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Comment by alangibson | Hacker News Reader

He did the right thing wrong.

Cold emailing in the B2B space is totally normal. He just wasn't cold emailing. The sheer numbers alone, combined with the fact that he used some scumbag data broker to get contact info, means to me that he was actually just spamming people.

If he had individually researched each company, then after deciding he could likely help them, looked for the right contact in their org and personally contacted them, he would have ended up doing the right thing right.

He would have ended up sending more like 80 emails, not 800.

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My main problem is that I didn't know how to find the exact type of person I'm looking for, so I cast a much wider net than I should have. I was told by an experienced salesperson that I should aim for ~100 emails per week, and then send followup emails to those same email addresses a couple days later, even if they don't respond to the first one, meaning I contacted ~400 people over the course of June. Part of the advice I received was that contacting the wrong person is okay, as they might forward me to the right person.

By the way, Apollo.io is a YC backed company, which was a huge part of my thought process. "YC? Based out of SF? Okay this must be how people do things these days." So against my better judgment, I gave it a shot.

It was definitely the wrong approach, but as someone with zero experience or knowledge of sales and cold outreach, there's no way I could have known that without trying first, especially with experienced salespeople telling me it's just what people do.

The volume is not the issue by the way nor is contacting the wrong person. You can properly cold email 400 people with a follow up. It’s probably going to take time to do it properly. The issue is entirely the content.

For cold emailing to be effective you need to have researched the company you are emailing a bit and give them enough in your initial approach that they want to follow back rather than send you to their spam folder. It means you need to show you understand their problem space, have a good grasp of how you could bring them value and having a chat with you would probably be worth their time if only so they know what’s available on the market for the problem you solve.

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