E020 Arnaud Belinga: Co-founder @ Breakcold

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 0:07
Once upon a time, there were millions of businesses struggling. Every day they wasted time, effort and money on repetitive tasks that added no value one day, the Better Automation podcast by PROCESIO came to help them find a way. Because of this, these businesses save time, reduce costs, innovate and make better decisions because of that these businesses grow, scale and use human creativity to change this world. Hello, my name is Aziz and I'm your host at Better Automation podcast by PROCESIO where I interview the world's top experts and share their very best ideas on how to improve automation in your business processes and life. My guest today is Arnaud Belinga. Arnaud is the co-founder of Breakcold, a personalized sales outreach tool. Breakcold allows users to automate their sales outreach workflow, personalize their emails, at scale and protect their deliverability, after studying for seven years to become a tax lawyer are no decided to devote himself full time to what he loves entrepreneurship. Arnaud how are you today?

Arnaud Belinga 1:34
Hi, Aziz, I am thankful to have thanks for having me. And Hi everyone. I'm doing great. Thank you.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 1:39
Yes, I'm excited. I'm so happy to have you here. And I know you have your own perspective on sales. So what do you feel, believe or think is the future of sales?

Arnaud Belinga 1:51
Yeah, actually, here we talk about automation. We are an automation sell sell software. But we actually do think that the future of sales is toward creating more relationship and towards more personalization. And so you can still automate a lot of stuff. But people nowadays just took automation for granted. Sometimes just import a CSV into a software like us. And then they this they should emails. And but they don't personalize the outreach. And so they fail to create as to start a conversation because this is the objective when you do b2b sales specifically, you want to start conversation first instead of being salesy or pushy. And so we think the future of sales will be more related to create relationships on social media, actually, it's already a term that is using more and more, which is social selling. And we think that the future of sales will be a mix between social selling, but also with the traditional cold outreach, which is cold, calling cold emails, etc.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 2:57
Thank you. And I don't want us to fall into the trap of the gift of the curse of thinking gift because I'm positive curse of expertise. So okay, imagine nobody knows anything defined specifically, what are like, how are relationships built in a b2b way? What is social selling? And how is that method? Like what you're proposing? What would be the steps or the phases to create such a sale?

Arnaud Belinga 3:32
Yeah, I think if you want to create a relationships, I think it's pretty much like the real world. Normally, when you call when you go to someone, I don't know, at a party or at an event, you're not going to present yourself and do a monologue for 10 minutes, and then saying, Yeah, are you interested in what I do? And it's the same with emails, people sometimes just write shoot you a very long email. And then they say the talk maybe for 10 minutes, like it will be in the real world. And then they just ask you a random question. And actually, it's more about first, maybe liking a post, commenting on LinkedIn, first of all tweet, and then from there, sometimes people just reply to you, then they will see your title, they will might be interested in your business, they will shoot your DM and also when you're commenting on other people post you it's easier than to reach out to someone because you can personalize straightaway, but this is the manual way, but you can also automate that with software's obviously, where with software's, you can aggregate the data by scrapping, for example, you have a lead, and then you can scrap all the information of the company of the prospect, then you can aggregate all the data into one place. Because actually many salespeople and many people who do sales, actually it's not the person's age. to an aspect where they lose where they struggle, it's too, it's so time consuming. So it takes time to go to LinkedIn, then to channel the window, then to go to Twitter, then to prepare the email in another software or in your Gmail account, etc. And so automation is can empower people, here, and so on. And when it comes to social selling, so the concept of social selling itself, it's more about people's people sells it as a way to sell on social media as basically so people now nowadays, they tend to build more the personal brand. So it's a segment of social selling another segment of social selling, just by engaging with post with tweets with YouTube videos, whatever social selling is also creating content. And so then you have a link, a bridge between social selling, and demand generation, and then all of that can feel cold outreach. But actually, when you do cold outreach, it will be warmer. So it's how cold how helpful, in a way,

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 6:05
thank you. And if I understood you correctly, you engage with people. So they're familiar with you, whether they're consuming your content, whether they're having conversations and tweets and comments with you back and forth. And therefore, when you reach out to them, or you're helping them with something you're adding value, when you reach out to them, the most important part of your email becomes not even the content or the subject, but your name, because they will think oh, I know that person. And therefore they will open it a lot more likely to open it, the percentages will be higher, and they will reply more. Is this correct?

