The cold emails which got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub | Hacker News Reader

The cold emails which got me meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub

startupmoon.com

189 pointsrubygnome53 comments

I spent 8 years as a car salesman, and I almost had to laugh at the things in here. I did mostly email and telephone based sales and this single blog post seems to sum up the years of training I had at various dealerships. In retrospect, much of it is obvious, but it's really awkward to say things like "I'll be in town the week of X and would like to set up time either Tuesday morning or Wednesday afternoon, which works for you?".

There's a ton more in there that is really great advice, but as someone who was a relatively successful salesman, if you're not a salesman and you're criticizing this or think this is cheesy, please understand this is how you "sell".

When this is being done to you, most people don't realize it, and even like the presentation. Even as someone trained in many of these techniques, you know they're being used, but if done properly it just makes for a pleasant experience and you don't even care.

A lot of them don't apply just to selling stuff, e.g., being specific alone is always a very valuable skill.

The only that's missing are a couple of quotes from Glengarry Glen Ross

We've added a little something to this month's sales contest. As you know, first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Know what second prize is? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is, you're fired.

A-B-C

A(ttention)

I(nterest)

D(ecision)

A(ction)

Good father? &%#@ you! Go home play with your kids. You wanna work here? Close.

> Even as someone trained in many of these techniques, you know they're being used, but if done properly it just makes for a pleasant experience and you don't even care

Someone once told me that other salespeople are the easiest to sell to. Maybe because on some level they're rooting for you to succeed, or maybe because they're more extroverted.

My observations seem to bear that out, but I don't have a huge sample size. I'm curious whether you think that's true?

p.s. I was tempted to open this with, "I saw your comment on HN and wanted to get your advice...". :) But I'm not trying to be a meta smartass. I'm genuinely curious.

I would say I'm relatively easy to sell to, but that I'm also not tolerant of having my time wasted when the value you offer just isn't what I'm after.

In that regard, I'd say I'm just like every other person who isn't a salesperson :)

I wonder much success an overweight, typically bearded engineer would have with the same cold emails? Surely the appeal of meeting an attractive brunette must have helped?

Yes I'm cynical, but good looks have been found to have a significant influence on success at interviews.

It is like the introduction. It increases the number first approaches but not necessarily the number of closes.

Presentation matters, whether it is the way you look (naturally), the way you dress, or the way you designed the documents you hand out.

That would certainly make an interesting A/B test. "Attractive brunette" might be such a radioactive phrase that I shouldn't even be commenting, but I'm sure there are differences between picture vs. no picture, young vs. old, light skin vs. dark, and so on. The only question is how large or consistent those differences are, and the only way to get an answer is to measure.

The email doesn't contain the headshot. I'm betting most people don't research me, but they do research the link in my emails.

However, if thats the only type of person your clientele will talk to, theN hire a smart, driven brunette, or blonde or a guy who walks some other part that fits the role.

She has a Google+ page with a headshot that will be shown next to her email when using gmail.

As someone who lost ~60 lbs. in the last year it's quite shocking how much of a difference it makes. Not closing deals mind you, but getting your foot in the door. (which is 50% of the battle anyways)

As an example of playing this the opposite way "The Practice of System and Network Administration", first ed. has a story about a woman in pink coverall that get everybodys respect.

The reason: everybody figures out if you can get away with that you have to have pretty amazing techical skills.

(Haven't come around to the second edition yet but the first edition follows me. Covers everything from cabling and datacenter layout to hiring, firing and salary negotiations.)

" I learned that people you approach through intros will probably meet with you as a favor to someone else but they won’t use a new product unless they have a good reason, time and will."

There's a lot of truth to this. We once approached a team in a "big telcom". Another team at the company referred us to them because the product was relatively successful for their purposes. The new team took the time to listen to us, and I think understood our value proposition, but these guys were dinosaurs. The prospect of changing how they do things, and taking a risk buying an expensive product was not interesting to them. They seemed more interested in coasting until their upcoming retirement.

This rule apply pretty much everywhere and especially to VC. If you want to talk to a VC find some one who can introduce you. If you can't do that then work on your network.

The advice in this post combined with Dan Shipper's awesome post the other day (http://danshipper.com/nothing-happens-until-the-sale-is-made) serves as a great blueprint for how to kickstart your startup's sales.

