Cold emails work. Find the best use case for the company. Attach a link or screenshot why/how it would help them. Take a screenshot of their site or chat box, then edit it with an example of your bot in action.
Follow up once. Not too many times. Sometimes people ignore the first time because they're in their emails looking for something else.
Some people prefer cold calling, but I find the success rates are much, much lower and you can't convey the same information. I think cold calling is only popular because it's easy to monitor failure rates.
In my experience, you should follow up 4-5 times. In many instances, we receive positive responses much later in the follow-up cycle. For context: Selling to 100-plus-person SaaS B2B organisations.
I see some companies doing this, especially if it's something with a trial. So I assume it works. But it seems like if you try too many times, you end up getting people who are not that interested, but have some free time, and aren't willing to pay much. Which is fine for larger companies who have to sell to late adopters.
It seems unbelievable unless you’ve done sales. I used to do B2B sales for a VAR when I was in college in the 90s.
I’d spend about 30% of my time doing cold outreach. I’d get a conversion 2-3 times a week. One day I sold about $250k of high margin training vouchers (it was MS Office user certification iirc) through a single phone call. It literally paid for that year of college.
A little anecdotal, but I get about 50% response rate. This includes selling weird stuff, like once I tried to sell brownies to wedding planners.
In terms of job hunting, I got about 2 out of 4 responses this way, so it's still a 50% rate. This actually landed me my first job.
This was from a few years back though. It might be harder now that everyone has automated messaging and CRMs designed to look like they're from a human being (probably illegally without an unsubscribe button).
It depends a lot on how you do it. I think the message has to hit well, it has to look personal enough, hence the screenshots have to be designed for that specific company. But done wrong, it can look a bit desperate.
You also have to find someone who can make a decision. A lot of people are terrified of this, but higher ranked people can actually forward you to the right VP in charge. We've cold contacted the CEO of the biggest media company in the country this way, and he was very happy with the meeting.
Some people prefer a wider net, like 1000 messages a day, with a 2% success rate. That's fine too. Sometimes it gets better results, because you end up with people more desperate for a solution. I just think the personal cold email method works better than cold calls, and it's a lot more fun.
For founders, personal emails help, because you can ask them why they rejected you, and that helps in improving the product or strategy.
Follow up once. Not too many times. Sometimes people ignore the first time because they're in their emails looking for something else.
Some people prefer cold calling, but I find the success rates are much, much lower and you can't convey the same information. I think cold calling is only popular because it's easy to monitor failure rates.