11
21 Comments

Your take on cold emailing?

For those in the B2B space, what is your take on cold emailing? If you have tried it how did you find it? And if you haven't, what's holding you back?

  1. 8

    Not as effective as cold calling. When I first started my development business, I was getting a lot of clients on either coast, but not a lot in my backyard. It was important to me to have some local presence. 70 cold calls in two afternoons yielded 2 long-term clients; e-mailing and snail mailing yielded 0. 🤷‍♂️

    1. 2

      Love it! The shortest way towards your goal. Lots of people, including myself, tend to over complicate things. Need clients? Start talking to people.

      Yes, I love content and more evergreen channels. However I do believe that by either cold calling or cold emailing (or better, both) you can build a ton of momentum very fast.

  2. 4

    Definitely works. The key is to make sure you understand your ICP (ideal customer persona) and message really well - their goals, pains, outcomes of using your product, negative outcomes of not using your product, and send very relevant messages.

    Here's a VP Sales example at a SaaS company...

    Goals: What are the main things they might be trying to achieve over the course of a...

    Day? E.g. Hire a new sales rep
    Month? E.g. Get their team to exceed their sales targets.
    Year? E.g. Develop a strategy to scale up outbound while reducing costs

    Pains: What gets in the way of the goals above? What makes them difficult to achieve?

    E.g. Not enough quality candidates
    E.g. Inconsistent lead flow
    E.g. Email-to-meeting conversion rate is too low

    Positive Outcomes: What will happen if they achieve those goals?

    E.g. They can go back to focusing on sales strategy
    E.g. They’ll earn more revenue
    E.g. They’ll be able to invest more money into improving their product

    Negative Outcomes: What will happen if they DON’T achieve those goals?

    E.g. They’ll be stuck in hiring mode, falling behind in other areas
    E.g. They’ll have to find new salespeople
    E.g. Their competitors could overtake them

    The more relevant your message to the right person the better results you'll have as opposed to "spray & pray". Hope this helps!

    1. 1

      Thanks for the input, that's great! And I definitely agree. The more relevant your approach the better. Actually dug up this resource again today: http://goodsalesemails.com/ (site made by a competitor, smart guys..)

  3. 2

    An email is better after a call or linked in connect in my experience.

  4. 2

    I feel like it can work when it feels natural. I've been the recipient of quite a few cold emails that were clearly automated (like, I don't believe you're actually emailing me at 7:50 AM, and it's a dead giveaway when a teammate receives the exact same emails). Those automated ones definitely leave a bad taste and make me less likely to work with a company.

    If you can do it well and actually be respectful of people, it's definitely a good way to get new leads.

  5. 2

    It can be effective if you are being intentional with those you are targeting and focusing on them and not your product. Truly effective cold emailing is a quality game, not a numbers game.

    1. 1

      Happy it worked for you :)

    1. 1

      Warm up your email address/inbox first (sign up to newsletters, use a warmup service, look like a real human), set up your technical stuff how it should be set up, send emails to valid/verified emails only to keep bounce rate <2%, as much personalization as possible, start sending in small batches - preferably <20 per day the first few weeks.

      1. 1

        Same old story - Many folks give this advice. The real experts no better.

        1. 1

          It's working out for me. Hope you'll find an expert to help you fix your inboxing issues!

  6. 1

    For all of you interested to read more about cold emailing, here is a free ebook on the topic: https://autoklose.com/books/cold-email-playbook
    We just launched it last week.

  7. 1

    @WizardofGrowth I considered cold emailing as the subset of conversational marketing.

    It's in between surprise and fun. Most of the partnership deals and B2B projects for my startup comes from cold emailing or cold message on a certain social media platform.

    I always make use of cold emailing to unlock the first 25 beta users of my silly side hustle. Happy to exchange ideas :)

  8. 1

    With the right prospect, both cold calling and cold emailing works perfectly!

    The prospecting is where people do wrong. Use lead gen tools to get good prospects that can be converted.

    I use SalesBuddy for lead generation and works like a charm for me.
    Might help you too, check it out http://bit.ly/2sQgtzn

  9. 1

    I was in B2B sales for 6 years and frankly in our vertical if I would cold-call someone they would hate my guts. So I got most of my leads from cold linkedining, conferences and referrals. I guess depends on the industry but as we go it feels like the more competition is out there, the shorter are the attention spans and conversion rate into paying customers is getting lower.

  10. 1

    I used to do this a lot and it worked, although I believe it's not as effective these days.

    A better approach is to focus on creating very specific prospect profiles and building relationships with them (interact with them on social, provide some value upfront then do the ask, that way it's not so cold).

    I wrote an article on my process a few years ago, it's quite outdated now but might have some useful info for you:

    https://blog.kylegawley.com/how-im-getting-a-29-percent-response-rate-from-cold-emailing/

  11. 1

    yes, but only with followup. Otherwise, it's a wasting of time

  12. 1

    Can be effective but it’s a number games. Follow ups are very important. Do a minimum of 2 follow ups after the first cold email.

  13. 1

    For our development services, cold emailing has been a hit or miss. Got a few clients that way.

  14. 1

    Works better than DMing on Social Media

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 47 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 27 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments How I Launched FrontendEase 13 comments