Cold emails are a superpower!

I recently left a comment on a post about cold emails that got some decent engagement.

It had a lot of the same apprehensions that I've seen other people hold on to when cold emailing is discussed

One of the mods (@sethking) thought it would be a good idea to write a standalone post elaborating on the comment and a few of the points I made.

Having sent more emails and running email campaigns than I can count (both from my agency days and now currently building CadenceIQ), I'm going to try and give my perspective on what makes cold emailing a superpower. Most of this post is going to be philosophical and psychological in nature. You won't find templates or hacks. This is just a way I think about outreach in general and I hope you find it useful.

The Status Quo

So the general consensus I've seen from people who are new to growth hacking or sales outreach is one of apprehension - "does cold email work? "do people even read emails anymore?" "cold emailing would never work, I never read cold emails sent to me"

Look, all of these are valid questions and even statements. But I want to take some time here to dive a bit deeper into this.

Firstly, does cold email work?

Now "work" here is a very vague word. Would landing in the inbox constitute "work" or the email being opened/replied to? For some people "work" could be a hardline question of "did it convert"?

Personally, "work" would be a successful conversation that was initiated. Did I get my prospect intrigued? Did they reply or even open multiple times? That "Works" for me.

But Soham, I never open cold emails, it's spam and dated.

Look, cold emails are still a very prized tool across almost all high-growth B2B startups, even F500 cos. Hundreds of millions of venture capital are being poured into sales tech to enable cold outreach for B2B SaaS specifically.

Top sales guys at sales-led companies are closing tens of millions in accounts every year.

So yes, you in particular might never read let alone open a cold email out of principle, and there might be a lot of people that do exactly that.

But it's fair to say that cold emailing is prevalent and enough people see success in it to keep sending them and spending money on tools for the outreach process.

Cold emails are a superpower

Cold emailing is a superpower, but it's not as straightforward as just doing a cold email campaign.

If you follow the status quo you'll be consumed by the statistics of the status quo i.e 2% open rates, aggressive responses, requests for unsubs, etc.

The problem with the status quo is that it's value extractive. It focuses solely on what the prospect can do for the person doing the outreach. It screams ME! ME! ME!.

So then how do we make this work?

Well, first you have to make sure that your emails are actually landing in the inbox instead of spam. This is more on the technical end so I won't cover it in this post. If the email positioning is bad it won't matter if you land in the inbox or not.

The next thing you want to do is make sure that your target audience is tech-savvy and engages in emails. Email outreach works best with white-collar workers usually (developers, marketers, executives, lawyers, journalists, VCs, founders, etc). Some people just won't engage with emails in a meaningful way so you'll have to focus on more efficient channels.

But let's assume that we fulfill the conditions and a cold email strategy is good to go - what are the next steps?

The only thing that matters is the content:

1. Subject line
2. First-line
3. Value and Pitch
4. Call to action

If you're not getting the results you want then one or more of them need your attention.

The most common reasons I see cold emails not working:

1. Subject line is not relevant so it's not even getting opened
2. First-line doesn't "hook"
3. Entire message is a pitch fest trying to extract value instead of giving
4. Not enough reason for the prospect to take the time to reply back
5. Call to action is too "hard"
6. Not enough follow-ups or outreach volume

To make your cold emails really effective there is a radical shift in perspective you need to go through. Add value without expectation. The solutions to the list of problems will have this exact theme running through them.

Listen, I'm not saying don't sell. What I am saying is don't expect the prospect to buy if all you do is sell. The ask from the prospect must match what you give them. If you provide genuinely useful information that is relevant then the prospect will respond to you.

