
A cold outreach strategy that works - jger15
https://www.patrickrivera.co/posts/cold-outreach
======
stared
> But in sales and recruiting, “no” doesn’t always mean “no”.

Where I should start?

I dived too deep into dating - partly because I was in the process of writing
"Dating for Nerds", and partly because my ex-girlfriend was a
sexologist/sociologist (who at that time was writing her master's thesis
"Market Metaphors in Dating").

There are many sales metaphors for dating, especially in PUA lingo (including
all about the target, pitch, funnel, and close). What I've found even more
interesting is that there are many parallels between the ethics of both. While
for doing things against someone's will it is obviously wrong (and a crime),
there is a dark-gray zone of things that are not a crime, but still - are
rarely done in good faith, and can hurt the other person. If something is a
gray zone in one, very often the other tells if it is OK-ish to a--holish.

And 'no' in business is the same. Yes, people can change mind. Yes, 'no'
sometimes means "maybe... but if I said that, you would have assumed 'yes' and
put me in a really uncomfortable situation". There are pushy salespeople that
after "no" they act as if they heard yes. This strategy may work, especially
on people who are less assertive, less confident, etc. But it is a dick move,
so don't. A lot of classic PAU is based on these pushy tactics. They even call
when the next day a girl regrets they have had sex "buyer's remorse".

Yes, some people would react differently if they've heard more, or maybe need
time to consider things, or would _benefit_ from some encouragement. I am so
grateful to all salespeople, and recruiters, who after hearing "no" respected
that work. And treated me like a person, not a ripe bag of gold.

~~~
anticsapp
Pre-dotcom bust there was this lady from The Daily Deal. She harassed the shit
out of us with her perkiness. No way we would spend IBM's money on a new
website. But she was a no means yes woman. I asked her for $50,000 of free
inventory to test if it was as good as she said it was. Free is always best
and it kicked ass. Then she gave birth to twins and named them Joe, my boss,
and my name. That was a bridge too far. Daily Deal became a favorite of IBM's
and they ended up investing millions in it for B2B marketing. Sometimes
stalking works. But I don't recommend it.

~~~
tschwimmer
She named her kids after you?

~~~
anticsapp
Sorry, just seeing this now. She really did. But she was super Irish Catholic
and I think she wanted the names Joe and Mike anyway. Also she was an early
Bloomberg employee and had crazy stories about him.

------
PedroCandeias
I'm seeing some negative comments that focus on the article specifics. So I
thought I'd say well done Patrick for reaching your goal using creativity and
the right kind of persistence. Thank you for showing the actual steps you took
and sharing your thought process.

I've been in software almost 20 years and due to some incredibly poor timing
am in need of finding my own door of opportunity, so I found your post
inspirational. Thank you.

~~~
patrickrivera
thanks, Pedro! yep. you can adapt the idea of research, add value, and handle
objections into whatever permutation works best for your situation. that's the
strategy part. best of luck, you can do it :)

------
amirathi
Great advice if you absolutely want that ONE job at this ONE company. If you
are in that boat then it's probably worth it to spend ~10 hours creating
something valuable to offer.

Most people generally have a set of companies that are ideal for them in a
tier'ed manner. In that case, more efficient way would be to choose ~5
companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at
these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If
it fails, choose next ~5 and so on.

It falls somewhere in-between spending 10 hours of effort on 1 application &
mass applying to 50 companies without any effort whatsoever. This is also how
effective sales teams work.

~~~
whatshisface
You get part of those 10 hours "for free" just from the basic due diligence
that you should apply to determine if you want to work for the
company/department/team in the first place.

------
petercooper
I'm the person who gets these sorts of emails at my company, and just a few
words in one of his emails really caught my attention!

 _" Would love to work on this mission with you and the team"_ .. yeah, yeah,
generic blah, everyone says that.

 _" and I won't take it for granted."_ Ok, wow, I rarely have people make
promises like that. It sounds genuine and even if it's not, it's a point I can
pull someone up on later on if they're screwing around.

Sending off some generic corporate speech will rarely work with me, but if
someone acts a little more personably and shows they have some sort of
emotional skin in the game, I'm all ears.

~~~
travisjungroth
> if someone acts a little more personably and shows they have some sort of
> emotional skin in the game, I'm all ears.