Not sure what it was about Dan's post, but it really resonated with me and motivated me to make 8 sales pitches yesterday. Already got 2 replies, one negative, one positive. Point being, if you don't shoot, you can't score.

The title is horrible. "Marketing for Developers -- Applying a low touch approach". Hm, that looks like something in my ads/spam folder.

The mail starts with some random blurb about the company. Honestly I don't care (yet). All I would think is: Why are you contacting me? How did you find out about me? They say they solve problems. Which problems? How are they related to my field of work?

After that I wouldn't even care to read the rest. Sorry, this is bad execution.

I'd probably even never open such email on my business email. I get a lot of random emails from a lot of people, I don't think they're the first to figure firstname.lastname@business.com out.

When I get recruiter spam to my work email, I always ask how the writer came across my address. Usually I don't get a response, but sometimes I've had them come clean about either using a service, or guessing.

Great post! Have already forwarded it to one of our sales guys.

One thing I would like to add from personal experience: It's really easy these days to connect to a lot of people on LinkedIn that you have never met or even heard of before. I am tempted to say the acceptance quote of a "cold connection" is about 50%.

Once your network has a decent size, you can connect to almost anyone from your industry (in our case gaming and mobile) even if you only have a free LinkedIn account (like I do) because you have a least a couple of people from their company already within your 2nd/3rd degree connections, and then you can literally add the entire board. Believe me, more C-level guys than you might think will accept you if your profile looks like you are a decent person.

The reason I writing all this is that I have been much more successful getting meetings through LinkedIn than through cold email. I feel that if I send a LinkedIn message to somebody I am connected to (but that I do not know whatsoever), that person is much more likely to a) open the message in the first place because the sender is not anonymous but rather has a name, face, and a job, and therefore b) also much more likely to read/digest what I am actually writing. And from here it is only really about what you have to say and sell anyways....

The bottom line is that while LinkedIn is a tool intended for connecting people that know each other, it actually works best for connecting (and selling something) to people you do not know at all.

Give it a shot!

Beyond what I said below about the effectivity of LinkedIn InMail, I don't like cold connections because I think it give less value and strength to the network. If the graph is complete (fully connected) what is the value behind the edges?

I cannot get passed the title. Unless the only cold emails the author sent were the ones that got the meetings, s/which/that.

(Actually I did read the article, and in it she says "cold emails produced 7 meetings at Twitter, Klout, LinkedIn", so either she sent 7 cold emails or the title should use 'that' not 'which')

Since we're doing grammar advice:

> I cannot get passed the title

I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong, this should be "I cannot get past the title". :)

A bit of lenience might be in order since the author is from Israel and English may not be her first language (then again, native speakers might not necessarily do better).

I thought you were right for a second, but I'm fairly certain that 'passed' is what I meant. It's the past tense of pass, and thus the correct word. see http://www.grammar-monster.com/easily_confused/past_passed.h... for a good set of examples.

I appreciate that the which/that distinction is tricky, but one is a restrictive clause and the other is not, changing the meaning of the sentence.

The site you linked to explains why "past" is correct IMO:

"To pass often means to move past, and this is where confusion can arise. Of note, to pass can also mean to sail past, to fly past, to run past, to hop past, etc. - the method of moving is irrelevant. This is worth bearing in mind, because if you have used a verb indicating motion already, then it will be partnered with past and not passed."

The verb here would be "get". See the examples at the bottom for use as a preposition.

Or did I now fuck it up again? ;)

possible, I'm much less sure about my use of passed versus past here then the use of which instead of that in the title. That said, I had thought 'get' did not indicate motion across the sentence here 'passed' did, so passed is correct. But I could totally believe I'm doing it wrong.

That's an interesting take about past/passed. Granted, I'm not really in a position to make good judgement calls about the English language either, but in my opinion it goes like this:

"passed" is something that happens or happened to you, like on the freeway you can say you have been passed by another vehicle.

"past", on the other hand, in this context is a state that refers to your location. Like in, "I'm past the red line". When you have to get past something, your position in relation to that something is expressed by that word.

Intuitively, I'd say that if it's the answer to an imaginary question of "where", it needs to be "past". If it's the answer to another question, like "what happened", it's "passed".

> I appreciate that the which/that distinction is tricky, but one is a restrictive clause and the other is not, changing the meaning of the sentence.

