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A cold outreach strategy that works

patrickrivera.co

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Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#41

Post by hash872 »

_jal wrote: post #14
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.

Do you know or have you ever in your professional career worked for a company that employed salespeople? Do you understand that they mostly do cold outreach to generate revenue? If all the salespeople were to disappear overnight from that present or past employer, what would happen to company revenue and how many people would lose their jobs?

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#42

Post by _jal »

goatherders wrote: post #37
_jal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is a difference between sales spam and scam spam. This is why we provide the former with a warning before being blocked, while the latter gets no such courtesy. (We don't engage in legal threats over it, that's pointless and stupid.)

Honest question b/c I'm curious: does this mean that as a policy you won't engage with cold outreach regardless of what is being offered? And if so, do you ever consider that such a policy may indeed hinder your business? A non-zero portion of unsolicited sales-based emails DO include something of meaningful value.

A non-zero portion of just about anything includes something of meaningful value to someone. This does not mean that sifting through it will yield value considering opportunity cost.

Given the volume of spam I get from would-be vendors, there probably has been something I could have used somewhere in there. Similarly, I've probably walked past storm drains with valuables in them. I don't dig in there either.

If some tool or service really is great, relevant and not something we already do/have, we won't have to read spam to find out about it.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#43

Post by petercooper »

I'm the person who gets these sorts of emails at my company, and just a few words in one of his emails really caught my attention!

"Would love to work on this mission with you and the team" .. yeah, yeah, generic blah, everyone says that.

"and I won't take it for granted." Ok, wow, I rarely have people make promises like that. It sounds genuine and even if it's not, it's a point I can pull someone up on later on if they're screwing around.

Sending off some generic corporate speech will rarely work with me, but if someone acts a little more personably and shows they have some sort of emotional skin in the game, I'm all ears.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#44

Post by nonzeromeans »

goatherders wrote: post #37
_jal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that there is a difference between sales spam and scam spam. This is why we provide the former with a warning before being blocked, while the latter gets no such courtesy. (We don't engage in legal threats over it, that's pointless and stupid.)

Honest question b/c I'm curious: does this mean that as a policy you won't engage with cold outreach regardless of what is being offered? And if so, do you ever consider that such a policy may indeed hinder your business? A non-zero portion of unsolicited sales-based emails DO include something of meaningful value.

A non-zero number of alternative methods don't have to involve spam, which does nothing for us than show us you are not to be taken seriously.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#46

Post by _jal »

hash872 wrote: post #41
_jal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you know or have you ever in your professional career worked for a company that employed salespeople? Do you understand that they mostly do cold outreach to generate revenue? If all the salespeople were to disappear overnight from that present or past employer, what would happen to company revenue and how many people would lose their jobs?

I'm talking about spam. And I do indeed want spammers to do something else for a living - making spam economically nonviable is the strategic intent of suppressing it.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#47

Post by thrav »

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…

I also read the CEO’s first response as, “it looks like you already have a job, but if you’re looking next year, we’d love to have you.” versus the author’s framing of, “No thanks. Try again next year.”

Unless I’m mistaken, the author never indicated that he was looking for a Fall internship until the second email. I doesn’t feel like he was ever actually rejected.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#48

Post by ghaff »

hirako2000 wrote: post #29

It's a non scalable outreach tactic. It's not a strategy. Yes it has a good chance to work, if you are willing to spend hours researching your target, hours producing free content for that target, and insisting until the target gives up and give you what you want.

>Yes it has a good chance to work

So, in other words, it is a good strategy if you genuinely are very interested in working for that particular company. Sure, sending out hundreds of form emails is a different strategy. But I'm not sure it's a better one.

Mind you, I'm not necessarily advocating, say, doing an unpaid internship in general--though that may be the price of admission in some industries. i.e. Spending multiple months for a shot at a position. But spending a day researching and preparing for an outreach to a company you think you'd really like to work for doesn't strike me as excessive.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#49

Post by hash872 »

_jal wrote: post #46
hash872 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know or have you ever in your professional career worked for a company that employed salespeople? Do you understand that they mostly do cold outreach to generate revenue? If all the salespeople were to disappear overnight from that present or past employer, what would happen to company revenue and how many people would lose their jobs?

I'm talking about spam. And I do indeed want spammers to do something else for a living - making spam economically nonviable is the strategic intent of suppressing it.

How do you propose that the salespeople, without whom your employer or employers would go bankrupt, reach out to new prospects? How would that work? Am genuinely curious. By definition it seems to involve cold outreach of some type

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#50

Post by goatherders »

_jal wrote: post #42
goatherders wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question b/c I'm curious: does this mean that as a policy you won't engage with cold outreach regardless of what is being offered? And if so, do you ever consider that such a policy may indeed hinder your business? A non-zero portion of unsolicited sales-based emails DO include something of meaningful value.

A non-zero portion of just about anything includes something of meaningful value to someone. This does not mean that sifting through it will yield value considering opportunity cost. Given the volume of spam I get from would-be vendors, there probably has been something I could have used somewhere in there. Similarly, I've probably walked past storm drains with valuables in them. I don't dig in there either. If some…

I agree to a large degree, your analogy about storm drains is spot on. As a person that does cold outreach sales spam bothers me too because it makes the job harder for people that are doing valuable research and targeting their prospects with greater purpose.

I do, however, disagree that great or relevant service will present itself without a proactive salesperson.

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