Here, I’ll show you the exact copy, our rationale, the behavioral psychology & resonance, and the actual Clay table (with Claygent prompts) I used for the client to make every single email relevant to each contact.

Our Approach

The client came to us wanting to target venture-backed SaaS & Biotech startups going up to Series A. Their main offer was as a fractional CFO, providing strategic financial expertise & numbers coaching.

Generalist fractional offers can be hard to promote via outbound unless you have a very specific use case you’re great at, because fractional CXOs are typically hired through referrals or inbound. Prospects generally ask their network for a referral first, then they’ll look at ads, ask ChatGPT, and so on. This makes sense, given that good fractionals charge high-ticket ($10k/month), like our client did.

Because of this, we approached the campaign attempting to simulate that inbound/referral marketing process using a lead magnet. We tried to use slightly informal language to be more relatable and less stiff while keeping everything low-pressure.

Results spoke for themselves with this campaign.

A Few of The Positive Responses We Generated

Here’s the copy we used:

Hey {first_name}, 

Couldn’t find your CFO on LinkedIn. 

Does {company_name} have someone creating financial models & KPIs to forecast operating efficiency months out and organizing your financial, sales, and operational metrics for decision-making?

We can help create models like:

1. Risk-adjusted return model for vetting trade partners 
2. Customer lifetime value forecasting for service companies 
3. Scenario analysis for market expansion decisions 

Any chance you’d benefit from a few financial models that integrate with any dashboard system you use for quicker decision-making? 

Happy to build and send those over if so. Some clients who are also {Venture Funding Round} backed use models like those in their monthly investor updates to funds like GC and a16z.

Thanks,

{Client signature}

P.S. - When helping {client case study} raise $35M at a $120M valuation, we married sales, operating, and financial data to create operating models & KPIs they could use from Seed to {Venture Funding Round} and beyond. Finance should help you make sure there isn’t an unscalable department that stalls growth. 

NOTE: Financial model ideas were generated using AI

The lead magnet was delivered either directly as a call or as a download on a personalized landing page with a VSL on it. We found that the soft-CTA email with the ‘give me the resources’ CTA performed better, so we doubled down on that copy and let the VSL add value too.

The Clay table I created for this client → click here

This quick Clay table finds what funding round they’re at, summarizes what the company does, and then outputs 3 potential financial models our client could create for them for free. Nothing crazy, but it gets the job done. With today’s tool overload, you should remember not to over-engineer where it’s unnecessary. Keep it easy.

Some thoughts

We tried even more personalization for something like this, but for this business case, we found that adding more personalization created diminishing returns that didn’t meaningfully justify it. The main thing you should care about is substance - ask yourself, is every word of this email worth my prospects’ time?  

On another note, CTAs of “please book a meeting” just don’t work how you want them to - it’s asking for a favor. The first interaction you’re having with this high-status person who doesn’t know you is asking for a favor, and they know you’ve made the same exact pitch to a thousand others with the same email. 

The solution is to be very specific in your CTA to funnel prospects into a call wrapped up as a lead magnet rather than just saying “Please let me spend 30 minutes convincing you to give me money.” Importantly, you actually do need to provide value on these calls and fulfill your lead magnet. Don’t make unrealistic claims unless you can deliver. 

These lead magnet call CTAs accomplish 2 goals - 1, you can qualify if the lead would even be best served to work with you - oftentimes, you’re not the right solution, and the prospect would be better off doing the work alone, with someone else, or not even at all. Two, if they are indeed a qualified prospect, you can find their exact pain points, hit on them, solve them live, show them how you think, and build a relationship. You’ve read this 100 times, but the basics are true - people buy from people. So be someone they would be happy to work with.

Behavioral Psychology

Behavioral psychology is a fancy way of saying you’re leveraging some common thought and behavior patterns that, at large, the population exhibits, to your benefit. 

Here is the ultimate truth of outbound:

People only respond to a message they deem as valuable, could create a tangible benefit in their life, and is credible. If there is nothing in it for them, there is nothing in it for you. 

Make your offer worth giving a damn about. 

Some behavioral psychology principles we used:

Reciprocity

It’s the basic principle behind all lead magnets. If you give someone something they care about and actually add value, they might care about you a bit more and give you real consideration instead of immediately writing you off. 

Don’t assume that just because you gave someone some random thing, they will feel compelled to give back to you. That’s just not the case. Your prospects don’t know you, and unless you do real research, you don’t know them. Give them something for free that the market charges for, and that could lead to the next step. You must be better than the rest to win in a market that demands excellence.

FOMO

We’re mentioning case study companies in the same venture round using our lead magnet to make their investor updates better. If they know that they want to improve their investor updates and they know that peer companies also do it, there’s a bit of FOMO getting triggered. It’s a subtle suggestion that they might be missing out on a standard practice their peers are using successfully. 

Suddenly, the email isn’t about fractional CFO services, it’s about us giving you something that you can use for something you actually care about.  

Choice Architecture

This is a fancy word for “getting your foot in the door.” We architect a micro-commitment to saying yes to something valuable to chain the first yes so that once we exhibit our value, it’s a bit easier to move forward.

The email isn’t about ‘meet me for a pitch,’ it’s a choice of ‘do we need these models and would we use them?’ 

Architect choices so that it’s not immediately a “no I don’t want to donate 30 minutes to getting pitched something I could care less about.”

It’s also structured in a way to get a mental yes pretty quick. We filtered our list based on some LinkedIn employee scraping to see if they didn’t have a CFO. If they already have a fractional CFO or their CFO isn’t on Linkedin, then they can easily click away at the first question, since our offer may not make sense for them.

Resonance

Resonance is when the frequency of one object matches the vibrational frequency of another object. Your prospects are thinking about a thousand things, like the next meeting, what’s for dinner, what their runway looks like, whether their MRR is on KPI, or any one of those thousand other things. It’s also a cool word to say.

You must figure out what frequency your prospects are vibrating at, and approach them with the same energy. If you can speak to the priorities that they have today, then they’ll buy today. This is the actual hard part of cold email that generates all the ROI. Anyone can eat a cake, only the committed can bake one worth eating.

The resonance factor is a concept we’ve been going all-in on here at Rendition. 

For this campaign, the main resonance factor was the list, so there’s not too much resonance language we put here compared to other campaigns we run for other clients for whom it aligns with their offer.

Feel free to reach out directly to me (@manavxom) with questions. Happy to jam about how we’re thinking about resonance, our research SOPs, and our internal testing frameworks to actually achieve it. 

I’ll leave you with this.

Respect your prospects’ time and intelligence. You’re asking them to work with you. Treat them well, and they’ll treat you well back. 

Thank you for reading this breakdown. I truly appreciate your time. If you’d like more content, let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like to see based on what we’re doing at Rendition! Always happy to share. DMs open.