matter if you’re literally giving away a million dollars inside your email. If no one opens it, no one’s going to know about what your offer is. No one’s going to read it and no one’s going to respond to it. You have to hone-in and focus on the open and then the next one is read.

Once you get them to open it, then you have to have a psychology and have the right email template. It has to flow well, and you need to get them to read it. They open it. You only have literally a second or two to catch their attention before they either delete it or they click out or they drag it to their spam folder or junk folder. You have to grab their attention once they start reading it, get them to continue to read it, and then you have to have it interesting enough to get them to compel them to want to respond. Open, read, and respond. They’re all separate things, but they all tie in together at the same time. It makes it one good smooth, cold email process. That’s the three-step process in doing any cold email, whether it’s emailing for hotel upgrades or emailing Jeff Bezos or emailing out to finding a mentor or emailing out to help me become a writer. You can adapt to Dr. Diane Hamilton, her radio show.

I’m going to get some free advice. I am coming out with a book and let’s say I want to have all CEOs, the top Fortune 500 companies open my email. Tell me what I should do.

The first thing is the pitch would have to be relevant to them. When your craft any cold email campaign, you have to dig deep and understand what it is that they want and what are their pains, what their struggles. It also what ties into it is what’s their desires? It’s like what I explained about the hotel manager. Their desire is to literally offer the best customer experience at their hotel. Knowing that I can craft my email pitch around that and tap into that psychology. For Fortune 500 executives, you have to figure out what is it that they desire most. They desire publicity. They desire knowledge, partnerships, networking, or probably all of the above I explained. Figure out what is it that they desire, what do they want, and what they struggle with.

Your book covers productivity and that’s perfect. You know it fits into their struggles and that they have a desire to be more productive and probably it will trickle down to the company if they’re more productive, if their company will be more productive. Your whole pitch will revolve around that. Your whole pitch will revolve around what they struggle with, what they want, and how you can fill that void. At the end of the day, it doesn’t even feel like a pitch. It feels like, “This is what I’ve been waiting for. This is what I’ve been looking for.” You get them to open it and I always craft my subject lines usually around that. I don’t put a question. I am more direct. For Amazon, for Jeff Bezos, my subject line was, “Amazing value for Amazon.” The reason why is because I knew that Jeff Bezos and these other CEOs and executives are looking for the best of the best. They’re looking to add value to their company wherever and however they can. They want to retain top talent, attract top talent.

I figured they’re always looking at how to add value, so I’m going to tap into that. There’s that desire and I’m going to put that my subject lines. It was very direct. That goes from my open, you’re very direct, you give them what they want right there in the subject line to get them to open it. Then you go to the read and respond. If you’re doing a book, you would word it in a way. I always do it three to five sections. Each section is between one and three sentences. That’s typically what I do. Sometimes it can be a little longer, like when I do the radio outreach to you or to a podcast, it’s a little longer because I know you are looking for qualified prospects, you want to hear more backstory and who the individual is.

For the majority of the time, it’s usually three to five sections or paragraphs, if you want to call it that. Each one is between one and three sentences. It was pretty short, pretty direct, pretty robust. It’s all about you filling the void or adding to their desires of what they are looking for and how you can help them. The response, the call to action or response is very direct. It’s what do you want. Do you want to send that? If you want to send them a free book. It’d be great. Do you want to get them to do an interview on your radio show? You can talk about your book on that. You want to send them an autographed book, train their people. The open reader response. That’s what I would do is tap on their desires, put it directly in the subject line, fill that void, provide their desires, craft it short, direct, concise, have a very direct call to action at the end and make it all about them. They don’t feel like that they’re being stressed out. They don’t feel like that they have to go out of their way. They don’t feel like it’s going to take too much time. They feel like, “It’s perfect, I can do this. I’m looking to be more productive. That’s exactly what I was looking for. I was looking for the next productive book. I found it.”

You’ve coined the phrase zero-cent marketing. I mentioned at the beginning that your results were featured on all those news sites. What is your percentage? What is your return rate? What’s your conversion rate? How much of what you send out do you get customers and why were you featured on all these news sites?

I always tell people that there’s no perfect email, there’s no perfect sequence, there’s no perfect conversion or response or open rate because everything is going to be different. When I do a sequence for emailing Fortune 500 executives, the open rate and the response rate is going to be night and day if I were emailing local a mortgage brokers down the street or chiropractors in my state or when I’ll do campaigns or I email podcast hosts, a guest on the podcast. That’s going to be completely different than if I’m emailing CEOs of large companies or if I’m emailing the GMs at hotels or finding a mentor or trying to get interview requests. It depends on what your goal is for the cold email campaign, who the target market is, how busy they are, what are you asking? I’ve gotten response rates. They responded back as high as almost 90%. That’s from anything I did when I was emailing out to large bloggers, in a particular niche at that particular time. They loved it. I was able to tap into their desires or their pain points and cut to perfectly lead and almost everybody responded. It was a lot. There are times where campaigns where I’m like, “I’ve only gotten a couple of responses. How is that possible?” It depends on who you’re with your marketing to.

