How to change your approach to Cold Outreach so you don’t get called a spammer (or how we bring in 20+ hot leads a month via email only)

When was the last time you got cold outreach you actually responded to?

My bet is either never or months to years ago.

So why are companies continuously investing hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars into cold outreach tooling that essentially does nothing for their business?

Well let’s start by defining the two approaches for async cold outreach (let’s leave cold calling out of it now).

Approach 1 - Proactive cold outreach

The classic spray and pray. Find as many contacts as you can and then tailor a loosely relevant message knowing that <1 out of every 100 will even read your message, let alone be a relevant target for you who has the particular problem you solve at the time you contact them.

You are typically lining up a series of messages in a cadence or drip and letting them play out unassisted without touching them once they are scheduled. You are also fighting spam prevention systems of email providers and secure email gateways, not to mention rate limits of social networks like LinkedIn.

If you are either a sophisticated power user, or have a team of SDRs at the ready, you can personalise and improve your outreach. However the data is beginning to converge to this approach only working for low ticket items with fast sales cycles (think <$100/month where the user is also the buyer and doesn’t need any approval from others to start paying for your solution).

Every GTM engineer started here with contact databases and tools like Apollo.io, ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Approach 2 - Event driven cold outreach

This approach is becoming more popular as it reducing the spam element of cadenced cold outreach using cues and events that your prospects trigger right as they are entering bottom of funnel of your sales cycle - hiring for a role that uses your product, posting questions about your category on an open forum like Reddit or Quora, engaging with posts in your niche on social networks like LinkedIn or X/Twitter - and then reach out with content specific to their actions.

This approach is proving more popular with the recent surge in signal tooling like Octolens, Trigify, Apify, Vector and others. We can see why, being able to engage when companies signal that they could be buyers seems clearly better than using the law of big numbers to find all your buyers through brute force, as well as engaging on the buyers terms rather than forcing your terms on them.

As the success rate is becoming much higher with event driven outreach, and companies are wary of causing brand damage through spamming their TAM, a lot of companies are beginning to move away from proactive cold outreach, or treat it as set and forget.

This is a mistake in my opinion.

Ultimately your goal as a GTM engineer is to build repeatable systems that bring in leads that are as close to the bottom of funnel (BoFu) as possible. These are leads that are ready to make a buying decision in weeks, not months or years. They are educated on your problem space, the players in the market, and hopefully at this point you have armed them with resources and knowledge that helps them make the decision that your solution is the only one in the market that is worth spending their hard-earned cash on.

The mistake that most are making with their approach to cold outreach is that they treat immediately treat it as a sales conversation. When buyers are presented with two options - an uninformed and generic sales pitch vs a tailored reach out when the buyer signals their interest in a problem/solution space - you know which is going to have a greater chance of success.

The best thing you can do for your cold outreach campaign today is start thinking about offer building.

If you’re reading this, it’s unlikely that your offer today is resonating in the market, you probably have a number of competitors, you don’t have feature parity to others and you have to compete on price, which is a great way to build a business that’s profitability either will never be reached or will converge to zero. And if this is the way you come across in your outreach, it’s unlikely you will onboard customers who will grow with you. You will continuously have to replace churning customers who are sold a better solution to a problem that you have informed them of.

Instead of being left behind, start providing your customers with an offer that they would feel stupid for not taking you up on. Something that leaves a good taste in their mouth and makes them feel like they owe you one for the help you gave them FOR FREE!

CustomerOS’s to-good-to-refuse offer is a free forever CRM. We have chosen not to make money on helping our customer’s run their sales process and in-life customer management. The reason we do this is we make money on helping businesses automate the processes they find work for them when they scale up. But before they grow to that scale, we give them all of the tools they need to manage their sales pipeline and in-life customers with a human behind the keyboard. For every business that pays >$100/month for their CRM, this is an immediate $1,000+ saving a year for doing nothing. Usually our customers are spending >$1,000/month. And who doesn’t like $10,000 more a year to spend on things that actually grow their business rather than just storing their stale customer data!

So what can you offer than will immediately deliver a meaningful amount of value that costs you close to nothing to deliver?

Some successful examples I’ve seen are:

• A report that helps a prospect understand where their locations have poor reviews comparative to competitors in close proximity

• A tool that allows them to check that their payment processing rates are the best they could be getting based on the volume of payments they take

• A free blog post written for the prospect to publish or improve upon that will help them target high value SEO keywords that they left on the table

What is similar across all of them is they are either automated or self-serve, and they just need an opt in from the customer to start the conversation with you and get access to that resource.

The opt-in is the most important part of the process, both from a tracking standpoint and a psychological perspective. It allows you to map that prospect to your buyers funnel (understanding the problem to understanding the solutions to choosing a solution) and get their approval to continue to provide them value over that channel. And more importantly it now opens a conversation, which can be especially fruitful when the value you have provided makes them feel like they owe you for helping them.

One of the problems we have faced is that we have had to turn people away who wanted to know how they could engage with us but our product didn’t solve any of their problems for their unique situation - yet they still wanted to give us cash for the help we provided - not a bad problem to have, especially when they are happy to give a positive referral to someone we can help!

Once you have delivered value, you have now obtained a soft-yes to drip feed them resources and content that is actually useful to them. Think of it more like a high-quality newsletter rather than continuously asking for a meeting to discuss something that isn’t relevant to them yet.

While we were still able to get 1% response rates to our cold outreach campaigns with thoughtful offers about our paid product, we found that the conversion was still an uphill battle. After changing to this approach of giving more before you make an ask, the sales process feels almost too easy.

Of course if this has been helpful in structuring how you approach cold outreach email and LinkedIn campaigns  and want to either chat about how you should structure this type of offer and approach for your business, or get setup with managed infrastructure to scale this type of campaign - let’s chat!