Quickstart tutorial : cold mailing in Germany ✉️

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Hallo 👋🇩🇪 !

After generating leads successfully all over Europe successfully, I’ve come up with a foolproof plan to kickstart your lead generation in Germany.

There are some interesting specificities to doing lead generation in Germany, namely, cold calling is well received and your cold emailing copywriting needs to be very relevant to be efficient.

Most importantly, there is also a German business network you might not know about that is even more active than Linkedin. A true mine of prospects, virtually untouched by the classic LinkedIn prospecting tools users.

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To generate quality B2B leads in any country you’re going to need :

• A clear idea of your target : industry, company size, job titles, job functions… the more accurate the better.
• A way of sourcing your prospects : Buying databases or scraping relevant websites
• Proper understanding of your target to create highly customized email copy
• A enrichment tool to find emails and ideally phone numbers
• Depending on your volume needs, an adapted email enrichment tool and/or a CRM

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Fear not, I provide everything you need in terms of tools at the end of the article in a nice spreadsheet !

Since you are looking for a quickstart, let us get right into it.

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Targeting and copywriting

This is the part where you have to do your research properly. 

You know your business more than anybody does, so you are the only one who understands the problems you are solving for your prospects and clients.

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There are major guidelines though which are as follows:

• Sell as little as you can. Look to create a conversation around the problem you are solving
• A short, to the point subject. Don't go overboard with clickbait.
• Your copy should be 4 to 5 lines long ! Setting this limit to yourself reduces selling pitches and forces you to write engaging content.
• Try your best to relate to your prospects as you can with industry related vocabulary and pains
• Use a relevant call to action at the end of your email : a calendar link, a call setup, a physical meeting, whatever suits most your target. Leave them a way to opt out as well, so they do not feel a lot of pressure. (if it works for you/ist das ok mit dir)
• Be diligent and insightful with your follow ups. I’ve found that 4 to 5 follow ups give the best results.

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If you have the resources and the time, try to contact your prospects through different channels in the meantime.

Ideally I would recommend trying to call first, visiting they Linkedin or Xing profile and then sending the first email mentioning your outreach action like : “Hey I’ve tried connecting with you on Linkedin with no luck, so I’m trying to reach out this way”

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Sourcing prospects

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I do not have much experience in buying databases, and it’s even frowned upon because of the implications of GDPR violations.

What I do know about is scraping. I mainly work on Linkedin but in Germany, Xing is especially relevant.

To source your targets on Linkedin, Sales Navigator is super handy. 

It’s very thorough, you can target very finely your prospects down to previous companies or even the content they post or interact with on Linkedin.

To export and scrape your results, there are a variety of tools you can use: Phantombuster (which offers excellent tutorials), ApiFy, DuxSoup, ProspectIn…

Xing is relevant here because it’s heavily adopted in the German business world with 19 million active users. 

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Chances are you are really missing out on opportunities if you do not have a go at it ! 

Xing’s premium plan is also very cheap, around 7 times less cheaper than Linkedin’s Sales Navigator allowing you to search their network with the same accuracy.

The only tool I know to source Xing prospects is the one we developed : Xingzap.

We work hard to make it a very simple and intuitive tool for people who want to get their German B2B lead generation going fast. Let us know if you have any feedback here !

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Enrichment: Finding emails

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Again, a lot of tools are at your disposal : snov.io, Hunter.io but to go really fast I would go with Dropcontact. 

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Their interface is really intuitive, and they usually have great email discovery capabilities, finding corporate emails at a solid average rate of 40 to 50%.

To get started, simply drop your scraped/downloaded CSV or XLS file in the main menu and you’re done:

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After a few minutes you can download your fully enriched file with valid email addresses and phone numbers and get started with your outreach.

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Sending your emails

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Whether you use your CRM or an email outreach tool (Lemlist, reply.io to name my favorites), be very wary of the daily sending limits.

You should send ideally around 100 emails a day, ramping up slowly over two weeks. Consider starting as low as 20 emails per day. 

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These practices ensure that your deliverability is the best it can be. 

Going above these limits is the worst thing you can do because your emails will never reach your prospects' inbox effectively making all your previous efforts useless…

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Final words
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If you are familiar with lead generation tools, you probably already realized that most of Germany’s lead generation specificity resides in Xing, a Linkedin equivalent in terms of active users in that market.

Leveraging Xing with cold emailing can help you rocket your lead generation output, as you’ll find more opportunities from these less contacted prospects. (some do not use Linkedin at all)

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Do remember to make your emails as relevant as possible so you don’t lock yourself out of any huge opportunity.

And as promised, here is the tool list ! 

Until next time,

Tschüss !