Ironically enough, the guys who sign their blog posts with "what do you think", "drop me a line", "I'm always available on email" etc, are usually the guys who never reply :-)
They have decided that they would rather have contact from as many people as possible and be the filter that decides if what someone is offering (or wanting) is desirable to them or not.
The other side of this is (back in the day) people who would do a version of "serious inquiries only" which would surely scare off all but the hardiest people.
You're not guaranteed a "yes" by any means, but people generally seem to feel flattered by such requests, and I know people who've tried to increase their profiles in niches by attempting to interview many of the big names there.
I guess my hidden point is that if you want to achieve a business aim with cold calling and e-mailing, it might help to hang it off of something else that the callee might find desirable or at least non-annoying.
Businesses exist because customers love paying them. There are few to no business aims that you could possibly fulfill without being inherently interesting to the people you're writing or being in touch with.
If you don't have an offering that is interesting, it's not that you should hang your offer on something that is of interest - it's that you need to fix your product/market fit!
That said, there are appropriate and inappropriate venues. As shown by my shopping habits, I love buying groceries, or paying for utilities - but that doesn't mean I'd like to see emails about either.
So I can see that you might have to overcome the limits of your channel. Overall, however, you should be able to find channels where your business aims align easily with what customers want.
In my original post, I was just pulling on experiences with ancillary projects, particularly content driven ones (e.g. interviews are a great way to launch a blog) or in my role as chair of a a commercial O'Reilly conference, where e-mailing potential speakers or inviting them to give interviews, etc, is a common technique that works well.
As ever, YMMV.
Obviously if you are working for an O'Reilly conference the inbound flow can make you forget the other side of the problem. Our company participated in the MIT G-Lab program [1] to help us in the outbound part. They helped us a lot, mainly because they can interview prospective customers as MIT students and in this way people are less reluctant to talk.
[1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/labs/g-lab-info-for-h...
If your marketing costs are low - like you only pay for hits or something - then you can afford to brute force the problem. Which is the underlying idea behind spam and door to door. Rather than solving the hard problem of how to identify the people who are likely to be interested in your product.
1. I've just started a digital magazine with curated articles. I emailed 6 contributors (5 of whom had never heard of me) and just asked clearly and politely for permission to reprint their articles. I gave them the option to say yes or no. I used a similar flow for each but they were personal and focused on the reader.
2. I emailed the local Mac dealer to offer some webdev services (email marketing and SEO). Just as a test, really to validate cold email as a customer acquisition tactic. Again, it was all about the recipient. The polar opposite of the generic emails I get from Indian agencies every week.
There's a great I Love Marketing podcast that talks about a play they call "the cats whiskers". It's worth a listen if you plan to do cold emails. It's episode 24.
Actually, I just thought of a third -
My girlfriend is an artist and had gifted a painting to some friends for their wedding. They hung it prominently in their restaurant and had a few enquiries about it from their customers. They collected a few email addresses.
About a year later, my girlfriend decided to do a limited edition print run and sent 9 emails (just as a test really, to see if there'd be any takers).
Basically said "You saw my painting in Ord Ban. I'm doing a ltd edn print run. Send £100 to my paypal email if you'd like one". Next morning there was £700 in paypal which covered printing/shipping and a profit margin. Not 100% cold because the recipients had expressed an interest but there'd been no prior contact at all.
Sending: works fine if you write a targeted mail / make a targeted call. In software consultancy my experience is that companies you call are more often than not looking for a new 'partner' to have software developed with as they will commonly rotate the companies they work with because the grass could be greener elsewhere. Same for products; if you have a good/better proposition of something they need or already have they'll want to listen.
I think cold whatever works unless it's perceived as spam. That's why you need to be careful in composing and timing such communication. For instance; it is 4.5 hours later in India, so i routinely get mails/calls from outsourcing companies at around 5-6 my time which is 9:30 for them. That is automatically spam to me; if you want to make me a business proposition, you have to do it on my time.
The lesson is: before contacting people do your homework.
On the sales front, I found emailing a much better use of time. While sales were marginally easier on the phone, getting the right people on the phone beyond difficult. And even when people agreed to chat - they often bailed last minute or never called me.
With emails I found two techniques -
For sales emails, I found the best response rates when I was the weirdest. For example, in a moment of exasperation after emailing the same guy 4 times (and getting no response), I wrote "Maybe you're like the wizard of oz, everyone lists you as a media contact, but you don't exist." I heard back within 30 minutes.
For intro cold emails, I found people incredibly receptive. The more specific the emails (specific to the person), and the more concise the email, the more warmly I was received. Perhaps common sense.
Email however, when done correctly (and legally!! don't spam!!) can be very effective. Instead of focusing on making a sale via an email, try instead to focus on getting a referral. Consider it a "win" when you get a referral to someone in the organization with whom you can have a "warm" conversation.