Evaluate what you did.

A big part of it too is understanding the stats. You have to understand the stats and you have to narrow down on your open rate, your response rate, your adjusted response rate. You have to do split testing. “This subject line got me a 50% open rate. This one had got me a 70% open rate, and this one got me a 30% open rate.” It’s all about constantly injecting, constantly improving your campaigns. The only way you can do that is if you can track your analytics and know what’s working and what’s not.

Now that you’ve started in your company, ColdEmailKings.com, are you available to hire for helping them with email me? What is it that you’re offering people?

I started out with cold email basically for myself. I already gave you my story how I got started and I started what I started doing and who I worked with and success. It was all for myself. Little by little I’ve had friends, coworkers, colleagues, influencers in certain niches, media. Little by little, things were getting noticed and some of the success I was having, particularly on different levels. I started getting a lot of people reaching out to me. At first, it started with my friends and colleagues and co-workers. People I didn’t even know are like, “I read this about you or I saw this here or that.” I was like, “I am pretty good at this. I guess people want me to help them.” I started helping people. At first, I did it completely free like, “Let me help you out.” I didn’t have a company for consulting. I was doing my own thing, my own companies. It’s already getting more and more. I’m like, “Oh, man.” It takes up a lot of time to do a campaign.

I got to start charging but even then, I didn’t have an official company. I didn’t have a consulting company, but I would still do it on this side at particular times. I still run my own companies. Finally, I was up until over the last months or so, I’m getting a lot of people reaching out from all over the world. I have people reaching out help me with this, help with that. I’m like, “I don’t have an official company, but this is what I’ve been doing, the rates.” Finally, at the suggestion of quite a few people, “You need to create a digital course online.” I’m teaching the same thing over and over to almost everybody. I’m doing three phone calls a day as a side gig and I’m teaching the exact same thing, answering the exact same questions. I have to be able to scale it. I’ll be able to help a lot more people, a lot faster from wherever they’re at. That’s what Cold Email Kings is. It’s basically everything from A to Z from a beginner or an expert, whatever who they offer cold email, I teach them everything. I included a lot of my personal templates in there. It’s everything, where I get the contact and how to keep your sender reputation high, how to understand the analytics and how to craft a campaign, how to abide by the laws. Everything is there to teach anybody at any level to become basically dominate a cold email.

Thank you so much for being on the show. That’s the best way they could reach you through ColdEmailKings.com or do you want to share another site?

My other company is Care Ultima, CareUltima.com. That’s the company that I initially started to partner with Amazon and met with all these executives, that’s the company that I was doing on my own and how I got into cold email. Either one, you can reach out to me. I’d love to hear from you. I’m excited and I hope this was beneficial and helpful. I loved it and again, thank you so much, Dr. Diane, for having me on. I loved it.

You’re welcome. It was fun. I’d like to thank Rich and Ryan for being my guests. We get so many great guests. Please find past episodes at DrDianeHamiltonRadio.com. If you’re looking for more information on Cracking The Curiosity Code or the Curiosity Code Index, you can go to CuriosityCode.com.

Important Links:

• Engage & Grow Global
• Quality Mind Global
• The Leads System
• Care Ultima
• Engage and Grow
• Mark C. Thompson – previous episode
• Marshall Goldsmith – previous episode
• Curiosity
• Brad Sugars
• Producers – LEAP past episode
• The Minds of Winning Teams
• Keith Krach

About Rich Maloney

Rich Maloney is the founder and CEO of Engage & Grow Global and Quality Mind Global. He has helped 40 sporting teams to grand finals and 32 going on to win premierships and along the way has been associated with seven elite Australian sports teams. He then adapted the Group Activation System TM I had implemented in a sport to business. From here Engage and Grow Global was born, achieving instant and overwhelmingly successful results in SME, corporate and government businesses around the world. He is the author of Engage and Grow.

About Ryan Peck

Ryan Peck is a Cold Email King, Leads Generator, Business Consultant, and Founder of The Leads System and Care Ultima. He is probably the only person in the world to partner with Amazon through a cold email. He has used cold email to get the attention of executives from Many Fortune 500 Companies and three of the top Fortune 10 Companies in the world.

• Here’s How »

• DrDianeHamilton.com
• Dr. Diane Hamilton Facebook
• Dr. Diane Hamilton Twitter
• Dr. Diane Hamilton LinkedIn
• Dr. Diane Hamilton YouTube
• Dr. Diane Hamilton Instagram