Which why generic corporate speech is just an arms race of faking that you
have emotional skin in the game. Saying you'd "love to work on this mission
with you and the team" was once enough. Now, you also have to say that you
"won't take it for granted" to catch your attention. I wonder what the next
step will be.

~~~
chrismarlow9
> I wonder what the next step will be.

[https://youtu.be/JWdZEumNRmI](https://youtu.be/JWdZEumNRmI) ?

------
scottfr
This is a great point and also very applicable to sales generally. There's
definitely a continuum between "hyper target / completely customized" and
"spray and pray" and each person/company needs to find the right point on that
continuum for themselves.

My company actually just put out a blog post last week on this showing how to
quickly create customized emails while still leveraging templates [0].

[0]
[https://blaze.today/blog/best_sales_cold_email_templates_and...](https://blaze.today/blog/best_sales_cold_email_templates_and_snippets/)

~~~
_jal
Spam like this earns an immediate "remove all email addresses from your lists
@ourdomain.com and let me know that you are suppressing them from your future
mailings", ccing your mail provider's abuse address. The second mail gets your
domain blocked and I tell your provider they're on notice.

Some of us still take spam seriously.

~~~
goatherders
I recognize we start from different places on this, but unrequested email does
not necessarily equal SPAM. We had a guy a few months ago who threatened all
kinds of litigation and reporting etc. when we reached out cold. At the same
time, one of his colleagues responded with interest and just before Christmas
their company signed a 5-figure annual deal with our client to provide an
endpoint security solution they needed for their managed services practice.

Put another way, if I honest to God had a gold bar with your name on it and
contacted you by email to say "when can we meet up so I can give you this gold
bar" and you replied and we met up and I gave you your gold bar, you wouldn't
view my message as SPAM at all because now you have a gold bar that is worth a
bunch of money. Hey, free gold bar!@ But when it comes to cold outreach many
people defer to "I didn't ask for this email....SPAM SPAM SPAM!" Sometimes
what's being offered isn't a good fit, doesn't provide ROI, etc. But sometimes
it turns out to be a gold bar.

I don't think that a business reaching out and saying "You guys provide X, we
have a solution that does Y and has helped other companies that provide X in a
meaningful way" is remotely the same as a Nigerian Prince selling Viagra.

~~~
wpietri
They are not the same, but if they're sent in bulk, they are both spam.

The essence of spam is using automation to use the same amount of your time to
waste more of other people's time. Door-to-door sales is awful, but at the
very least the waste of time is symmetrical. Computers, though, let spammers
waste ever more of their targets' time on their quest to get rich.

Having talked to many spammers on the phone back in the day, excuses like
yours are common. "I'm an exception! What I'm doing is special and valuable!"
Sure, bud. We're _all_ special snowflakes. But you don't really believe it's
all that valuable, or you'd trust that people with a need would seek you out.
Your actual goal is to manipulate people such that money goes into your pocket
instead of somebody else's. Which I get, in that there are plenty of other
people doing the same thing. It's an arms race, and not playing guarantees you
don't win. But let's not pretend that your spam is somehow not spam.

~~~
goatherders
I would never ever in a million years trust that people with a need would seek
me out. Most people are lazy and they don't pay my bills.

Not sure I agree/understand the idea that cold outreach is manipulation.

~~~
wpietri
Sure. I believe you don't understand. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult
to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not
understanding it." If it made sense to you, you'd be doing something else.

~~~
goatherders
Your patronization and condescension are not lost on me. Without knowing
anything about me, my work, and my company aside from what I've shared you've
taken the time to behave like an utter jackass because you dont happen to like
what you think I do for a living.

Know this: I love my job and the company I've built. My employees love working
here and the problems we solve. The clients love the service we provide and
their customers love that we helped them connect.

------
mkchoi212
A lot of people may think this blog post is either over complicating stuff or
stating the obvious. While slightly true, you'd be surprised at how many
people miss the points highlighted by the author. I get so many cold emails
that don't hit any of these points and I just end up deleting them
immediately.

------
BlackCherry
This blog post over complicates and mythologizes an extremely simple process.
That is to not be embarrassed or ashamed to ask people you want something from
what you can do to get it.

Additionally, this is survivorship bias. His emails sounded very
professionally immature and while this companies leadership may have found it
endearing, I could easily see other groups of people finding it off putting.

What this guys effort signaled to me is that he’s probably annoyingly
overeager, but willing to basically do whatever I want him to do whenever and
however long I want him to do it. In other words he’d be a good lackey.

If you want to shamelessly signal that you’d be a decent lackey for an obscure
to medium startup this may be decent advice. And this may not be a bad thing,
I know Casey Neistat’s employee Jack Coyne did something similar and it opened
up a lot of doors for him.

