A little end of the year outbound technique that’s worked for me in the past

Welcome to December, we’re on the home stretch and all over the world people are getting into holiday-mode as they get ready to wind down the year. For some reason, historically Q4 has always been my best year for domain sales, I’m not entirely sure why but I’ve thought it might have something to do with the fact that companies that have budgets with unspent funds feel the pressure to spend later in the year.

At the same time, I also take action, usually in December, to lock in a sale or two via outbound. I don’t normally do any outbound and for this particular outbound technique, I’m leveraging inbound to do outbound so it’s different from pure outbound to cold leads.

So here’s what I do, and am likely to kick off starting this week. First, I login to Uniregistry and Efty and pull together one master list of inquiries I’ve had over the course of the year. I then separate these into two groups – potential buyers and tire kickers.

Tire kickers are people who have usually put in a very low offer, and then when I follow-up, they stay low. Potential buyers are people who may start with a low offer but do show that they have some budget, just not enough to close the deal.

Once I have my two lists I first email the people on the “potential buyers” list, usually with a subject line like, “Price drop – [domain-name]” where [domain name] is the domain they were interested buying. I don’t give a specific amount, and usually I’m not going to dramatically drop the price, but I am happy to shave off a bit in order to make the sale.

I typically let 3-4 days go by and if I don’t hear back then I start emailing people that were interested in the same domain on the “tire kicker” list. The reason I reach out to these folks second is that I know I’d have to likely take an even bigger haircut on the price if I want to sell to them so I’d rather start with the group that is more likely to pay more.

One very important caveat to mention here is that I don’t do this for every single domain I’ve had an inquiry on over the course of the year. There are some domains that I don’t want to decrease the price on, and others I actually want to increase the price on. Instead, I focus my efforts on names I’m happy to sell for a bit less than I had them priced, and if they don’t sell that’s okay too.

This is pretty much the only time I ever do outbound, and since it’s outbound to people who have already inbounded it’s a nice group to email. While you can likely sell more names faster if you do general outbound year-round, I’m just too darn busy to do that so this is my one time a year.

If you haven’t tried this in the past, give it a shot this year with a handful of names, you might be surprised at what you end up selling. In the worst-case scenario, you remind a good chunk of people about the domain they were interested in which could bring them back around early next year. Either way, keeping your domain top of mind for them doesn’t hurt!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton