- Create a referral program with complementary providers to exchange referrals. Be sure you only include providers in this network that you’d be comfortable recommending to your best client or best friend.
- Recognize and thank your referral sources. This could be with a simple phone call, email, or even better, a handwritten note. The important thing is to express your appreciation. You’ll also encourage additional referrals this way.
- If you have clients who don’t refer, create another way for them to recommend you (e.g., case study, testimonial). I once worked for a large organization that prohibited written testimonials and discouraged referrals; however, I was able to provide recommendations by phone for vendors with which I worked. Two vendors I worked with took advantage of this opportunity and closed several deals by having select high-value prospects speak with me.
- Make sure your current clients know about all the products and services you offer and how you help so they can either refer within their company or to others they know. Too often sellers assume their clients know more about them than they do. If you’re a market research firm and a client uses only your online survey research services, for example, make sure they know about your intercept interview service or focus group capabilities.
- Add a link to a form on your website for referral submissions.
- Be remarkable; remind clients why your company is special. Give them something (good) to talk about.
- Inspire confidence. It’s risky referring someone—what if it’s not successful? You can inspire confidence in your referral sources by letting them know that 80% (or whatever) of your business comes from repeat customers.
- Offer a referral commission.
- Provide valuable content your referral sources can share with their network—an invitation to a breakfast or lunch seminar or webinar on an industry topic, research briefs, an article about a regulatory change or industry trend, etc. Make it something special for them to share.
- Treat the vendors and suppliers with which you do business as partners. Make sure they’re aware of who and how you help.
- Update your LinkedIn profile and stay engaged with your contacts regularly.
- Create a list of buyers you want to work with. Check out their LinkedIn profiles to see whether you’re connected in any way. If so, reach out to them via your network—whether it’s an individual, a company, or a group.
- Treat your clients as partners, too. Let them know you view them as a strategic partner, and tell them you hope they’ll do the same with you. Create formal channels to share referrals.
- Give a referral. It’s one of the best ways to get one in return.
- Ask for referrals. You’ll get a lot more referrals if you ask for them. As you’re completing a project with a client, simply ask if they know anyone who would benefit from something similar.
What Is Cold Email & How to Write an Effective Cold Email
Email isn’t exactly a neglected marketing medium, but it’s often misused. Since it’s so easy to send a mass email to dozens, hundreds, or thousands of subscribers, we often forget that email can also be intensely personal.
Cold emails are the perfect example of an underused art. When done poorly, a cold email can reflect badly on your business and lose a potential sale. However, when done well, it’s a fantastic way to convert prospects into customers.
Those are the questions we’ll dig into today. We’ve also come up with an 11-step strategy for writing your own cold emails — ones that not only convert, but might also turn customers into brand ambassadors.
What Is Cold Email?
Cold email is a communication strategy that involves reaching out via email to someone who is not aware of your brand or business. It’s similar to cold calling — you’re getting in touch with someone without first hearing from them.
When you send a cold email, you’re inviting someone to check out your brand and your digital products so they might become a customer. However, you choose prospects based on data or information you’ve collected about them.
You’re not picking numbers out of a phone book. You’re curating a list of people who fall into your target market.
Is Cold Email Spam?
I visited your site and it looks like you need [service]. We can help! Give us a call or visit our website to learn more. It’s impersonal, addressed to a vague recipient, and often devoid of personality and valuable information. That’s not what you want.
Spam gets your email address blacklisted and results in lost sales. Cold emails, on the other hand, help you win sales and improve your brand reputation.
How To Write a Cold Email in 11 Easy Steps
1. Create a List of Potential Customers
Start with the people you want to email. While you’ll send individual messages to each person, it helps to start with a list. You can then prepare a template that you tweak for each individual person.
The same goes for messages via Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms. Just keep in mind that people don’t appreciate receiving private messages the second you connect with them.
If you’re going to send cold emails via social, wait until you’ve interacted with the person in some way, such as by retweeting, commenting on a Facebook post, or liking an Instagram photo.
2. Craft an Intriguing Subject Line
The challenge with cold email subject lines is to avoid sounding like a marketer. That’s always tough when your goal is to market something.