Arnaud Belinga 6:47
Yeah, it is absolutely correct. Because even myself, sometimes I just talk with people, and then they shoot me a DM or an email, in a imagine to do it in a spammy way. So just again, the shoot a really long email, or really long DM, but we interacted for maybe a few weeks already. And so even though it might be if I didn't know the person, it could be a spammy message. But because I know this person more willing to first read it, then actually consider it, then obviously, you reply it, and so and so yeah, it's more natural, basically. And so the definitely CLI you can tax less people that return on investment, the ROI is actually maybe five times better

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 7:35
than you. And I'll play the devil's advocate a little bit. Which is this, because the foundational paradigm or premise that you're sharing is that you cannot, okay, I will explain to you, spammers, when they spam people, what they're counting on is they think, look, you cannot convince anybody of anything. You're trying to arrive at the right moment when somebody needs something. And then you play the percentages, because it's all a numbers game, while other people say, Oh, yes, you can influence people's frames and beliefs and thinking into choosing you rather than any competitor into desiring the benefits you offer, even if they were not aware of and they will cite like Listerine or whatever that was that they invented the bad smell of the mouth halitosis that they called it and then everybody, they created demand for a product that nobody cared about three or four. Do you? What do you believe? Do you believe that? Really, it's not about convincing people. It's about being top of mind until they need whatever your offer and then they choose you? Or do you believe that actually, you can create demand, even if people were not going to buy by educating, convincing persuading? Whatever it is?

Arnaud Belinga 9:01
Yeah, I think from my personal. My perspective, I think it's a mix of both. And it also most importantly, it really depends on what is your business, actually, because some type of business if you have an excellent offer, and if you're really niche down with your business, you can just do a cold email campaign. And by targeting the right people and just closing sales really easily, even sometimes without demos because your offer is irresistible. But for all the type of business where the sales cycle can be longer where you don't have when you don't have an unstoppable offer in that it's actually you are in a saturated market. And where there's maybe I don't know, loads of VC money and everyone is competing. The little difference will be to be like you said to be top in top of mind. And so this small details will count and so you want to do a mix of both So you want to do both both ways. So you want to create demand, it's your as a regular basis, you want to feed your lead with content, etc, you want to start conversations with people that maybe they are not ready yet. But they will be at some point. And so you will be top of mind. And then on the side, so not on the side, but it's like a triangle, where you do three things at once. You also contact people that you know, they are already ready, and you know, they're highly targeted. And then you can just go with a cold email campaign, for example, with in crafting the right offer. And because, again, with automation, like you said, Some people they might be spammy, but for example, I really liked this because, um, people sometimes this this, the cold email has a bad reputation. But it actually has a bad reputation, because of some users that just shoot emails without thinking. And they go for the volume and numbers. But actually, some people are way smarter, they know how to enter identify the target, they will, for example, a concrete example will be that recently, I was using this tool called scrappy bird on Twitter, where you can scrap leads from a tweet from comments from likes, and so you can just grab the the followers that liked the post a specific posts related to your niche, then it automatically enriches with the bat, very b2b email address. And you know, for sure these people are interested in your business in the problem you want to solve, because your targeted tweets related to that. And then you can just shoot an email with the right offer. And you know, the one because the magnet then the signify interest for your product. So I think in, in general, there's, there's no, there's no bad or wrong, there's no good or wrong, it's just about depending on your industry, what you're selling, and if it's the right time or not for the prospect, so you should do the free thing all at once. So social selling lead generation and demand generation, which is kind of free thing.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 12:09
Thank you. That sounds fascinating. But for a lot of people, they will think those are so many skills. So how come people are making money in business in general? Because it sounds like nobody should be? Do you believe that there are like you said too much VC money and people who are burning money rather than actually making an earning revenue. And some people might look to them and think, Oh, they're spamming, and it's working for them? But actually, they don't understand the difference between profit and revenue? Or do you believe that it's possible, but also at the same time, a lot of people are simply creating relationships and the relationships are making all those other things less necessary.

