For many companies, especially in the B2B space or anywhere you can use account-based marketing, cold outreach is a crucial strategy for both sales and marketing teams. But, the truth of the matter is that many of the messages filling up inboxes are filled with half-truths, if not outright lies. Below are some of the most common fibs you’ll find in the cold outreach world – and the humorous truth behind them.
Yeah – okay. You were found within a list of 10,000 contacts that someone bought. You weren’t even actually thought of. We’ve all seen this one – an email kicks off with the ol’, “I came across your profile and was impressed.” The truth? Your name and email address was a part of a bulk contact list that was scraped or bought. There’s no personalization here, just automation…
While this could be true, it’s more likely that the sender is pitching a one-size-fits-all product. A tailored solution sounds great, right? But the issue in “tailoring” is that it stops at the industry drop down in their CRM. Most messages push a single product that’s applicable to various industries – however, they’re vaguely applicable.
The only thing within this outreach that was personalized is one, they have your email, and two, the email only contains your first name because of the merge tag. Sometimes that even goes wrong. In many cases, the “personalized approach” is nothing more than changing that merge tag in a pre-written email template. If you’re lucky, which is rare, they’ll even add your company name, but don’t expect a lot more than that. Anyway, why should we be so ungrateful? Haha.
Not sure where this figure is coming from, but if they’re counting it as “opened” if it lands in spam, then sure, they might have an 80% open rate. But, let’s not forget that email tracking will often register an email as opened even when they’re in the spam folder, unopened by the human eye. Don’t let this number fool you. It sounds impressive, but it’s more misleading than anything.
Instead of just looking at a general response rate, these companies need to look at a positive response rate. Why? Because a 2% “remove me from your list” is not a win. Whenever someone is listed as a “cold outreach pro,” they love to throw around how high or great their response rates are. However, they don’t mention what the responses are. Any angry “remove me from your list” isn’t going to provide any MQLs. Neither will those that threaten to sue you because of not following guidelines.
Then why are you messaging me? Simple as that…
Not only will they take up your time, but they’ll spend up to an hour attempting to pitch you. Everyone promises a short meeting, but how often does a quick 15 minute stretch into a full-blown sales pitch? If they really only needed 15 minutes, they’d get to the point quick and correctly – they never do.
One company does not mean it’s “companies.” While they may have helped this one company, wild revenue growth is usually promised and it’s a classic sales move to promote FOMO. Sure, maybe the one company saw a decent spike in sales, traffic, etc – but it’s likely an outlier, not a promise of what their service will do for everyone.
Cold outreach is a good tool, especially if you have the right audience and the right messaging. However, it doesn’t have to rely on deception to be effective. In fact, more people prefer honesty and transparency when it comes to cold outreach and it’ll help you build better relationships with prospective buyers/customers. So, instead of falling back on these old, tired lines, focus on understanding the exact needs of the people you’re reaching out to and offering a solution that’ll speak to their challenges. Lies will get you to the door, but they won’t open the door.