There are several ways to make a subject line more clickable:
- Mention a shared acquaintance
- Describe how a competitor achieved something amazing
- Ask the recipient to reserve a time for a call
- Invite the recipient to guide you to the decision-maker
- Ask for a favor
Keep your subject lines short and sweet — somewhere between three and five words. If you can mention something personal, such as when you met the recipient at a convention, do so in the subject line. The same thing goes for a shared acquaintance.
3. Add Each Recipient’s First Name
In some ways, email personalization has been played out a little too much. It’s overused because it’s become easier than ever to insert personal details into an email automatically.
Start with the person’s first name. Insert it in the subject line if you can, then add it to your email’s greeting.
You can add other personalization features, too. For instance, you could mention the recipient’s job title, company name, or geographic location. Show that person you’ve done your research.
4. Explain why you’re Contacting Each Recipient Individually
Continuing with the personalization track, let’s make sure that you’re tweaking your cold emails to suit the recipient. Remember that you don’t want a cold email to sound like marketing speak.
Let’s go back to our example about a Knowledge Commerce professional who sells online courses on public speaking.
Maybe you know that the recipient is a member of Toastmaster’s or that he or she is preparing to speak at an event in the near future. You can mention that fact in your email.
5. Avoid Over-Selling Yourself
The best way to approach a cold email is as a friend. You might not know this person, but you want to help him or her out.
Maybe you don’t even mention your online course yet. You just invite the person to get in touch for a chat. Perhaps you mention your online course by explaining that a shared acquaintance has taken it in the last month and enjoyed it.
Focus on what he or she can gain from your message instead of what you’re trying to sell. That way, your recipients feel like they can trust you moving forward.
6. Capitalize on Social Proof and Compelling Data Points
Social proof is huge in cold emails. People like to buy products that other people have enjoyed — it’s human nature.
That’s how social proof works. It alleviates the stress of being “the first.” People don’t like to become guinea pigs. They want to know that other people have enjoyed a product before they invest their own cash.
It’s kind of like peer pressure — but in a good way. You’re not trying to convince someone to meet you behind the school for a cigarette; instead, you’re sharing a product that he or she might enjoy.
Social proof can come in the form of a testimonial, compelling data points, the recommendation of a shared acquaintance, or the seal of approval from a recognized industry expert.
7. Don’t Waste Your Recipients’ Time
If you waste someone’s time, they’ll never give you a second thought. In fact, they’ll actively avoid you in the future.
Think about it. We can always make more money, find other friends, cook more food, and find more water. Time is the one thing that can actually run out.
The important thing is to make sure that every word conveys something useful and intriguing. If it doesn’t, cut it out. Be ruthless.
8. Provide Multiple Ways to Get in Touch
Everyone has a preferred method of communication. Some people like to send emails. Others like to call. Still more would prefer to talk via social media first.
Provide multiple ways for the recipient to get in touch with you at the end of your email. Make sure to add your email address even though it’s in the sender’s information at the top. Add your phone number and social media handles.
9. Offer Multiple Times to Talk
As we mentioned, some people want to talk to a live human being. It might sound crazy, but it’s actually beneficial for you to hop on the phone or Skype for a quick chat.
10. Offer Something of Value
Generosity is one of the most powerful motivators in your arsenal. When you show someone that you’re generous, you invite that person to reciprocate.
You could provide a link to your most recent blog post, for example, based on the person’s interests. Even better, provide a free download (or link to a download) that might help the recipient solve a specific, painful problem.
Link to a YouTube video, a webinar registration form, or anything else that serves up true value. Your goal is to demonstrate that you’re free with sharing your knowledge, which suggests that your paid products are even more valuable by extension.
11. Track Your Emails
This is why it’s essential to send every cold email individually. You can provide a special link for each person so you can track that person’s activity after opening the email.
You can also create email sequences for cold prospects. The first email might be an introduction, for example. The second asks whether the recipient received the first email. You can then ask if the person wants you to remove them from your list.
Track subscriptions, open rates, bounce rates, CTR, and more through Kajabi. The more data you have, the better.
And if you’re more comfortable with old-school tactics, keep a spreadsheet, too. You can use it to track email addresses, names, emails sent, and emails received. It’s a great way to build data on your cold email campaign.