Having said that, let's fix the things above:

1. Make the subject line relevant - add their name or company name, use a keyword they are obsessed with, talk about a specific goal hyper-relevant to them
2. Don't come across as "salesy", this means don't just say "found you on LinkedIn" or "saw you're into fishing" etc. That is not "personalization, but being absolutely pedantic. Either talk about specific PAIN POINTS/ASPIRATIONS/GOALS they have or compliment them on something about them that is ALSO related to the pain point and your value prop.
3. Stop focusing on what you do. Write what you can do FOR them not the features and the list of who you've worked with or why you're better than your competitors. Agitate on their needs, not their wants. Be very specific with the exact value your product or service is providing. Keep it short (Nothing worse than a long drawn email that makes your eyes glaze over)
4. If you've done the above by focusing on THEM through addressing THEIR pain points, goals, and values, then they will respond.
5. Go for soft closes instead. Chances are you are not going to add enough value in email 1 to convince them to get on a call. That's fine. The goal is to get them to respond and engage. Use things like - "are you interested in some more details?" "can I send you some more info regarding this" "would you be interested to hear more about this"? Get them to reply back the first time.
6. Follow up at least 5 times unless they tell you to unsubscribe.

Now, I know exactly what some of you are thinking. "All of this is great advice (thanks!) - but I just can't bring myself to follow up 5 times? I would be so annoyed if I was on the receiving end."

In fact, this was the actual response to my initial comment by @feelgoodfreddy so I'll just rewrite word for word what I responded to his concern.

Follow up philosophy

First, I want to acknowledge that it's a legitimate concern, even fear, for some people that holds them back from following up.

The reason you think you might annoy people by following up multiple times is that chances are, you've been followed up with multiple times and it has annoyed you. But the follow-ups you've received have been the status quo i.e the value extractive ME! ME! ME! email.

Most of the follow-ups you receive or think you'd receive are "any feedback?" "did you see my last email" etc? None of this adds value to the prospect.

Once you actively start avoiding that path you'll realize it's not that annoying at all, and in fact, it can be very rewarding. I am sure most of you are subscribed to a newsletter that you read religiously that sends you frequent emails. But for you, it's so valuable that you wait to receive those newsletters.

Okay I know it's not the exact same thing since a newsletter is opt-in. But the idea is to position your messaging in a way where the prospect would opt into it too. You opted into a newsletter for the high-quality content did you not? So deliver the same experience to your prospects.

Here are some actionable follow-ups that would be useful to your prospects:

1. Actionable strategies/tips in their particular industry (don't paywall this)
2. A Twitter thread hyper-relevant to them that is super engaging (attach the thread link in the follow up with "thought you'd find this useful for x" or similar)
3. A list of best practices/tools they review or research about
4. Informative graphics and diagrams that provide them with more context about something relevant.
5. Summarize complex documents for them such as industry reports, competitor analysis, and market trends, and tie them to your value prop.

No one is going to get annoyed if they receive these things. Because you are giving with no expectation of return. Just add a no big deal CTA at the end like "would love to chat or show you some stuff to help" etc

A bit about me

As you can tell I'm a bit passionate about this topic. Not just cold emailing but the entire sales outreach process in general.

I was a solo B2B sales agency owner running outbound campaigns for startups for almost half a decade, sent out innumerable emails and sequences, and booked meetings with decision-makers at Huawei, and Amazon, the owner of Chick-Fil-A too. At my agency's peak, I hired and managed an SDR team of 6. Then burnt out completely.

For 5 years I used almost every outreach tool available - Outreach, SalesLoft, Gong, Chorus, Groove, Apollo, the whole 9 yards. Yet, I was not satisfied with the sales-tech space. Yes, automation was great (never missed a follow-up), and call transcriptions were great (word for word accuracy mostly and a great library of our best calls).

But, we never really figured out intuitively what made great sales conversations.

In 2022 I started building CadenceIQ to do what I always wanted a sales outreach tool to do.

• To understand every part of a conversation across text (later voice)
• To be able to accurately predict outcomes based on what was said and how it was written
• To search for and retrieve buried information and team knowledge
• To do all of this without going to a separate app

It could be the only true conversational intelligence and ops productivity assistant being built.

This space is deeply important to me, and I want to make sure I build something that is of supreme quality, a joy to use, and genuinely useful to all stakeholders.

So I'm building in public as consistently as possible and I would really appreciate a follow on Twitter if you found this useful or interested in sales-tech and B2B SaaS in general.

I'll be posting regular updates about my progress with CadenceIQ both on Twitter and IH and plan to release our v1 in a few weeks.

Super long wall of text but I hope it's been helpful :)