~~~
dannyw
I didn't find his email professionally immature. I think it's an overstatement
to somehow infer that these emails signal a lackey.

~~~
OJFord
> somehow infer that these emails signal a lackey.

"Does the team need an office manager, receptionist, coffee runner, etc.?"

------
danial
Patrick, if you’re reading this, I enjoyed this article. It reminds me that if
you spend a little bit more time researching your prospect, you are more
likely to get positive results. Another lesson is that it helps to focus on a
few prospects you really want to work with, rather than spray and pray. Thank
you for sharing.

~~~
patrickrivera
thanks, Danial! exactly. the strategy isn't the literal tactics I took (e.g.,
spending ten hours, reaching out to one company, etc.) the strategy is
thinking about cold outreach as a sales process and adapting it to your
situation.

------
tom_mellior
I think this post tries hard to claim something that wasn't quite the case.
The author did not overcome a "no". They "overcame" a "sure, next summer might
work". Which, given that they were a student, was really a "sure, _whenever
you are free_ might work"; the company assumed that they would be studying
during the fall.

So what remains is that in the initial mail, the author presumably failed to
mention that they would be free already in the fall. If they had, it looks
like the company would have happily interviewed them for their fall internship
program.

So my reading is that there really was no "no" at all to overcome, just some
unfortunate initial communication. Including the fact that the company created
the impression that they "weren't hiring", while in fact they were.

------
DoreenMichele
Good negotiating is a fact-finding mission. "No" is data that tells you
something. "No, not this thing" is not the same as "Drop dead!"

The email response he got wasn't even as ugly he framed it in this piece. They
were clearly interested and telling him when he could potentially connect with
them.

Countering that with more information about his side of the equation -- that
he was willing to take _any role_ they had and his target date was the fall --
turned up more information and helped them reach agreement.

Generally speaking, it's fine to treat _no_ as specific to X and not interpret
it as a blanket rejection. And most CEOs will not be coy about letting you
know that their "no" means "Sorry, you are just not a good fit for our
company." They usually didn't get to be CEO by being a milquetoast.

That's not really comparable to trying to sort out how aggressively you should
pursue some woman that you're probably taller than, stronger than and so
forth. These are just not good points of comparison.

I'm annoyed by the "no means maybe" thing. He tries to cover himself by saying
that "in dating, no always means no." But I wish he just hadn't gone there.

Too many people are already disrespectful pricks. They don't need any openings
to help them justify their lousy behavior.

Anyway, congrats and thanks for the write up. It's good info, even though I
think it unnecessarily steps in it on that one detail.

/2¢

------
deepspace
FTA: " Following up is so crucial that enterprise sales teams have software to
automate follow ups."

As someone on the receiving end of sales solicitations, a lack of follow-up is
the most frustrating thing imaginable, and I don't believe that it is a solved
problem right now.

I suspect that some widely used enterprise sales software (maybe Salesforce?)
recently developed a bug that messes badly with the follow up process.

I have recently seen many interesting and perfectly targeted outreach messages
in my inbox, for products that I am genuinely interested in. So far, so good -
something is obviously going right. But then I reply to the message, and
instead of the sender following up with me, I start getting multiple copies of
the first message delivered from random people at the same company.

Replying to these messages only increases the flood of solicitation messages,
until I have to resort to blacklisting the entire company domain. What a waste
of my time, and what a lost opportunity for the companies running the flawed
software.

~~~
dvasdekis
A friend works at BeeCastle ([https://beecastle.com/](https://beecastle.com/))
which aims to address this exact niche. Systemic but carefully curated sales
approaches.

Free trial available.

------
C4stor
I wonder how significant it is in the US, but in France, securing an
internship is hardly difficult.

Interns tend to barely get paid (when they do) and a lot of companies have no
problem letting them rot for half of the internship duration.

You could probably get an internship almost anywhere if you're willing to do
the most annoying crap half of the day, and nothing the rest of the time.

So, I don't know how significant is "I got an internship through this method"
to prove that a method is good (but then again, maybe in the US culture it's
actually something significant !)