Best Cold Email Formulas for Knowledge Commerce Professionals
Use Storytelling With the Before-After-Bridge (BAB) Formula
Storytelling is a powerful way to connect with prospects. Our brains instinctively understand stories, so you’re already ahead of the game.
The before-after-bridge (BAB) formula relies on storytelling:
- Before: Paint a picture of your prospect’s current situation regarding your product. What does it look like? What are the pain points?
- After: Describe the “after” picture. What would life be like without the problem, pain point, or lack of knowledge?
- Bridge: Tell the prospect how to get from before to after via your product. You’ve created conflict with the before picture and provided an intriguing climax with the after. Now you just have to get the prospect there.
The BAB formula works well when you want to explain how a product successfully solves a specific problem.
Capitalize on Pain Points With the Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) Formula
There’s also an element of storytelling in the problem-agitate-solve (PAS) formula. It’s a tried-and-true copywriting tactic that has worked for decades.
- Problem: Describe the prospect’s specific problem or pain point. What goal is he or she trying to achieve?
- Agitate: Explain the outcomes or collateral damage of the pain point. Why is this such a pressing issue?
- Solve: Relieve that pain by presenting your product. Tired of suffering? Here’s the solution.
The best tool for cold email marketing
Close.io
Close.io allows salespeople to send more e-mails, make sales calls, and do away with manual data entry.
Their cold email software allows you to track all communication with your leads in one spot. For example, you might send one introductory e-mail to your prospect, then get them on a sales call, then get them on another call with someone higher up, etc. All that communication is automatically tracked within Close.io without the need for any data entry.
Besides making calls and sending e-mails through the software itself, you can pre-load templates and the software will automatically populate them with the right information.
Reply
Reply claims to be able to scale your sales outreach while keeping your e-mails personal.
Through their system, you can set your own e-mail sequence for follow ups and then A/B test them to maximize your conversions. This saves you time that you could be spending on other, more important things than just data entry or manual organization.
PersistIQ
PersistIQ also claims to be able to scale the “human element” in addition to the volume of sales e-mails that you send out each week.
Their system allows you to import your leads while catching duplicate names, launch outbound campaigns that are personalized, and then improve them based on data.
One of PersistIQ’s most valuable features is their integrations. For example, they offer bi-directional sync with Salesforce to keep your records up to date without double data entry.
Sendbloom
Sendbloom is another tool that helps sales teams scale their cold outreach while keeping e-mails personalized.
The main difference between Sendbloom and other similar solutions is their segmentation tool.
Mixmax
Mixmax is a cold email outreach tool that comes with a variety of additional features that salespeople can leverage to close more deals.
Here are a few of the features they have:
- Email tracking. Email tracking is a “table stakes” feature that lets sales reps see when someone opens one of their emails. This makes it easier to gauge response rates, and see where the “friction” in the sales process lies.
- One click meetings. Appointment setting is a pretty big pain for most salespeople. Once your recipient agrees to get on the phone and chat, there’s usually a long email thread that follows where you and your recipients try to find a time to chat.
- Send later. Another fairly standard feature Mixmax provides is scheduling emails to be delivered later.
- Mixmax sequences. Sequences are the holy grail of cold email automation. Based on people’s responses and behavior throughout the sequence, you can send them particular emails and exclude them from others. You can automate follow-ups, personalize emails at scale, Mixmax currently integrates with Gmail, Google Inbox, and Sales force.
- Advanced embedding. Mixmax allows you to embed things like slide decks, PDFs, and more directly in the email. That way, you don’t need to persuade your recipients to click on the link you want them to click on — they’ll already see it directly in the email.
Outreach
Outreach is an all-in-one system that makes the workflows of sales teams more efficient.
This software is probably the most comprehensive tool for sales teams out of everything we’ve covered. Through Outreach, salespeople can make calls to any city or country, automate their cold e-mail outreach, and integrate social media as part of their sales process. They’ll soon be adding an SMS integration feature along with postcard delivery and “swag” delivery to turn fans into advocates.
As with Reply, Outreach also allows salespeople to create automated e-mail sequences for their prospects.
Mailshake
Mailshake is an email outreach tool that makes it easy for you to promote content, build relationships and generate leads – and all you need is a Google account. Mailshake is a great resource for cold emails as it allows you to track emails, automate follow-up messages and hit pause on any email or even the whole campaign.