If you are honestly looking for feedback on your product/service, the sales will come. Your cold email will get forwarded to the right person and you can get some conversations started. For us, these campaigns have been extremely low cost and have yielded some great partnerships and repeat business in our niche industry.
A couple rules we laid down:
1. No attachments, no pricing, no selling
2. Make no more than two attempts over 30 day campaign
3. No more than 5-6 sentences with 1 embedded link and a clear request for a referral
Some recommended tools and resources include:
http://www.amazon.com/Predictable-Revenue-Business-Practices...
"Cold calling via phone is a not an effective use of a smaller team's time in my experience-- you will rarely reach the right person within an organization, there are lots of 'gatekeepers' for high level executives, and voicemails just don't generate responses."
Along these lines I'm amazed at the amount of times don't use postal mail to break the ice.
I don't mean a canned direct mail piece. I mean a personal letter, signed in ink, that makes the point.
With that their is no (direct) rejection and it's possible to send many at a very low cost (even if they don't end up in the right place).
As a biz dev guy for a web development company, the thing i'm struggling with is how to bank on cold-emailing as a sales approach when there is so much variability/unpredictability. Sure, someone might pass on your contact to a referral, etcetera, but i'm having a hard time justifying devoting so much time on an outbound marketing campaign a la cold emails when the results are scattershot. How does this low cost marketing campaign you speak of fit within the composition of the rest of your sales efforts?
Here's a great post I found by a seasoned entrepreneur about this: http://www.startupmoon.com/how-i-got-meetings-at-twitter-lin...
I also wrote about my experiences with cold emails: http://blog.jhaniv.com/cold-mails-to-hot-people
I also get telephone calls from people/business I've never contacted before. I get so many, I just let the machine deal with it.
You have to remember if you cold call or email, then you are just one of a number that people get every day at home or at work. They will assume its junk, spam or your selling something they don't need. The ideal way is to not to bother people with cold calling/emailing but rather be the person they are looking for. The solution to their need. The useful thing they don't know they want till they need it.
I am sure, cold calling, emailing works for some but for me I just ignore them and I believe many people do. May be different in Enterprise.
I lost track of the large number of people who asked for the "Webmaster" or person who owns the website. That was in 2001/2002 and way before Google.
Conversely, the cold emails I've received have always been very welcome, though I do encourage people to reach out to me for expert opinion or whatever else.
Finally, the cold phone calls I've received have always been a very negative experience for me. A lot of that is on me, but the immediacy of the phone is a major inconvenience most of the time, especially when there are so many time-delayed methods of robust communication now.
That said, we just landed a new client that called me back out of the blue months after I initially contacted them. So you never know...
You can find tons of blog posts about cold emails with different techniques, etc. For me, I had some key takeaways. (FYI, I don't have any hard data to back my claims, only my experience and feelings.)
- If the market sees value in the problems or solutions that you're pitching, the market will respond.
- When I start my emails being open and giving about myself and background, I seem to get more responses. I usually open up with "Hi, my name is Minto. I'm a software engineer in Austin, TX, developing X."
- I'm very specific about the person's niche. ie. "I'm developing X for <Y niche>."
- My emails are very laid back and unpolished. I try to come off as informal as possible, as if I was writing to an old friend.
- I approach from a place of learning instead of selling. I think people, myself included, don't like being sold to, but like to help a fellow human being out. The fun and exciting thing is that if you hit on the interview with the right problems and solutions, you've pretty much sold them.
- I put a timeframe on my ask, "30 minute coffee", etc.
- Adding your social identity seems to help. I add a link to my LinkedIn profile in my signature. I can only imagine that this adds credibility and many people I email will ask to connect with me on LinkedIn.
- Referrals get high responses. Not really a cold email, but the technique of having a subject line of "Referred by X", gets a high response rate. I only do this if I was really given a referral by someone.
- Be short and sweet. I'm not a very verbose person as it is, but I think people will tend to read your emails if they're short.
I haven't done any cold calls yet, when I do, I would approach it in a similar way. I am pleasantly surprised at the responses I've gotten and the willingness of people to help.
Your approach answers the following questions in the recipients mind:
* why is this person contacting me?
* what is it going to cost me (time/money/etc.)?
* what's in it for me?
* is this some sort of scam?
[edit: formatting]
I'm uncomfortable with the scattergun approach, so I research the business before calling and use LinkedIn to see who I should be talking to. I use the call to ask them about pain points, and while talking try to figure out a solution tailored for that individual.
This takes much more time per prospect than cold emailing or phoning through a list, but figuring out something for each target already narrows the field down a lot and increases your chances.
The messages are very focused and I study people (LinkedIn/Blogs/etc) one by one.
Do you prefer to receive an e-mail than a LinkedIn introduction? personally I don't care where the message is coming assuming the proposal was directed to me and can be of value.