As a founder or growth leader, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that outbound email is no longer worth your time and money. To some extent, that’s right - it’s no longer what it used to be. But what exactly did it “used to be” and did that ever make sense to begin with?

 

There are three ways that humans throughout history have ever been able to introduce themselves to someone new: With their face & voice, with their voice alone, or with their written words.

 

When someone new approaches us using one of these channels, we are very good at using faces and voices to assess reliability. More accurately, those of us who were not very good at using faces and voices to assess reliability didn’t survive and pass on our genes. However, we are far less adapted to assessing reliability using written words alone because we’ve had a few hundred years less practice. 

 

This is not to say that it’s impossible to make an effective introduction using written words alone - much of the American and other revolutions were possible thanks to some pretty persuasive letters - but the degree of difficulty has always been higher, and remains so today. What changed in the last quarter century or so was scale.

 

Can you imagine writing letters to a few thousand prospects per month with a quill pen? Even with the printing press, it would take days or weeks to create and then mail your message to your prospective customers. But all of this was before email and - importantly - mailmerge technology. And once tools like Mixmax were paired with (increasingly inexpensive) databases like Apollo, early adopters could send messages to thousands of prospects at once, each of whom was still receiving and evaluating the message through an old mental model that had not yet caught up to the latest technological advancements. In other words, an email still looked like a letter to your prospect. And subliminally, a letter was something that took research and effort.

 

This means that we used to perceive our inboxes to be full mostly of messages from people who actually wrote them. When the pandemic hit and cold outbound volume skyrocketed, this changed. Now, we’ve become aware that our inboxes are full mostly of messages from people who did not actually write them.

 

And we’re not happy about it.

 

As a result, our treatment of each individual message is different as a result - even when the targeting is good and the content indicates a good fit. It’s socially acceptable to not respond to a cold email. That was not true in 2018.

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In 2020, our founder wrote a blog post that, in retrospect, predicted the immediate future:

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"Email as a medium is weak in persuasion. It is two-dimensional, lacks flair, is difficult to personalize, and does not allow for any of the creative sales techniques that need to happen in a good pitch."

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We saw this reality play out over the intervening five years. Salespeople fought against it and tried harder and harder to find the very perfect nugget of personalization to get the attention of their prospects (most tried to use AI to do so). They were solving the wrong problem and they have failed. Many have given up. Those who have not are increasingly grating. Cold email is no longer an effective direct response channel because prospects evolved to the technology.

 

So cold email isn’t worth what it used to be, but what is it worth? Certainly less, but - we believe - not nothing. Because the time is finally right for cold outbound email to take its place not as a miscast direct response channel, but as the world’s best advertising channel. Email is highly ineffective at selling, but highly effective at identifying who is interested in being sold to.

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From the same blog post:

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"A way to think about this is to organize the world into three very broad categories:

 

• 'Fans' - People who will always buy your product or service regardless of the sales process

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• 'Detractors' - People who will never buy your product or service regardless of the sales process

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• 'Evaluators' - People who could be persuaded to buy your product or service depending on the sales process​

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Most CEOs, product people, etc. tend to think of sales as dealing with the third group of prospects (Evaluators). As a society, we possess a collective image of an old school used car salesman (probably overweight, probably with a mustache) chomping on a cigar and doing whatever he can to make a deal. The image persists even as technology changes the world (including the world of sales) more and more quickly with each passing year. 

 

It is true that, even today, there are people who are extremely good at dealing with Evaluators. These are the “natural salespeople” of the world (including our used car salesman above). But the secret to good cold outbound sales - particularly for companies that have not yet achieved product-market fit or crossed the chasm - is that the job for early-stage B2B companies is much more about working hard to find Fans than working hard to persuade Evaluators.

 

If you let that sink in for a moment, it’s actually a startling revelation. Sales: An exercise in discovery instead of persuasion."

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At Incendium, we agree that cold outbound email is (mostly) now ineffective as a direct response channel. But if we can’t sell to cold leads, shouldn’t we turn them into warm leads first? With this goal in mind, email is probably the most effective channel there has ever been. We just need to reimagine how we’re using it.