It provides many popular email templates (i.e. pre-written messages) that you can personalize by answering just a few simple questions, such as:
- Guest posts
- Content promotion
- Lead generation
- Link-building
- PR Pitches
With this tool you can monitor clicks and replies, view charts and stats on the progress of your emails and easily scroll through recent activity to see the full history of any email thread.
SalesHandy
SalesHandy is a SaaS-based sales communication and analytics tool that allows you to engage smartly with prospects and close more deals. This tracking, productivity and outreach tool includes such features as Email Tracking and Scheduling, Mail Merge Campaigns, and Auto Follow Up.
Apart from the most important features, SalesHandy also provides Link Tracking, Document Tracking, and Analytics. In short, it is a total power-packed tool!
The best cold email
Cold emailing is one of the most commonly used marketing campaign strategies in recent times. Business owners, marketers, salespersons, and so on, use cold emailing as a way to reach out to a large audience for their marketing campaign.
Sending cold emails to a large list of contacts manually is a very difficult task. You will be limited to the number of contacts you can send emails to. This will lead to time wastage and low productivity.
Follow-up is another important task that needs to be effectively engaged in cold emailing campaigns. Without an efficient and effective follow-up, a cold email campaign will not yield good results.
Most business owners, marketers, salespersons, etc., are limited in their cold email campaign because they are not using good cold email software.
A good cold email software should have all the important and useful features, from lead generation, customer relations management, up to final sales.
As a marketer, business owner or salesperson that wants to be very productive in your cold email campaign, getting the best cold email software should be your priority.
If you do not know the best cold email software to get, we are going to help you out.
Hupport is an equipped cold email software that has all the useful features needed in cold emailing outreach campaign. It is a leading cold email software used by small, growing and big businesses to increase their customer base and increase revenue.
It has great features such as lead generation, professional cold email templates, follow up templates, reply detection, intelligent auto-follow response, etc.
Hupport is one of the best cold emails. It is used by over 150 businesses worldwide and over 50 partners resell the software to their clients.
It is cold email software that is tested and trusted for great productivity. It is easy to use. It can be used by both beginners and professionals without any required skill.
It works with Gmail. All you need to do is to have a Google account and integrate it with your Gmail. You can perform all your outreach campaign right from your Gmail. It is as simple as it gets.
Hupport has some very important features that we are going to talk about so that you can have a deep understanding of its usefulness.
List of cold email ninja features
Hupport has some great features that promise to generate excellent results within a very short time.
It has important features such as; the ability to send personalized cold emails directly from Gmail or G Suite, over 100+ cold email templates, over 100+ follow-up templates, reply detection feature and other great features.
Here are the features of Hupport that are sure to be of great benefits to your cold email outreach campaign.
Sending Personalized Cold Email directly from Gmail or Google suite emails
Hupport sends personalized emails to different prospects in such a manner as they are being sent manually to individuals. Sending personalized cold emails to your prospects with this software will make each prospect feel like the emails were personally and manually sent to them.
Using Hupport, you will experience an increase in the open rates and conversion rates, which will lead to getting more customers and increase in sales.
100+ Cold email templates
Hupport has a wide range of templates. It has over 100 professional and sophisticated cold email templates to get you ahead in your campaign.
Templates include; Guest posts, Content Promotion, Lead generation, Link-building, PR Pitches, etc. With these different templates, prospects will easily understand different contents. Each template serves a specific purpose.
Content promotion template helps in promoting your contents to your audience. For example, you have products to promote to your audience, this template is the right template to use.
100+ follow up email templates to get more replies when no response
Follow up email is a way to increase your reply rates. Sending more follow-up emails can triple your reply rates. 50% of sales happen after the 5th follow-up messages.
All these stats prove the importance of follow-up. Follow-up is one of the key features of Hupport.
Hupport puts into keen consideration of the importance of following-up on prospects. It makes sure that it effectively follow-up on all your cold email prospects until they reply.
Even when you are not available, Hupport make it look like you are available by following up on your prospects.
Intelligent Auto-follow response with a timeline
Intelligent auto-follow response allows you to schedule follow-ups. It sends follow-up emails to your leads based on scheduled time until they reply. It stops the sequence when it detects that a lead has replied.
