A cold outreach strategy that works • Hacker News Board

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#121

Post by ta999999171 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 4:20 AM UTC

wpietri wrote: post #116

goatherders wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your patronization and condescension are not lost on me. Without knowing anything about me, my work, and my company aside from what I've shared you've taken the time to behave like an utter jackass because you dont happen to like what you think I do for a living. Know this: I love my job and the company I've built. My employees love working here and the problems we solve. The clients love the service we provide and t…

If I were behaving like an utter jackass, you would certainly know it. If you can't deal with somebody talking honestly about what you're publicly admitting to doing, I can't help you with that. Spam's spam. You contempt for the people you spam is blatant. And you're quite clear about your motivation, which is pecuniary. You're only upset because you're not honest with yourself about it, like the people who eat meat…

If there are a majority of my target niche companies that literally don't know my type of software exists, and it could help them, but having physical door to door salespeople would make the software more expensive than they'd be able to pay, what approach do you recommend?

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#122

Post by tschwimmer » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:08 AM UTC

anticsapp wrote: post #110

stared wrote: post #104

> But in sales and recruiting, “no” doesn’t always mean “no”. Where I should start? I dived too deep into dating - partly because I was in the process of writing "Dating for Nerds", and partly because my ex-girlfriend was a sexologist/sociologist (who at that time was writing her master's thesis "Market Metaphors in Dating"). There are many sales metaphors for dating, especially in PUA lingo (including all about the…

Pre-dotcom bust there was this lady from The Daily Deal. She harassed the shit out of us with her perkiness. No way we would spend IBM's money on a new website. But she was a no means yes woman. I asked her for $50,000 of free inventory to test if it was as good as she said it was. Free is always best and it kicked ass. Then she gave birth to twins and named them Joe, my boss, and my name. That was a bridge too far.…

She named her kids after you?

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#123

Post by tschwimmer » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 6:26 AM UTC

I appreciate that this high touch approach worked for the author, but I think the most important thing to understand about cold outreach is that it simply won't work 99.9% of the time and plan accordingly.

I did cold outreach for a startup I was working on many years ago. I wasn't even selling anything, just trying to do some research. I called and emailed dozens of people. Nobody responded. I then went and showed up in person at a dozen or so offices of people who I wanted to learn more about. The most polite among them told me they were too busy to talk and when I told them I could wait they asked me to leave. The worst slammed doors in my face and swore at me. I tried a number of different sweeteners. I offered our service for free for varying amounts of time. I even offered hundreds of dollars of cash up front just to speak for 30 minutes. On average I could barely finish one sentence of my pitch before people said no.

The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, and people treat strangers accordingly. Even if your product is amazing or you're offering someone a holy grail, their perceived risk of you is almost always too high for them to trust you. To me, this suggests that the pray and spray approach is a better one: if I double my chances of success from .01% to .02% (and these numbers don't feel too far off) by doing 10 hours of investment per customer, then I'm much better off sending thousands of generic emails. I'd say the author's success in cold outreach was more luck than anything he specifically did. Just my 2c.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#124

Post by IMTDb » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

plastodon1 wrote: post #84

IMTDb wrote: post #82

> In dating, "no" always means "no". But in sales and recruiting, “no” doesn’t always mean “no”. What does say "no" in sales and recruiting ?

> The price of the car is $2000, are you interested? > No > The price of the car is $500, are you interested now? > Yes

> The price of the car is $2000, are you interested?

> No

> The price of the car is $500, are you interested now?

> No

> When will you be interested by a new car ?

> Never

> Can I call you back in 3 month ?

> No

* 3 month later *

> The price of the car is $2000, are you interested?

> No

...

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#125

Post by JoshuaDavid » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

goatherders wrote: post #51

nonzeromeans wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If not email, then what kinds of alternative methods do you find acceptable/permissible for someone to connect with you in an effort to introduce you to a new product or service?

Not the GP but a couple examples:

An informative blog post which solves or helps with a problem I am experience, and plugs your service at the end.

A more direct approach of an offer of something of value in exchange for my time (e.g. pay $$ to beta test this for a week).