~~~
snazz
Internships are very competitive at places like Google. At less prestigious
companies, they're less likely to be paid well and are easier to get.

~~~
C4stor
Ok, makes sense then !

In France, when I was a student, it was quite often a matter of "we take 10
interns but have only one full time position afterwards, so good luck to
everyone !", so it was staying in the company that proved quite competitive.

------
scapecast
I wonder if the people that are condescending about Patrick's effort have ever
done cold outbound prospecting and sold anything in their lives. But who am I
to make assumptions...

Patrick, great job for:

1) trying something different and being persistent and polite, but not
annoying

2) reaching your objective, and

2) documenting it in a post.

You've got the result on your side, and you found one possible way to get
there. Are there others? Sure! Get an intro via a mutual connection, etc. You
chose the one that worked for you given your constraints / circumstances.

When I saw your slide, my immediate reaction was "he must have been at
Accenture". Looks like the templates haven't changed since I left in 2013 :-)

~~~
Macha
> I wonder if the people that are condescending about Patrick's effort have
> ever done cold outbound prospecting and sold anything in their lives. But
> who am I to make assumptions...

I'm sure cold outbound prospecting is very hard and has a non-zero success
rate.

The fact that it might be hard for the person doing it doesn't mean it's not
an unwelcome intrusion for the rest of us.

------
tschwimmer
I appreciate that this high touch approach worked for the author, but I think
the most important thing to understand about cold outreach is that it simply
won't work 99.9% of the time and plan accordingly.

I did cold outreach for a startup I was working on many years ago. I wasn't
even selling anything, just trying to do some research. I called and emailed
dozens of people. Nobody responded. I then went and showed up in person at a
dozen or so offices of people who I wanted to learn more about. The most
polite among them told me they were too busy to talk and when I told them I
could wait they asked me to leave. The worst slammed doors in my face and
swore at me. I tried a number of different sweeteners. I offered our service
for free for varying amounts of time. I even offered hundreds of dollars of
cash up front just to speak for 30 minutes. On average I could barely finish
one sentence of my pitch before people said no.

The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, and people treat strangers
accordingly. Even if your product is amazing or you're offering someone a holy
grail, their perceived risk of you is almost always too high for them to trust
you. To me, this suggests that the pray and spray approach is a better one: if
I double my chances of success from .01% to .02% (and these numbers don't feel
too far off) by doing 10 hours of investment per customer, then I'm much
better off sending thousands of generic emails. I'd say the author's success
in cold outreach was more luck than anything he specifically did. Just my 2c.

------
arturm
Most jobs come from referral. Scalable cold outreach strategy is key to
getting a job in tech these days.

Does anyone still apply online?

~~~
joejerryronnie
About half the positions I staff are from referrals and half are from randomly
submitted online resumes. The quality of team members have ended up being
roughly equivalent.

------
minkzilla
Who does one contact at a medium to large size company? Obviously contacting
the CEO would not work.

~~~
yread
Founders@ might work

------
reese_john
Derek Sivers has proposed a similar strategy:

[https://sivers.org/gethired](https://sivers.org/gethired)

------
mrfusion
I’d like more help with step one. Just finding the contact information. I’ve
tried connecting over linked in and never gotten a response.

~~~
goatherders
There are hundreds of tools available for finding everything from email
addresses to phone numbers to physical addresses for work. Apollo.io,
Hunter.io, LeadIQ just to get you started. Most have some tier of "free" if
you only need a handful of contacts per month.

~~~
ghaff
Please do not phone. Maybe that's not universal, but I basically don't pick up
the phone if I don't recognize the caller--or at least think because of area
code it may be someone I should answer. With my work number and never check
messages case, I don't even have a physical phone attached to my line.

~~~
georgespencer
I am a grumpy git, but…

Please also do not email. It feels like every week I'm removing my corporate
contact information from some obnoxious website which sells my email address
having not obtained my permission to store or process it.

Presumably somewhere, long ago, there was a CEO or founder who responded
positively to cold outreach from a Ukrainian outsource dev team or Indian QA
company, but I find all cold outreach to be unwelcome. Making it more personal
just means I have to type my "politeno" text shortcut instead of "gdprsmash".

People celebrate and mythologise the 0.1% of cold outreach success stories and
ignore the fact that 99.9% of it is irritating spam.

~~~
goatherders
Your %'s are off by a startling amount.

~~~
georgespencer
I assume you think the utility derived from cold outreach spam is even LOWER
than I ballparked? :)

~~~
goatherders
To the contrary, proper cold outreach can result in qualified opportunities
for 2-10% of prospects contacted.

~~~
georgespencer
Seems a bit like moving the goalposts. I'm saying that in the aggregate, cold
outreach is annoying and unsuccessful 99.9% of the time. You're saying that's
wrong because proper cold outreach "can" result in qualified opportunities
(not even sales!) for 10% of prospects contacted.

In any event, your best case seems to be that 90% of people are at _best_
unmotivated enough to ignore the message, and in all likelihood would rather
it hadn't come in the first place.

------
dt3ft
relevant: [https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-
learning/article/2018...](https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-
learning/article/2018/05/23/missionu-self-styled-alternative-higher-education-
closes-after)

------
hirako2000
It's a non scalable outreach tactic. It's not a strategy.

Yes it has a good chance to work, if you are willing to spend hours
researching your target, hours producing free content for that target, and
insisting until the target gives up and give you what you want.

