Cold email isn't really dead
But for most of us, it is.
It's not PC to say that cold outbound or anything is dead, but manners aside, looking at the data, here is what's undeniable:
The below image is a screenshot from the website of one of the most reputable cold outbound agencies. They're good. Like, very.
It shows cold outbound campaigns run by the company.
In a nutshell:
• they sent ca. 39,860 emails
• got 210 positive replies
• booked 36 meetings
Don't bother with a calculator, I've done the math:
That is a 0.09% email-to-meeting ratio.
Gonna pause for a sec while it sinks in...
And these guys are good! They send over a million emails a month, use the best of the best tools, and have scary-good outbound email infrastructure.
0.09%.
And we're only at booked meetings, not show-ups, let alone SQLs... and customers.
Moral of the story:
1. If your total serviceable market is large enough, it 𝘤𝘢𝘯 make sense to do this
2. But if your market doesn't have multiple times 40.000 buyers, cold outbound is simply not an option anymore.
Scraping, enriching, filtering and running the infrastructure to send these 40K emails costs money.
At the end of the day, it comes down to how much you spend per sales opportunity.
To be fair, outbound isn't just cold, you have warm outbound and these guys do that too.
So, what's a better channel than cold outbound?
That's actually the wrong question to ask.
Because it falsely assumes you should be thinking in terms of channels, rather than buyer journeys.
This thinking results in bad marketing plans and even worse execution… because the buyer journey is a tangle of spaghetti that is never channel-specific…
So, how do you approach this instead?
The right question to ask:
What components does a journey have, where we:
1. make buyers aware of their problem and get them in the right frame of mind
2. edutain them until they're ready
3. pop first thing into their mind when they're ready to buy
4. make choosing and buying us as smooth as possible
5. make sure they're thrilled as customers
We want to
• follow along from as early as possible
• make sure we have the systems in place to act when they get to stage 3 and beyond.
Outbound is a part of this, but for us, not cold outbound... and depending on the company, we use a bunch of other tactics/channels.
But focus is on the process. From the buyer's POV.
If you want to look into the components of our setup and see it at work, you can check out this free webinar:
Here's the
harsh truth:
most companies have
• no clue about their buyers' journey
• no way to (meaningfully) score target accounts for prioritization
• no system to activate accounts with the right message/CTA
All is happening ad-hoc. If happens to follow an SOP, it's often neglected after a few weeks.
Because it's hard.
In all honesty: we've been guilty of some of those, too. But we fixed it.
The solution starts with finding your constraint - that one bottleneck that's killing your pipeline.
(Spoiler: It's often at the top of the funnel.
A.k.a early in the buyer journey (for those of you who cringe at hearing "funnel"))
Here's what actually works:
• Stop spreading yourself thin across multiple initiatives and focus on ONE motion that will move the needle the most
• Build a proper engagement tracking system
• Focus on warming up accounts before outreach
• Use AI strategically for content and research
• Capture all meaningful signals from your owned media (and 2nd, 3rd parties)
• Have automatic account scoring in place that tells you who to prioritize
The results when you get this right?
• 3-5x higher response rates
• Dramatically shorter sales cycles
• Actually predictable pipeline
And who doesn’t want that!?
Have a great Q1:
Dan Renyi
Founder, Klear B2B
ps.: Thanks for reading (or scrolling) all the way to the end today. I so appreciate you and want to double triple down on this newsletter in ‘25. If there is anything I can serve you with, let me know by replying or DMing on Linkedin.
pps.: If you liked this newsletter, you’ll probably enjoy the Workshop on how this all ties together in real life.