Table stakes: Debating the role of cold outreach in a sales strategy
Does cold outreach form part of your sales and marketing strategy? Maybe you’ve considered the question of where direct sales ends and spam begins. This is the question Nick Drage posed to WAS partner Ed Roberts when Ed sent Nick a LinkedIn message out of the blue. The resulting chat was interesting enough that both Nick and Ed felt it was worth having in public. So in this joint post, Ed and Nick discuss their experience of direct marketing, spam and its place in a modern sales strategy.
Ed:
I do a lot of what you’d call ‘cold’ outreach. Until recently, it was probably the primary pillar of my work to build our agency and client list. I don’t think of it as spam, though fully sympathise when people feel this is what it is. In the past, we’ve used services which involve the mass emailing of lead lists, and yes, this is almost certainly spam and definitely one of the reasons we don’t do it any more (also, it stopped working).
When you’re relatively new on the scene as my company We Are Systematic is, your rolodex is naturally thinner and you need to expand your network quickly. There are ways to do this IRL, including attending events and conferences, but for obvious reasons this became suddenly a lot more difficult recently. Even when not in a pandemic, personal circumstances can sometimes prevent equal access to events that often assume a desire or ability to travel (a young family or caring responsibilities being two examples). And with networks like LinkedIn being right there it would almost seem oddly self-defeating to not make use of the tools available to you to reach and connect with more people than ever before. Rather than sitting and waiting for that RFP to land on the doormat, get typing and start making some introductions.
I recall a discussion on a recent episode of the SaaStr podcast Ben Cassidy, cofounder at CoSell, describing how sending direct, usually unsolicited messages to potential prospects has become ‘table stakes’. Something you can’t afford to not do, or let go of completely, but something we all seem to want to get beyond. Ask any agency owner and they will probably cite referrals or their personal network as the most valuable source of new business. But the six-degrees-of-separation approach isn’t particularly quick, and direct outreach gets you in front of people you normally wouldn’t be able to see. In contrast to networking events, you can more carefully select those you reach out to based on their position, company and a decent estimate of whether they might need your services. Ultimately this is good for both parties. All that said, the ‘s’ word is never far away because the messages you send are always unsolicited, even if the person is buying what you’re selling. Whilst we make an effort to carefully select those we reach out to, and do our best to personalise the messages, it’s essentially impossible to scale outreach in any way without resorting to some form of templating or cmd+c, cmd+v. It can be personalised, but it’s rarely personal.
That said, we don’t get a bad response. Most people simply ignore a message if it’s of no interest. But some reply, and a few lead to sales. Very very rarely is a response what I would consider aggressive or rude. Occasionally a contact will ghost me mid-conversation or not turn up to a call, and that hurts a bit (but is probably the subject of a separate post…)
In total, the feeling has always been that outbounding is a necessary evil. Not the marketing we’re most proud of, but an important cog in the machine. Table stakes.
Nick’s response was unique. He politely made clear early that he didn’t have need for our agency services, but instead took a meta approach and asked about the contact itself. Why was I reaching out to him, Nick wondered. Does what you’re doing even work any more? It was a fair question. So we arranged a call.
I didn’t really know what to expect. Was Nick lulling me into a false sense of security before emptying both barrels at me for my spamming? Actually not. It was a really frank but enjoyable conversation about the pros and cons of cold outreach, as discussed above. We wondered what it’s place was in a world where we all receive so much cold outreach, the noise has fully drowned out the signal. We touched on wargaming, a specialist subject of Nick’s. This led us to thoughts about how to move away from attrition tactics like direct outreach, to freer concepts of play, in its evolutionary sense. Practising for real engagements in an enjoyable, low stakes context. We ran out of time, but agreed this was a conversation to be had in public and the outline of this post was quickly drafted.
To conclude, we set up and left hanging three key questions, which I look forward to discussing further with Nick:
- How does a “genuine” unsolicited outreach float above the high tide of spam?
- How does an agency like ours, swimming in a red ocean, get our point of difference out there?
- How can our prospects understand this difference when making a choice between partners?
Nick:
I’ve been online since 1992, therefore I expect the first spam I ever received was nearer to the first spam message ever sent ( Guy Thuerk in 1978 ) than the present day. I started my online working career as a Systems Administrator, so for all of my time online UCE ( Unsolicited Commercial Email ) has been a problem to be dealt with, and similarly its senders have always been seen as the enemy, and a despicable one at that. Therefore my reaction to UCE has become ingrained over a few decades now, and my reaction is predetermined.