~~~
reaperducer
Why does everything have to "scale?" It's an SV-bubble cliché that's really
getting tired.

------
IMTDb
> In dating, "no" always means "no". But in sales and recruiting, “no” doesn’t
> always mean “no”.

What does say "no" in sales and recruiting ?

~~~
plastodon1
> The price of the car is $2000, are you interested?

> No

> The price of the car is $500, are you interested now?

> Yes

~~~
perl4ever
I looked at a used car at a new car dealer a year or two ago, and when I
didn't follow up, they didn't just call me back, but they started calling two,
three times a day, practically every day. They literally wouldn't give up
until I answered the phone, even though I didn't want to talk to them
_because_ I was freaked out at how much they were calling. They didn't
however, offer to sell it for $500. And I'm never, ever, buying a car from
that dealer. In 50 years I will remember that, even if there was one bad apple
salesman or one stupid boss who forced him to do it.

So I think it's too glib to say dating and sales are different. Ghosting and
people who won't take no for an answer are upsetting things that happen in
both settings. People do both because they perceive it's in their interests.

------
hellofunk
If I told you I had an outreach strategy with a perfect record that could be
made available to you, is that something you might be interested in?

------
tagami
^ old sales guy. "no" means "know".

They need to know more about the FABs (feature advantage benefit) you are
offering to solve their problem.

------
MomchilIvanovK
The article provides good value. But it would be better if the guy (Patrick)
also included the script he used to reach out.

1\. Research is important - no doubt about it. Without knowing your prospects,
you can't do anything to persuade them.

2\. Offer value - is also true.

3\. Overcome obstacles - also true!

But I'll add one more - baby steps.

Baby steps means that you shouldn't ask to hire you in your first cold email.
It feels like a lot of work to do and CEOs typically don't have the time.

Instead propose them a time when you can chat more about it so the CEO can see
if you are a good fit, etc.

~~~
patrickrivera
Patrick here. Agreed. In the initial outreach I gave some context and asked to
meet for coffee. Here it is:

"Hi Adam,

My name is Patrick Rivera and we have not met, but since hearing about
MissionU on the Rich Roll podcast I've been thinking about how MissionU has
the opportunity to improve the future of education.

I've spent the last two years trying to get an internship in management
consulting but was repeatedly told I didn't have a chance because I don't go
to a target school. Although I eventually succeeded, I realized there are
millions of people today that don't have pedigree, but do have potential. I
think MissionU would be a grreat fit for me because I'm interested in
empowering these people to develop skills needed to maximize their potential

Additionally, I heard you say on Lewis Howes' podcast that one of MissionU's
challenges is identifying cities to expand into. I've attached some
recommendations based on my research.

Would love to connect over coffee to discuss what you're working on at
MissionU and see if there's any way I can help as I'll be in SF until
Thanksgiving.

Thanks in advance for your time!"

------
joyj2nd
"For example, with MissionU, I used the research phase to understand what the
CEO needed and then created a 13-page PowerPoint deck with data analysis and
recommendations on what they should do."

Well, sometimes it works and sometimes it does not. I would not do this. In
fact, if I were asked to do this, I would agree an ask 20k Okay for it?

When I was a fresh PhD, some companies managed to extract an insane amount of
free work from me.

------
codingdave
This fell flat for me. "Researching needs" started out talking about
understanding the need of your audience, which is correct... but then devolved
into google-stalking them to learn their hobbies. And the rest of the piece
sounded like Sales 101, not a new approach. Which also means that those of us
who are bombarded by cold contacts from sales guys pretty much see all these
actions for what they are - sales pitches. That doesn't mean we won't listen
if you show us a product that solves a problem... but it does mean that
"follow up after a few days" when we don't respond is not going to increase
our desire to engage with you. Your fellow sales folk may commend you for
being "scrappy" and persisting to close a deal, but those of us who you are
trying to actually sell to are just as likely to mentally blacklist you as
annoying.

~~~
tsomerville
He is talking about how to get a job - not sell you something.

~~~
codingdave
That does explain some of it... but was completely unclear because he
literally said at the top, in bold, "it's a strategy with fundamental
principles for any cold outreach."