Arnaud Belinga 12:59
Okay, got it, to lots of questions in one. I think, if someone like when you're starting out, your priority is to at least get users and then paying users. And so like you say you cannot do everything at once. And so the best way for me, for myself personally and for people that my stage. And so early stage startups is that they do their due like mornings, is for is for product, SEO on a really in depth product. And then the afternoon is for outreach in general. And so you what you and myself, we two co founders, so my co founder is handling the product, and I'm angling, the marketing and the outreach, sales, etc. So actually my job for example, as an early stage startup starting out kind of is the morning I prepare my campaigns, my outreach campaigns in the afternoon, I am focusing on distributing content and building a brand. So I think even a small scale is possible like because in like four months we achieve a million impressions per month on Twitter. And we're still really small company and a we generate the loads of leads this way. But when you're really starting out and you cannot have air or the kill all the skills and takes time to build skills in many different fields. The best way from my perspective is to try on your hypothesis with cold emails by doing proper outreach instead of first building a brand first, you know creating demand etc. First you want to validate your ID validate your project and validate in revenues with paying users at least 10 people. And so you want to focus on average straightaway because you will get nose but noes are good because then you can iterate It's on your target on your offer. And then when you close, you can just scale the campaign. And then you can start to think about the broader aspect, and then focus on demand gen demand generation, and maybe social selling. So straight away, I want to focus more on the call on the queue called outreach suspect.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 15:21
Thank you. And therefore, if I understood you correctly, that right now people don't know or in the beginning, at least they don't know what works and what doesn't. They should be face to face with people. And the closest thing is called email outreach. They can begin conversations with them or test hypotheses and offers to see if something doesn't work, they should move on and test something else. When they find an offer that works through the hard trenches of cold email outreach and cold outreach in general, then they can use that same offer benefit idea and creating their content, because they know people will be reading it who are interested in making their offers there, as well as in social selling, in beginning conversations with warm leads, based on something that actually really work works rather than guessing and never testing it. Because through cold email outreach, you can reach 1000s of possible leads. And therefore you get a lot more data than trying just to write tweets and about random topics are not knowing what you're doing, or what works or what doesn't, is this correct?

Arnaud Belinga 16:35
Yeah, it is correct. It is correct. You can validate a hypothesis or real offer way quicker. This way. You can do it with cold emails. But you can also do it with cold DMS and automation on LinkedIn. But obviously, it's harder to automate stuff on LinkedIn when you're starting out, because sometimes you also have people to accept your invite even there's many ways to, to bypass this. But we won't go into details maybe. But yeah, in this particular way, cold emails is faster. And then on the site, you can reach out to a few targeted people on social medias to ask questions. But again, it still depends on your product, or service. Because if you do a service, called emails might be a better way, especially when you're starting out. But if you do a product, maybe it can add more value to spend times on social medias, especially Twitter or LinkedIn, to to just talk with people and ask questions to validate ID product. But and when it comes to emails, you will have way more replies with cold emails. Because when you're not selling in cold emails and just asking questions. For example, let's say you have a product that you want to validate, you want to build a SAS, for example, and can just ask questions. Yeah, and I'm thinking about this ID or I have this better? What do you think about this particular problem? People, we will reply you way more that if you were to selling on having them on a demo of an actual product, for sure it happened to myself. For previous projects, I happen to many people out there. So depend on the approach as well,

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 18:13
thank you. And you're mentioning Twitter and LinkedIn, and the ability, you have to get a lot of reach through that. What do you know or understand about the Twitter algorithm and LinkedIn, because a lot of people fail on it, even if they want to do social selling, how to create something that will be shared, or will go more viral, or will get a lot more impressions than what most business people are creating nowadays?

Arnaud Belinga 18:46
Yeah, I think the first First thing first, I believe people should not focus on reach, the better on quality reach. For example, like a few days ago, I got a tweet, who which went viral, like 300,000 impressions in like 12 hours. But business wise, it was barely nothing. And so actually, when I have some tweets or LinkedIn posts that have a much smaller reach, like, I don't know, like 5000 impressions, it actually bring loads of business. So again, this is also perspective on that. So people should bear in mind that it's not about the clouds going viral. It's more about building gradually, a brand but related to your business audience and people. I think this is the part where they failed the most. So this is the first thing. And then on LinkedIn, I'm not really active a lot right now. I'm starting out recently, but when it comes to Twitter, I can speak from my personal experience, like six months ago as 01 follower actually If I wasn't Twitter guy, now we have almost 6500. And a lot, many impressions per month. And I think the secret, there's actually no secrets, it just about consistency and engaging with people that that is the basic solutions for the algorithm. So you just need to find people who are related to your niche, or to the thing you want to talk about. And you just need to engage with them every day. So imagine you have 10 people, you engage every day with these 10 people. And, and when it comes to the weekdays and weekends, you want to tweet, two tweets a day or two, three tweets a day. And that's it. I mean, there's really no secrets, it's just about consistency. But obviously, if you don't have a good content, etc, you might grow slower. But the more you write, the better you get. And so if you're if you if you're consistent with your writing, and engaging with other people, birds, especially people who are way bigger rich than you, you will notice patterns on how to writing good, and so you will naturally get good at it. And so there's pretty much no secrets, it's like anything in life just being consistent. And, and then there's a few Twitter, not hacks, but just tips. So for example, when you use particular words, you will have a broader reach by default, because you will have chances to go into the trends section. For example, if you use the word marketing, or startup or business, automatically, your reach will maybe double, triple, even if you're a small account, but people don't know that. They forget that. But most importantly, they don't know that. And so then maybe you have interesting tweets. And it just don't just don't plug the right keywords. And I've done some tests. Sometimes I just say the exact same same sentence or same tweet just added the keyword, the trending keyword. And yeah, reach like, I have a five times more reach. So it does work. But yeah, otherwise no, no secrets. But most, the most important thing is just to to relate to your business niche. And people just sometimes just go for virality. And it's not the goal.