With this smart feature, you do not need to manually check your inbox for emails to reply. It automatically follow-up on all your leads and send follow-up emails to anyone that has not replied.
It sends follow-up based on the scheduled sequence and stops the sequence when it detects that the prospect has replied.
This increases the response rate because it constantly reminds every lead who has not replied to reply.
Personalized emails to each and every lead
Personalized emails are personally-tailored emails sent to individual lead. They are emails that are relevant to each lead.
Hupport sends personalized emails to each and every leads, making each lead feel that the email was sent by manually. Personalized email increases open rates. Non-personalized email reduces open rates.
Use Hupport to increase your open rates by sending personalized emails to each and every leads.
Personalized emails are known to increase response rates by 100%. This means that the more personalized your cold emails and follow-up emails, the higher your reply rates.
Open rate, Bounce rate, Click link tracking feature
Hupport has a smart tracking feature that tracks the open rates, bounce rate and click rate of your cold email campaign. With this tracking feature, you can fully understand how your campaign is doing.
The open rates are the number of leads that opens the emails sent to them. These are the leads that actually opened their emails to read what is in it.
The higher the open rates, the higher the reply rates. When the open rates are low, definitely the reply rates will be low.
The bounce rates are the number of emails that were not successfully delivered. There are some situations that may lead to an email being bounced. It could be as a result of the recipient mail server or a wrong email address.
Team Management
Team management involves effective communication, teamwork, setting objectives and meeting up with those objectives. Without an effective automated team management system, there will be lapses and loopholes in the system.
Team members will not communicate effectively, communication with team heads and supervisors will be ineffective.
Hupport helps each member of each team to effectively coordinate themselves to perform their respective tasks. Team heads and all members of the team can know how campaigns are doing. Updated information across all team members.
Cold email software
Cold email software that goes nowhere, take time to reconsider your approach and whether it incorporates a sensible and strategic approach.
Rule No. 1: Go In Hot
Make no mistake: To succeed at cold emailing, you must go in hot, not cold. Before making any attempt at outreach, your email needs to reflect the following:
- Research: Before you attempt contact, do your homework. Why is the prospective client or opportunity on the other end a good fit? Why is it worthy of your outreach? If the connection is weak, so are your chances for success.
- Relevance: Even if you can identify an end target, you still need to define why you are the one who can hit their mark. What about your background, expertise and experience make you a compelling choice for this client or opportunity?
Rule No. 2: Make It About Them
Make that clear from the very start, or you’ll be quickly dismissed. It’s also a good idea to be succinct. Don’t repel your recipient with long-winded emails. Say it short and simple.
Rule No. 3: Make It Easy To Say Yes
Sometimes, we become our biggest competition. If you want to create opportunities with cold email, you need to make it easy for the recipient to say “yes.” To stay out of your own way, be sure your email:
- Makes a specific request: Is it clear what you’re looking for the other person to do next? Did you state that message up front, or is it buried in the body of your message?
- Defines a time horizon:
Did you give the recipient a clear sense of when and how your request can
be fulfilled? Remember, you’re hitting above your weight class and the people you’re reaching out to be busy
and inclined to say no.
- Your job is to convert their hesitation to support by making the ask as defined as possible.
- Specify the dates, times, and duration for your request and be certain that it can be fulfilled under those conditions.
- Demonstrates empathy and good taste: As a useful exercise, trade places with the recipient and ask yourself: “If I were the one getting this email, what would it take to keep my interest?” You wouldn’t appreciate aggressive language or urgent deadlines, would you? Neither do they.
Rule No. 4: Show Gratitude
The first three rules can help you warm up to a cold connection. But even if you successfully win them over, you should already be thinking about ways to nurture that relationship for future opportunities. And there’s no better way to do that than with a genuine expression of gratitude.
If something good comes from your original request, let the recipient know. I still drop a note of appreciation every few months to the real estate executive who gave me my first paid speaking gig. It’s an opportunity for me to thank him for taking a chance on me and to let him know the good that continues to come from it.
When you take a sensible and strategic approach to cold emailing, you just might discover that opportunity knocks. If you give others what they need, you can usually get what you want. And when seeking opportunity, always remember: Expect nothing, appreciate everything.