You're right, but I think we have to take non-native speakers into account. Also, the implication that those were the exact same emails doesn't really change with that, it only gets weaker. In my experience, people use that in the same way express a definitive relation. As in "those are the cats that ate the cheeseburgers" I get the impression that a specific set of cats are involved in a specific cheeseburger incident. That doesn't really change if you say "those are the cats who ate the cheeseburgers".

"Cannot get passed the title" would mean that you are unable to have the title passed to you. Which, I suppose, you can't. But that's nonsense and surely not what you meant.

You definitely meant [past](http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=pas...):

    Past \Past\, prep.
       1. Beyond, in position, or degree; further than; beyond the
          reach or influence of. "Who being past feeling." --Eph.
          iv. 19. "Galled past endurance." --Macaulay.
          [1913 Webster]
    
                Until we be past thy borders.         --Num. xxi.
                                                      22.
          [1913 Webster]
    
                Love, when once past government, is consequently
                past shame.                           --L'Estrange.
          [1913 Webster]

The line between "cold emails" and spam is quite thin.

If you don't want me to mark your email as spam: * Do your research about me and my company and what we need. If we're a scala shop, yeah, I'd be interested, but if we're a python shop, you're likely to annoy me with your pitch for a scala product. * The fact that you're the co-founder certainly helps. * Use your company's email. Using a random gmail account makes me think that you're using it as a throwaway account. Don't even think of using hotmail, yahoo, etc. * Don't spray. If I find out that you've sent emails to 5 of my co-workers at the same time, you're much more likely to go to spam.

I've been on the other side, and these are all rules that I've used when I tried to get people interested in my products.

The advice in this post is excellent. I would only add that it can be more effective to open by mentioning the other person's work and / or achievements (instead of pitching yourself and your company in the first paragraph). Most people are selfish and they want to know what's in it for them, even if that something is just recognition.

Many smart people would see right through it.

See through what? If you're inclined to contact a person or company, you probably do admire that person or organization's work. If you genuinely appreciate it, let them know sooner rather than later. And if you don't, don't contact them.

I think your point about making your pitch about the other person is bang on, but for different reasons. The whole reason why someone would use your software/product is because it benefits them. So starting off by saying something like "Our product X can help increase your sales by 10%" is just good salesmanship.

I prefer to start sending messages via LinkedIn InMail to pass spam filters. That's their main advantage. Another positive thing about LinkedIn is adding context: the recipient is aware that the distance between him and you is short.

That's interesting. To me looks like almost 100% of the time LinkedIn messages are misdirected and too close to be spam that I almost never bother to reply if I'm not genuinely interested.

When I get a proper email directly to my inbox, it immediately gets my attention and it's likely to get a reply.

99% of the messages and invitations I receive from e-mail and LinkedIn users are by people who want to connect without studying what I do. They don't follow the basics.

BUT, the messages I send try to be laser focused and I have a good success rate of conversions (~20%)

I guess LinkedIn messages are easier for lazy/busy people that need to contact lots of people.

If I get a direct email that is definitely not based on a template means that that person a) found my mail and b) spent some time on the process, so I usually reply as courtesy.

I applaud your approach, although I think it's difficult to get noticed in a noisy channel and LinkedIn messages are overused.

Strange downvote....

99% of the messages I get in linkedin are spam, and their messages interface sucks. linkedin is the lowest thing in my list.

Well, we had critical success with it. For example, in a few days there will be a joint press release between a top virtualization company and my company. This was achieved through LinkedIn InMail.

A little unrelated, but for cold emailing, should I be using my Google business email or another generic email? I do not want to get banned if someone reports it as spam. Would you recommend any webhost which I can use for this safely?

Sending unsolicited marketing to people is always hazardously. Not only do you have to worry about your email account and domain name reputation, but there are also national and local laws to consider.

I'd like to see a comparative study of how this works for a slender attractive female such as the author v. a fat older man.

Yes she is attractive. But people open her emails and respond because of the content, it's not like they see the subject and skips the content directly to her Thailand facebook album.

What's a cold email? I don't get it.

The email equivalent of cold calling people: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_calling

Emailing somebody you don't know and don't have any sort of pre-existing connection with.

Just a quick heads up: you spelt Takipi as Tapiki in the first sentence.

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