Dear SaaStr: Cold Emails Are Not Working for My B2B SaaS Startup. What Am I Doing Wrong?
We’ve all been there. The fairly crappy, “my product is so great”, outbound random email to 30–100 folks when you are trying to get your start-up off the ground.
That never really works, absent extreme luck:
- No one has ever heard of you;
- You don’t yet know how to describe your value proposition compellingly in 1 line properly; and
- You likely are in a crowded space and there are already other solutions people have heard of; and
- Why would someone respond, anyway?
But the thing is, outbound always works. At least a little, at least to some extent. At least a little bit. If … if … you do it right.
Here’s what usually works, at least a little:
- Take a pause, and really find the 10-50 best potential prospects.
- Really find the right stakeholder.
- Find a way to either get warm intros into any of them, or at least, craft the best email — and subject line — that’s ever been crafted in the history of emailkind.
- Tweak it, revise it, personalize it. Make is so great it’s the best elevator pitch — ever. Get 20 folks you trust to give you feedback on it. Make it an email all of them would buy just reading the email alone — even without ever talking to you, or seeing a demo, or anything else. Make the subject line alone so compelling, you’d almost buy based on that.
- And research each and every prospect. Tell them exactly how you’d solve a big problem for them.
We call this “account-based marketing” now, to some extent. Carefully, properly targeting your very best prospects.
If your product (x) solves a real problem 10x better than anything else, and (y) you get to the right decision makers with (z) the perfect and succinct pitch on how you are solving one of their top problems — it should work. It should once in a while, at least get you a call. Not every time. Not even very often. But if both are true — at least once, to start.
a little more here: https://www.saastr.com/outbound-…
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