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A cold outreach strategy that works

patrickrivera.co

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Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#11

Post by amirathi »

Great advice if you absolutely want that ONE job at this ONE company. If you are in that boat then it's probably worth it to spend ~10 hours creating something valuable to offer.

Most people generally have a set of companies that are ideal for them in a tier'ed manner. In that case, more efficient way would be to choose ~5 companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If it fails, choose next ~5 and so on.

It falls somewhere in-between spending 10 hours of effort on 1 application & mass applying to 50 companies without any effort whatsoever. This is also how effective sales teams work.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#12

Post by tsomerville »

codingdave wrote: post #2

This fell flat for me. "Researching needs" started out talking about understanding the need of your audience, which is correct... but then devolved into google-stalking them to learn their hobbies. And the rest of the piece sounded like Sales 101, not a new approach. Which also means that those of us who are bombarded by cold contacts from sales guys pretty much see all these actions for what they are - sales pitches…

He is talking about how to get a job - not sell you something.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#13

Post by _jal »

C4stor wrote: post #6

I wonder how significant it is in the US, but in France, securing an internship is hardly difficult. Interns tend to barely get paid (when they do) and a lot of companies have no problem letting them rot for half of the internship duration. You could probably get an internship almost anywhere if you're willing to do the most annoying crap half of the day, and nothing the rest of the time. So, I don't know how signifi…

In most industries, internships are just another class differentiator.

Tech is different, in that the best internships actually pay, but in other fields internships are one of the main entrypoints into a field. If you can't afford to live in, e.g., NYC and work for free, that door isn't open.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#14

Post by _jal »

scottfr wrote: post #3

This is a great point and also very applicable to sales generally. There's definitely a continuum between "hyper target / completely customized" and "spray and pray" and each person/company needs to find the right point on that continuum for themselves. My company actually just put out a blog post last week on this showing how to quickly create customized emails while still leveraging templates [0]. [0] https://blaze…

Spam like this earns an immediate "remove all email addresses from your lists @ourdomain.com and let me know that you are suppressing them from your future mailings", ccing your mail provider's abuse address. The second mail gets your domain blocked and I tell your provider they're on notice.

Some of us still take spam seriously.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#16

Post by goatherders »

mrfusion wrote: post #8

I’d like more help with step one. Just finding the contact information. I’ve tried connecting over linked in and never gotten a response.

There are hundreds of tools available for finding everything from email addresses to phone numbers to physical addresses for work. Apollo.io, Hunter.io, LeadIQ just to get you started. Most have some tier of "free" if you only need a handful of contacts per month.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#17

Post by BlackCherry »

This blog post over complicates and mythologizes an extremely simple process. That is to not be embarrassed or ashamed to ask people you want something from what you can do to get it.

Additionally, this is survivorship bias. His emails sounded very professionally immature and while this companies leadership may have found it endearing, I could easily see other groups of people finding it off putting.

What this guys effort signaled to me is that he’s probably annoyingly overeager, but willing to basically do whatever I want him to do whenever and however long I want him to do it. In other words he’d be a good lackey.

If you want to shamelessly signal that you’d be a decent lackey for an obscure to medium startup this may be decent advice. And this may not be a bad thing, I know Casey Neistat’s employee Jack Coyne did something similar and it opened up a lot of doors for him.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#18

Post by codingdave »

tsomerville wrote: post #12
codingdave wrote: post #2

This fell flat for me. "Researching needs" started out talking about understanding the need of your audience, which is correct... but then devolved into google-stalking them to learn their hobbies. And the rest of the piece sounded like Sales 101, not a new approach. Which also means that those of us who are bombarded by cold contacts from sales guys pretty much see all these actions for what they are - sales pitches…

He is talking about how to get a job - not sell you something.

That does explain some of it... but was completely unclear because he literally said at the top, in bold, "it's a strategy with fundamental principles for any cold outreach."

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#19

Post by [deleted] »

C4stor wrote: post #6

I wonder how significant it is in the US, but in France, securing an internship is hardly difficult. Interns tend to barely get paid (when they do) and a lot of companies have no problem letting them rot for half of the internship duration. You could probably get an internship almost anywhere if you're willing to do the most annoying crap half of the day, and nothing the rest of the time. So, I don't know how signifi…

[deleted]

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#20

Post by rsp1984 »

BlackCherry wrote: post #17

This blog post over complicates and mythologizes an extremely simple process. That is to not be embarrassed or ashamed to ask people you want something from what you can do to get it. Additionally, this is survivorship bias. His emails sounded very professionally immature and while this companies leadership may have found it endearing, I could easily see other groups of people finding it off putting. What this guys e…

The way I see it he was just very motivated to get the job / internship. I didn't find his emails "professionally immature" either.

For sure I'd much rather invite / interview him as opposed to one of the 100s who just send their CV via email with not much else.

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