A cold outreach strategy that works

That's fair, but marketing's main job is to find prospective customers. In a successful organization, marketing and sales scale roughly in lockstep, so marketing is generating enough warm leads for sales.

One can debate how warm/qualified they need to be - and sales and marketing teams do - but the answer isn't "They've expressed no interest at all and might not have ever heard of us."

Your comment applies to cold emails to strangers, too: that's marketing, not sales. It's ineffective, often expensive marketing because it's performed by people with the wrong skill set and goals. Generalizing, a company doing that has over-invested in sales and under-invested in marketing.

And IMO they are totally right to do so. That behaviour is so ludicrously dumb that I can't believe people do it. Your company is exhibiting in a room full of potential customers. If someone doesn't come and talk to you then you have no right to reach out to them IMO.

> a lot of people still get mad at emails that are the result of casual interactions

Hey, if I gave someone my email address that's fine. I expect them to contact me. If I gave a conference organiser my email address, I do not expect the exhibitors to be able to contact me.

> And then some company would figure out…

For sure. But OP's point seemed to be that money stops being spent in a world without sales people. It's an interesting thought experiment. My hunch is that the same money is spent: sales people are not, in general, getting more spend out of customers overall. Salesman X might get Customer Y to spend more money with _their particular company_, but not money that would not have been deployed in the market anyway.

does this mean that as a policy you won't engage with cold outreach regardless of what is being offered?

How will we know what is being offered if we don't read the message or accept the call? Unless we've had prior contact with someone or they make contact through a trusted third party, we normally won't, we'll just block and move on.

And if so, do you ever consider that such a policy may indeed hinder your business?

No, not at all. We're quite happy doing our thing, and when we identify something that seems like we could do it better, we're quite happy going out and actively looking for ways we could improve it. If someone wants our business, by far the best way to win it is simply to have a good, no-nonsense website so we can find them if we're looking.

The email response he got wasn't even as ugly he framed it in this piece. They were clearly interested and telling him when he could potentially connect with them.

Countering that with more information about his side of the equation -- that he was willing to take any role they had and his target date was the fall -- turned up more information and helped them reach agreement.

Generally speaking, it's fine to treat no as specific to X and not interpret it as a blanket rejection. And most CEOs will not be coy about letting you know that their "no" means "Sorry, you are just not a good fit for our company." They usually didn't get to be CEO by being a milquetoast.

That's not really comparable to trying to sort out how aggressively you should pursue some woman that you're probably taller than, stronger than and so forth. These are just not good points of comparison.

I'm annoyed by the "no means maybe" thing. He tries to cover himself by saying that "in dating, no always means no." But I wish he just hadn't gone there.

Too many people are already disrespectful pricks. They don't need any openings to help them justify their lousy behavior.

Anyway, congrats and thanks for the write up. It's good info, even though I think it unnecessarily steps in it on that one detail.

/2¢