Why Your Outreach Isn't Working: Hilarious Examples

Doing the Work to Prove You’re Human and Can Deliver Value

Credit: Tech Sales Guy

This was written well over a year ago and it’s as relevant as ever today.

Recently participated in an X spaces and one of the key takeaways is that AI is helping productivity but a lot of people use it the wrong way. It’s not a silver bullet for personalization or cranking out more emails for productivity’s sake. We’re not paid for activity, we’re paid to source and close deals.

To the point above, you need to do the work to show you’re an actual human understands on some level, and can potentially provide value.

Credit: Ant Nat

Get ready for a few laughs in today’s post along with some key takeaways:

• Stop using AI to blasting/spam

• Do your research: have a POV

• Have a reason to reach out

Before we dive in I wanted to quickly note, that at the end of the day, we’re just slinging software. It’s sales, try not to take life too seriously.

I’m not going to call anyone out because let’s be real, no one’s perfect, even me. I’ve messed up before on outreach, which I’ve shared before.

All that said, it’s always interesting to be on to the other side of what you do for a living. Every time I interact with other sales people on the other side of the table as a prospect/customer, I’m always observing how a fellow practitioner approaches their craft.

Stop Blasting/Spamming

More often than not, especially in tech, we’re seeing a shift towards quantity over quality. I’m seeing this and I’m not even a BUYER. Can you imagine what a prospect’s inbox looks like?

Because AI is leveraged the wrong way, you get emails like this:

I don’t research tarsier vocalizations or diverse roles on film production. It’s not even my ICP. There’s nowhere to go from here …

I don’t want to join you for coffee, I don’t even know you. Our company doesn’t even use Calendly …

This one was actually OK.

Except for the fact that I don’t need these tools - I’m the wrong persona.

The BLUE highlight however shows a little digging for info in the follow up on potential contacts that might be relevant. I’ll give them credit for that.

Do Your Research: Have a POV

Credit: Florin Tatulea
***Check out Prospecting from the Trenches by Florin (I subscribe as well)

Developing a POV helps not just on discovery calls but also on outreach. You can make “cold” outreach “warm”, like TSG mentioned. Find commonalities amongst customer pain points which demonstrates how you can help or use resources like Florin mentioned above.

All of this can help you drive towards a hypothesis of how you can help or why it might be timely to reach out. Most importantly, why “you, Mr. Prospect, should take time to respond or hop on a call to learn more.”

All this to say -

Have a Reason to Reach Out

It’s better to just ask yourself “what is the reason I’m reaching out”?

Credit: Kyle Asay

The same advice above applies to cold outreach.

Better off sending less, but more targeted emails. Based on the examples above, cranking out emails for activity’s sake is clearly still in practice.

You can do more volume, but more targeted. The net outcome is you don’t just landing a meeting or response, but a higher likelihood of converting it to an opportunity. Better yet, a higher likelihood it turns into deal that yields commission.

It’s what we’re all here for anyway.

Thanks again for reading and as always, see you all next week.

As always, thanks for reading and see you all next week. If you have any questions or thoughts, shoot me a DM or email andrew@hackingsales.xyz.

-Andrew K

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