In general, the more the method of getting my attention requires a non-fakeable demonstration of value, the more likely I am to pay attention to it and the less likely it is to bother me.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#126

Post by 411111111111111 » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:26 AM UTC

tschwimmer wrote: post #122

anticsapp wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pre-dotcom bust there was this lady from The Daily Deal. She harassed the shit out of us with her perkiness. No way we would spend IBM's money on a new website. But she was a no means yes woman. I asked her for $50,000 of free inventory to test if it was as good as she said it was. Free is always best and it kicked ass. Then she gave birth to twins and named them Joe, my boss, and my name. That was a bridge too far.…

She named her kids after you?

That's gotta be the highlight for any family meetups

"I named you Joe to score a deal!"

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#127

Post by meowface » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:29 AM UTC

goatherders wrote: post #99

meowface wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally depends. A particularly industrious person could essentially be a human spam bot / template permuter. It's too open to say definitively. How many people are contacted, how were they identified, how much unique effort went into each email, what is the actual content of the email, what are your intentions, what is your offering, what do you say you want from them, what do you actually want from them, etc. If it…

I agree. Early on we had clients who said "we have a list of 1,000 prospects we want to reach out to. How quickly can that be done?" My answer was usually "about a month, maybe longer." We like to research the prospect and their company, find a reason the offering might actually be useful, craft a message connecting those dots, then send an email or two and add in some phone calls. We lost business that way, "Just se…

What you're doing is certainly less spammy if it's actually hand-tailored to each recipient and their particular domain or requirements, and not based on a template.

Maybe I'm missing your or your clients' perspectives, but you you have to understand the perspectives of the recipients, too, and of people like me who see the aggregate of what they receive. Depending on someone's role, someone may receive emails of that nature from 5 - 20 or more companies every week. (Often involving more than 5 - 20 emails, since many are follow-ups.) Multiply 5 - 20 a week over years, and you might develop a certain attitude. And then when I have to look at tens of thousands of them per year (over 100,000 in total if you include any kind of reported email), over several years, I'm definitely going to develop a certain impression.

Depending on the company and product, an offering could apply very generally. For example, employees at our company would receive tons of cloud- and security-themed cold emails, and these would be addressed to anyone with any technology-related position. Pretty much every medium or large company is using the cloud in some way and cares about information security, so is the "correct" thing to do to blast the cold emails to the hundreds of thousands/millions of people who work in a technology role at any company above a certain size? How do you know where it ends?

I'll say it's better than constantly calling people's phones, at least, and if the follow-ups aren't that aggressive or frequent then it's just a minor nuisance, but mass marketing and advertising in general often just rub me the wrong way.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#128

Post by petercooper » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 10:33 AM UTC

travisjungroth wrote: post #107

petercooper wrote: post #43

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 t…

> if someone acts a little more personably and shows they have some sort of emotional skin in the game, I'm all ears. Which why generic corporate speech is just an arms race of faking that you have emotional skin in the game. Saying you'd "love to work on this mission with you and the team" was once enough. Now, you also have to say that you "won't take it for granted" to catch your attention. I wonder what the next…

I guess. But if someone comes up with something new, that shows they recognize the banality of the corporate speech and came up with something new. Almost no-one actually bothers to do this (judging from years of banal, generic bizdev type emails I've received).

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#129

Post by goatherders » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 3:21 PM UTC

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #125

goatherders wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If not email, then what kinds of alternative methods do you find acceptable/permissible for someone to connect with you in an effort to introduce you to a new product or service?

Not the GP but a couple examples: An informative blog post which solves or helps with a problem I am experience, and plugs your service at the end. A more direct approach of an offer of something of value in exchange for my time (e.g. pay $$ to beta test this for a week). In general, the more the method of getting my attention requires a non-fakeable demonstration of value, the more likely I am to pay attention to it…

I actually thought long ago of a platform that gave vendors a place to pay people to demo software. Like "$10 gift card for 15 minutes of your time." Problem is that most companies strictly prohibit their workers receiving outside compensation. Many companies would gladly pay prospects to engage.

Re: A cold outreach strategy that works

#130

Post by goatherders » Thu, Apr 02, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

Silhouette wrote: post #117

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.

I'm not connected to anyone else commenting here, just chiming in with another data point for you. 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 bl…

Fair points all. But what if you dont know what you are looking for? What if you dont know that the way you are doing things now can be done significantly faster, better, or with less cost?

I used to work for a large managed WordPress provider in their early days. The vast majority of people we talked to said "I had no idea this was available. For $x dollars you are saving me Y hours of time each month, Y hours that I'm doing work that I absolutely hate and probably am not good at."