Cold email marketing
Cold Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It usually involves using email to send advertisement request business, or solicit sales or donations, and is meant to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. Marketing emails can be sent to a purchased lead list or a current customer database.
The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant’s relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Types
Transactional emails
Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer’s action with a company. To be qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these communications’ primary purpose must be “to facilitate, complete, or confirm a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into with the sender” along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional messaging.
Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support, which gives companies the ability to include promotional messages within the body of transactional emails. There are also software vendors that offer specialized transactional email marketing services, which include providing targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific marketing campaigns.
Direct emails
Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional message. Companies usually collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional messages to, or they rent a list of email addresses from service companies
7 Cold Email Tips That Will Increase Response Rate
1. Stop Talking About Yourself
The last thing you want to do is ruin your chances right off the bat by writing paragraphs about yourself and how great your company is. There’s a difference between logically introducing yourself and giving someone who has no idea who you are the entire spiel you give all your SQLs.
2. Don’t Come Off Too Sales-y
It’s natural to want to drop the ball right away and ask to set a meeting after all, that’s the whole goal of cold emailing. But remember what they say: “Slow and steady wins the race.” That is also true for successful cold emailing. Think about the solicitors who ring your doorbell, fake a two-minute conversation, and then immediately slam you with a sales pitch about a product you’ve never heard of. Whether or not it could benefit you, you’re put off by the experience.
3. The Subject Line Is Just as Important as the Message Itself
Your email is only as good as your subject line, and there are literally thousands of articles and “science-backed” evidence of subject lines that work. But the best data is what you can pull from your own past email sends. Look at the past sales emails you’ve sent and see what really works with your specific audience.
4. Do Your Research
It is actually crazy how many cold emails I’ve received with my name spelled wrong, calling me “Mr.”, not knowing my job title when it’s public information, and so on and so forth. If you were face-to-face with someone, you wouldn’t call them the wrong name or mistake them for the opposite gender without feeling like a total fool. Don’t let the security of being behind a screen allow you to have a lesser quality conversation.
5. Be Respectful
Let’s say a person replies to one of your emails and you get really enthusiastic and are ready to book that meeting and close that deal, so you rush to reply, but then they all of a sudden go cold again. They replied to your email, though, so they must really be interested, right? You decide to reply again in a few hours maybe they didn’t get your first email. They don’t reply to that, so you wait until the next day (it’s been 12 hours!) and email again.
6. Make It Personal
Even if you have built the perfect cold email template, you’ll want to personalize it for each prospect, and I’m not just talking about “[[INSERT FIRST NAME]] here” personalization. Do your research and use it to your advantage. One of their interests is college basketball? Perfect starter conversation.
7. Add Value
One of my all-time favorite marketing and sales professionals, Tim Roisterer of Corporate visions, really helped me to transform the way I crafted our sales pitch for my sales team. Too often, I see companies so excited about their product or solution that they forget that no matter how good your product/service is, unless you can get people to buy in and realize their need, your amazing product won’t make it far.
What makes you unique?
What are hiring managers really asking in the job interview when they ask about what makes you unique? Well, they don’t want to know about what makes you special on a personal level. They want to know what makes you unique in relation to the job you’re interviewing for. Essentially, they’re asking, “Why should we hire you?” “Why should we choose you over everyone else?” “What makes you different from the other candidates?”
What makes you unique is your individual blend of education, experiences, skill sets, and personality. Sometimes it’s not the particular job on your resume that makes you appeal to hiring managers. Sometimes it’s an aggregate of the different pieces that you’re bringing to the table. Maybe you have strong communication skills, and experience in the industry, and experience in advertising and that ends up being the mix that attracts that hiring manager to you.
Think about what makes you unique and what makes you valuable, and then think about WHY it makes you valuable. You can even quantify your answer of how in the past, your blend of experiences has proven valuable to previous employers.
“Because of my background in X, I was uniquely positioned to take advantage of Y when I worked on ABC project. I completed it faster and with better results than anyone else in the company.”
How to Answer Interview Questions?
If the quality or the success rate of your work is outstanding, that’s valuable to an employer because it saves them time, money, and aggravation. But you have to think about why it is that you are especially successful and be able to articulate that.
Whatever you say, now is the time to brag. You must show that your particular blend of education, experiences, skill sets and personality is the solution they need to solve the problems they have.