On most platforms I’ll ignore UCE, especially as it’s not usually UCE but just a scam — which covers almost everything I receive by email, Telegram, WhatsApp, and similar. Usually on a platform like LinkedIn I’ll at least give it a glance, and then ignore it, or poke gentle fun at the sender who’s obviously pattern-matched on a job title I had years ago, and hasn’t read my profile. A lot of the senders are mistakenly basing their approach on volume, rather than picking the right people to contact.
But something about Ed’s message caught my eye, and I was in the right mood, so I took a moment to look at this awful spammer’s profile. There I saw Ed’s big smiley face, and there were some aspects to the company’s offering that caught my eye, such as “evidence based design” and “scientific approach”. I’d loosely call what Ed does “Marketing”, a profession that seems to have its fair share of auteurs who couldn’t possibly explain their magic, or practitioners with a couple of techniques they use on everything, regardless of context. Ed looked different to that.
Ed politely interjects:
I would personally not refer to what I or WAS do as marketing, though I fully appreciate it is often perceived that way. We design and make digital products, applications rather than brochureware. However, as so many companies still group ‘digital and marketing’ into a single division, lack of clarity over this distinction is entirely forgivable. And I think it is important to this story that there was some misalignment here — I had clearly not effectively communicated this to Nick, an important note to self.
Nick continues:
And looking at Ed’s profile, I see he’s a history graduate, who spent some time volunteering in a library. Hardly the evil marketeer I imagined, twirling his moustache.
So I replied:
Good afternoon.
[redacted] has no purchasing capability for what you’re offering right now ( LinkedIn has helpfully overwritten your first message, so I’m just going by your profile and company website ), and as a wizened Internet veteran I’m disinclined to buy from anyone who “spams” me anyway.
But also in such a congested environment I struggle to think how else you might promote what you’re doing — so I’d be interested in communicating in some way, but only to hear what kind of responses you get from people to these unsolicited approaches, and what your conversation [sic] rate is. Considering that I currently have absolutely no purchasing power for what We Are Systematic does in any of my roles, I’m just intrigued by what your “scientific approach” entails, please let me know your preferred communication medium and we’ll take it from there.
So we chatted a little on LinkedIn, and then arranged an online meeting. And just had a nice conversation about how to market to people online in 2023, especially when your offering crosses different industries. I have no better explanation than Ed’s words above “It was a really frank but enjoyable conversation about the pros and cons of cold outreach […] We wondered what its place was in a world where we all receive so much cold outreach, the noise has fully drowned out the signal.”
In a world where SEO is gamed, all online review sites are gamed, search engine results are just “sponsored links”, we have far more information to sift through than we have time for, and platforms actively permit this kind of contact — what should someone offering a service do? Not taking part in this kind of online marketing has a nebulous effect on everyone’s day to day online experience, but avoiding it can make or break your business. I hate to advocate for this kind of unsolicited approach, but rather than just being against it, I want to put forward a better approach… and I didn’t have one.
Ed:
How better to demonstrate what you can do than to do it? As any agency, occasionally we have designers ‘on the bench’ between projects. Maybe this is an opportunity to create something, with Nick playing the role of the client. Something we can share and make public. A collaboration based on a connection made.
Nick:
For me the idea of roleplaying a client to We Are Systematic satisfies several requirements. Firstly, it will give me a chance to show my ability to roleplay usefully within a business context, coming up with realistic requirements, but also with one eye on how they can best demonstrate WAS’s abilities, and another eye on what would be most interesting to future readers. Secondly, the idea itself demonstrates my problem solving ability, especially in such indistinct and complex situations. It’s easy for me to say “I help you mould ideas or find new solutions” or my “I help guide from discussions to decisions”, but I need examples, to encourage potential customers to think of me and my company when they face these kind of nebulous issues?
My final thoughts on this are quite simple, but potentially controversial. If you have to outreach to others in an unsolicited way, tailor your message to the recipient, and think twice before you click send.
If you’re a recipient — yes it is annoying, and yes we should have the tools to filter it or file it as a lower priority message ( footnote — “In all the excitement over AI generating content, where are the discussions of using AI to silently determine which of those unsolicited messages might actually be useful?” ), but consider what other options the sender did or didn’t have, and maybe even provide a friendly reply.
Nick is probably best described as someone who provides “decision support”, from unstructured discussions and more structured games and wargames. He is a Director of Path Dependence.
Ed is a product strategist and partner at We Are Systematic and ProductSweet. Sometimes he writes and speaks about evidence-based design.
