A cold outreach strategy that works

What does say "no" in sales and recruiting ?

> No

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

> Yes

I've previously been in the position of having to review all spam (and other unwanted or suspicious emails) reported by employees at a large company. Every day. I've seen thousands of different spam messages that are essentially indistinguishable from this.

It's all the same. It's all spam. People don't like your spam. Most of them report it, and then people like me have to look at it every day, and nearly all of the rest of them delete it. Some tiny, tiny percentage will reply, but that's exactly how the viagra spammers work, too. They need to send massive volumes because the percentage that click or reply is so miniscule, and then the percentage of those who make a purchase are also miniscule.

I recommend finding something different to do with your career or life if your career or life is just spamming as many people as possible to try to convince them to do something they don't want to do. At the end of the day, is this truly what you want your infinitesimally small fraction of existence to be composed of?

I can only speak for the businesses I have been involved in (software, product marketing for software, marcomms, real estate), but cold outreach -- if done at all -- would be the longest of long tails: low conversion, increasingly high maintenance (esp. because folks like me send petulant ICO/GDPR subject access requests to clog up organisations sending unsolicited emails).

So speculative cold outreach is crazy inefficient and frankly not on-brand for most companies (yes, eastern European outsource software teams can do it, but e.g. AWS can't).

Most companies look to qualify their leads by having some degree of engagement: whether it's impressions > clicks > landing page. They might do this in addition to cold outreach, but the companies I've worked for (and started) focused on marketing (SEM, TV, print, radio, trade shows, PR, networking events). All of these generate either inbound or permission-based selling: if you're attending a trade show or responding to a TV advert, then you're giving us implicit permission to talk to you.

We are not sending an invasive message into your inbox which is a personal place, whether it's a corporate or personal inbox.

Marketing is effective - especially at the point of intent (e.g. when someone Googles "buying new motorcycle helmet" rather than just "motorcycle helmet") and not dumb/broadcast.

The gun analogy illustrates: if you removed all sales people from all organisations, then nobody would need any salespeople: companies would still have needs for e.g. software and would still find companies through marketing. It wouldn't result in companies losing revenue. OP (not sure if it was you or not) was conflating marketing and sales.

As someone on the receiving end of sales solicitations, a lack of follow-up is the most frustrating thing imaginable, and I don't believe that it is a solved problem right now.

I suspect that some widely used enterprise sales software (maybe Salesforce?) recently developed a bug that messes badly with the follow up process.

I have recently seen many interesting and perfectly targeted outreach messages in my inbox, for products that I am genuinely interested in. So far, so good - something is obviously going right. But then I reply to the message, and instead of the sender following up with me, I start getting multiple copies of the first message delivered from random people at the same company.

Replying to these messages only increases the flood of solicitation messages, until I have to resort to blacklisting the entire company domain. What a waste of my time, and what a lost opportunity for the companies running the flawed software.