How to answer “What makes you unique?”
Preparation is without a doubt the most important piece of the job-searching puzzle, and answering this question is no different.
Below we’ve outlined the steps you should take so you can knock this out of the park and get the job.
Don’t shortcut or skip any of these. They are extremely important and will serve you well when nerves are running a bit higher than normal (interviewing is stressful).
Understand the role you’re applying for
This is the first step to sharing what makes you unique when it comes to the job you’re applying for. If you don’t have a thorough understanding of the role, it’s going to be extremely challenging to convey why you’re the perfect candidate for the job.
The first place to start is by making sure that you’re familiar with the job description and the skills that it will require. Most of the time you can find this on the actual job posting page, but if you have any other information available you should use that as well.
Why would you want to do this?
This information will give you a great opportunity to tie in any other skills and experience you have with other roles. If you’re applying for a marketing position and will be interacting with the company web developers often, sharing your basic code knowledge will be an asset.
Remember, your interviewer is thinking of the big picture when they ask “What makes you unique.”
Showing you’re not only a perfect fit when it comes to daily responsibilities but that you can also fit into the entire operation seamlessly is how you win the job.
Outside of that, making sure you’re familiar with the company as a whole is obviously important as well. But you should already know that.
Be ready to speak on some unique aspects of your personality as well
This is a part of your answer that you might not get to, but you want to be prepared for.
We recommend using this as a complementary way of differentiating yourself after you have explained the most important aspects of what makes you unique. It should be short and sweet.
The most important aspect to remember is to make sure it relates back to the job. The fact that you prefer to cut your peanut butter sandwich into eight pieces before eating it is not what we’re looking for here.
A good example of this could be talking about how you’re naturally curious and enjoy tackling projects where you need to learn as you go. This would apply quite nicely to almost any job.
Sometimes people struggle with this because they think they’re rather unremarkable. That’s why it’s so tricky.
We undervalue a lot of the interesting things about ourselves because they’re normal to us.
If you really get stuck and can’t come up with anything, a good fallback is anything about work ethic. You will want to jazz it up a little bit (more on that in a moment), but it’s going to be hard for a interviewer to dislike that portion of your answer.
Do an inventory of your skills to find what’s important
Now that you know what the company is looking for, you should do a full inventory of your skills to find what matches.
Some of these will seem obvious but others might not be. You would be surprised if you knew how often interviewers forget to mention a past skill or experience that could differentiate themselves from the rest of the candidates.
That is what makes this step so important.
If you go through and list out everything you can do or plan on learning you’ll be able to quickly match it with what your potential employer is looking for. These will be the core points you’ll touch on when explaining what makes you unique.
Spending a moment on this ahead of time means you’ll be able to easily recall and convey this information without having to think about it too much.
This means if you get nervous or if they sneak “Tell us what makes you unique” into a portion of the interview that you didn’t expect, you’ll easily be able to hit all of the main points of value you offer.
Remember, it’s not just what you say but how you say it.
A great answer that’s delivered poorly can be a missed opportunity, and a poor answer delivered with confidence can make you look like a doofus.
Spend a little extra time to make sure you can answer this with confidence and clarity!
Sometimes the small stuff can be more compelling.
Once you have a full list of samples, prioritize which ones look like the best fit for the job you’re applying to. Time can sometimes run short, or the interviewer can steer the conversation in another direction.
Make sure you take advantage of your window of opportunity by mentioning the best stuff. If you have time to hit some of the secondary examples that’s great.
The main thing to remember is you don’t want to leave the room thinking “I wish I had a chance to mention X.” Leading with the important examples first will make sure this doesn’t happen.
Share how this can help the company
This is where you tie everything together and get back to the most important bit:
What you can do for them.
Like we said, when they ask “What makes you unique” they’re really looking for what makes you a perfect fit to help their company.
And now that you have everything laid out it’s time to show them.
This is where the knowledge of the company and position come into play. A lot of the time you can find what they want written word for word on the job description page.
It might be growing sales 5% month over month. It could be drafting grants for various departments.
Whatever it is, explain how everything that makes you unique can help them accomplish their expected goals (and more).
This will put a nice bow on your answer that’ll leave the interviewer thinking “wow” and give your chances of getting hired a massive boost.
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