How to design your first cold outreach sequence
Best practices for maximizing response rates
It goes without saying that when it comes to generating leads at an early-stage startup, a warm outreach motion is the preferred starting point because your connect rate with prospects is literally 10-100x higher than with cold outreach.
But when you don’t have a big network of investors, advisors and colleagues who are connected to people who match your ideal customer profile and willing to help you with intros, you need a cold outreach motion to keep filling the top of your funnel.
Setting up a cold outreach motion the wrong way will result in extremely low response rates and extremely high disappointment. To avoid embarking on an exercise in futility use the following best practices, which are covered in detail in this issue:
Focus on the sweet spot of your target market
Find an external signal that your prospect has the problem you solve
Use plain language to describe what you do
Meet your prospect in the channels they use most
Make your messaging channel-appropriate
Keep your sequence short
More people > more companies
Focus on the sweet spot of your target market
Given the low response rates of cold outreach its easy to get sucked into thinking you can overcome them with volume i.e. a massive target account list. This never works, in fact its the underlying reason why response rates keep declining. The more you increase the size of your target market, the more you drift into the margins of relevance. AI is not the solution either.
Instead focus on the sweet spot of your ICP — people who look like your current customers because they share multiple, specific attributes with them. The more they look like your current customers, the more likely they will have heard of you from industry colleagues and the more likely they are to respond to your value prop and insights.