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 22:24
I agree. Because if someone will publish a cat video, they might get like a million viewers, but none of them will be interested in their cold email outreach. It is up and and therefore can you speak about break cold? What is it about and about yourself as well? What do you share on your social media and where people can find out more about break cold as well as about you? And I will write your Twitter in the description as well.

Arnaud Belinga 22:55
Yeah, sure. So yeah, you can find us at Brett cold.com. And by the way, if anyone is listening, you can shoot me an email at honor that telinga at recall that calm, happy to answer any question. But yeah, break call them. Obviously we right now we will sales outreach software, focusing on cold emails. The main difference compared to all the tools is that we both are net, we first a cold email outreach platform that is powered by AI first lines. So right now you can find tools that do cold emails, you can find tools that do AI first lines, which is a bit trendy at the moment. But we we are the only tool that it can do both at the same time. And so people when they import a CSV, if you have the LinkedIn URL, or the website URL of your prospect, we're able to generate four different lines per prospect. The thing is realized quite early on that there's many tools out there, but don't focus on quality of the lines. And because people were complaining in the beginning about all these tools, and I noticed myself that it's really simple to create AI first lines, but to get quality is really hard. And so our focus was not to generate lines, depending on education or random stuff that to propose users with limitless possibilities, but rather to focus on just two kinds of outputs. So website URL, LinkedIn URL, but we've really high standard quality lines. So I'm really important. And so yeah, people come to us, especially to save time on personalization. And then from there, they just prepare the campaigns and do cold outreach. And we also have, we also protect your email durability with this. This is an area where people fail a lot when they do cold email outreach, is that maybe they have a good offer? Then everything's good but they go to the spam folder, because they don't follow the best practices. And so we help you I'm with video modules courses free integrated in the app, but also with technology with email a warm up. So you can learn more about us on the website. And but the vision is to go toward more personalization beyond the first lines, and an enable people to actually leverage social selling aspects. So like we talked about in the beginning. And yeah, that's pretty much it. And on Twitter, I'm sharing because you asked me what I'm sharing on Twitter, on Twitter, I'm not talking that much about the business itself. I'm more sharing about the journey, and about the startup journey more. So sharing numbers, etc. And you can find me on our know Belinda CX. And yeah, and on LinkedIn, it's full content, or highly targeted on business and more value here. And we also have a Facebook groups. So yeah,

Abdulaziz M Alhamdan 25:57
I love that. I love that you're moving towards a very holistic approach, because, like we said earlier, we're moving towards a world where all markets are saturated, and therefore you need every possible advantage you can have. And of course, before we finish, one of the biggest advantages you can have is PROCESIO. PROCESIO is the modern low code, no code platform for advanced automation. And creating an enterprise grade back end for your software. Breakcold has an API? Of course it can integrate with it. So that's a cool thing. Yes, it does. And any listener or viewer can request access to a free account at PROCESIO.app. And for the business people who have big needs and want more, there is a very generous 50% discount code. BETTER50OFF, one word, capital letters to use on any upgrades. More information in the description. No, this was my privilege, my honor, my luck to speak with you. Thank you for this conversation. And I wish you a good day.

Arnaud Belinga 27:12
Yeah, thank you very much for having me as this it was great conversations and really good questions. It made me think a lot. Thank you. See you soon. Bye