The Problem With Cold Outreach In 2024

These days you see people saying cold outreach is dead, and you see others claiming they are easily scaling cold outreach and hitting 6 figures per month with it.

What’s the difference?

Some would say deliverability, but to be honest with deliverability, that is just something I would ask a deliverability expert about.

And when I did ask my friend who is a deliverability expert about why people online were complaining so much, he just said:

“Yeah, it gets harder every year, but to be honest if it is not working it’s a skill issue.”

So the ‘problem’ is not really deliverability. If your emails don’t hit the inbox, you can figure out why by running some simple testing, or just getting a fresh set of cold email domains and sending lower volume.

The real problem is that you look desperate when you reach out to prospects and beg to work with them.

“Please sir take my lead magnet!”

“Please sir chat with me for 15 minutes!”

“Please sir let me work for free!”

And if there is nothing that repulses people and prospects like desperation.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but mostly because it puts the prospect on a pedestal and makes them look down on you.

People never give money to someone below them, unless they are making some kind of donation.

Imagine if a homeless guy was asking for $3000/mo to run ads for you.

Quite literally nobody is saying yes to that unless they just want to donate 3k/mo and don’t care about a return.

Think about your last 5 sales calls.

Can you honestly say that the prospect saw you as an equal on that call? Or did they kind of push you around a bit, even subtly?

It’s not always a complete frame control, it can show in many ways, like:

• Going through their own pacing to make a decision (never getting back to you)

• High no-show rate

• Not giving you all the information you need (staying at surface level info)

• Shopping around multiple vendors

When the prospect doesn’t respect you, everything is just harder. And with cold outreach, it can be hard to get the respect back because you reached out to them, not the other way around.

In my experience, there are a few strong ways of solving this:

1. Having good social proof (case studies, personal brand, references). This one is kind of obvious

2. Acting like you’ve been there before. This can take time, but just imagine how someone like Hormozi would act if they were selling a 3k/mo package to an eCom store. Do you think he’s gonna be all excited and uppity?

3. Focus on qualifying them for a problem, and getting them to admit it. As soon as the prospect admits they have a problem in X area that they haven’t solved, and/or don’t know how to solve it (or don’t have time) you win. You can do this in your cold emails by focusing on specific problems and the reasons behind them. For example, if they are interested in lead generation, there is a massive problem in their business. Find it.

These are all great, but none of them will solve the secret #4 - which is your self image.

If you get on the call and you don’t really believe you belong there, you will always pedestalize the prospect. That’s just the way it is.

You’ll be fumbly, you’ll get disrespected on the call and 9/10 times you will leave the call empty handed, the exact same way a girl leads on a guy.

To solve for self image is a tough one. You need competence. You need proof of work. And you need to act like you’ve been there before.

But it’s really a matter of internal work and changing your identity into the person who gets the results you desire.

For that, I would recommend writing down the vision you have of that person and everything about them, then simply acting as that person starting today.

Do that, and the results will flow, and you’ll be surprised what it does for your cold outreach.