Your targeting and messaging suck.
6 ways I know your outbound isn't working...
1. You are warming up and rotating domains.
If you do this to send more than 250 emails per rep per week, you are using the wrong medication on your disease. Bad domain reputation is a symptom of too much volume (of emails, of unsubscribes, etc). You have to send lots of emails bc your targeting and messaging suck and don't book meetings at a high enough rate to not be considered SPAM. There are good uses too, but most people use this for evil.
2. You have a less than 2% reply rate.
Proof is in the pudding, and I see people bragging that they send 30k emails a month to generate 40 "qualified leads" (not meetings, not opps...leads). If you can't have 1 in 20 people reply to your email to book a mtg, then you've not targeted correctly or the message is bad.
3. You have a sub-10% correct connect to meeting booked conversion.
Targeting and messaging just aren't about email. When you can't seem to have 1 out of 10 people who get ahold of agree to a meeting, a big factor is always calling the wrong people or having poor phone skills (messaging).
4. Decks marketing uses look nothing like the decks sales uses.
Classic sales/marketing misalignment. Sales doesn't trust the messaging of marketing bc it doesn't fit their conversations. Then, every rep comes up with their own version. That trickles into emails and phone calls, and results in random targeting criteria and messaging with no cohesiveness (e.g. I read an email and go to the website and it all makes sense together).
5. You judge emails based on your personal preferences.
This is the worst. Just watched an "email expert" talk through 5 subject lines he shared her opinion of. Every one began with "I don't like this..." Know what? Doesn't matter if you like it. Matters if the recipients do. Yet, most targeting and messaging are put through someone's personal preferences filter. (Shocking but whether you use Hey or Hi as ZERO bearing no matter how much you prefer one over the other).
6. You personalize the email to the person.
In that last 5 years, putting personal facts in an email to elicit response went from effective to manipulative. There's no reason to bring up a personal hobby in an email, then make some strange transition to a pitch. People are people, but in B2B sales people have a job at a company with defined responsibilities. That's what they care about in professional communication.
❓ Do you have a great method of contacting the right companies?
Your points are valid, but I want to highlight number 6. Personalized emails don’t need to dive into a prospect's private life... that’s just stalking. 😅
I usually send out personalized emails based on what prospects post on social media. For example, I’ll mention something about their post, product, or website.
That’s the kind of personalized message that should be sent. Anyone doing what you mentioned is totally doing it wrong.
Totally agree with you, personalization should feel relevant, not creepy. Referencing a recent post or something meaningful on their site/product is fair game and often super effective. The issue is when people stretch a random hobby or personal detail into a pitch with zero connection, it just feels forced. Appreciate you calling that out!
Sure man
really appreciate the breakdown and the honesty around effort vs. automation. Too often, lead-gen advice skips over the grunt work and testing phase that actually makes it work.
How do you balance personalization vs. scale when you're building a list? Are you doing micro-segmentation up front?
You're spot on, there’s no shortcut around the testing and iteration phase. For balancing personalization vs. scale, we focus a lot on micro-segmentation upfront. The more tightly defined the segment, the less personalization you need per message because the content already feels personal. We’ll layer in light customization where it matters, but the real win is matching the right message to the right slice of the market. Curious how you approach it?