3 Reasons to Avoid the "Pitch Slap" In Your Cold Outreach

5 min read

Open up your email or your LinkedIn inbox on any given day and what do you see?

People trying to sell you their services, right?

And most of the time it’s one of two approaches:

Either the seller spends their whole message talking about how great their service is and how much money they’re able to make for other people…

Or…

They’re making incorrect assumptions about you and their business as a reason for why you should buy their services.

So it’s natural that the large majority of business owners I talk to about their outreach messaging are concerned with one thing:

They don’t want to be “salesy”

That word - salesy - is associated with these selfish, annoying, and tone deaf messages. Another word for it is “spammy”

But still, every single day business owners get caught up in the cold outreach frenzy.

It is, after all, the fastest way to get new leads for a B2B service.

And cold outreach certainly does work.

But there are certain risks to the approach, especially if you’re doing it the way most of those low-tier spammers in your inbox are approaching it.

So let’s look at 3 big risks you run if you do cold outreach the lazy way:

• It burns through your best leads.
• It’s what all the low level people in your industry are doing
• It doesn’t give you a chance to show the value you can truly bring to the table

Then we’ll make some suggestions for how to improve those response rates, get more people on calls, and close clients who will actually be excited to work with you and pay you what you’re worth.

Burning through your best leads

I’ve been doing cold outreach via LinkedIn and email since 2021.

I got my chops at a “lead generation agency” a business whose sole purpose was to set appointments for service providers by sending sequences of emails & LinkedIn messages.

And in the 2 years I worked there, I noticed something:

We needed a huge amount of leads for the process to work.

To book 10 appointments we’d probably need to message 1000 people.

And out of those 1000 people, probably 100 or more would say “unsubscribe”

Think about that.

Many more people were offended and annoyed by the outreach than were helped by it.

Assuming that you’re able to find some well-targeted leads, do you really want to have a solid chunk of them irritated and annoyed at you?

And especially important:

People weren’t getting annoyed because they weren’t good prospects for the business… they were annoyed because of the communication itself.

Otherwise good prospects, now firmly putting us in the “annoying spammer” category.

This is a huge missed opportunity. You’ve got good prospects who will never know how much you could actually help them, simply because they way they found out about you was annoying to them.

Working this way means that you have to constantly be on the hunt for new leads. Getting bigger and bigger lists.

If you need to book 100 sales appointments a year for your business to thrive, are you really going to be able to find 10,000 leads each and every year?

Wouldn’t it be easier to have a higher proportion of people be willing to listen to your message?

There are many approaches that can help you reach out to your prospects and avoid getting treated like a spammer.

One of the most effective ways that I’ve seen is to avoid asking leads for any of their time (their most valuable commodity) until you’ve given them something truly valuable.

Most spammers aren’t going to do the research & work necessary to come up with a report, a manual, a checklist, or some other resource that leads will actually find valuable.

It’s a huge way to stand out.

Cold-pitching is what all the low-level people in your industry are doing

When I get a cold pitch from someone claiming to be able to help me make thousands of dollars (despite the fact that they know nothing about what I do)...

I’m afraid my eyes are going to get stuck forever staring up at my eyebrows because I’m rolling them so hard.

It’s just not believable.

And it’s not trustworthy.

The businesses I trust rarely do outreach this way.

They do outreach. Most successful service businesses do. But it’s not this kind of selfish, annoying SPAM.

Because the best businesses in any niche truly know what their customers are looking for, and how they can help.

So they don’t need to rely on generic outreach.

That’s a low-level tactic.

So if you show up in someone’s inbox with a message that goes

“We help ___ add $XXXXX every month by ___”

You seem like a low-level business.

Even if you’re not.

Your best prospects will either lump you in with the beginners, or with the people who know better but don’t care and are just “playing the numbers game”

What’s the better approach?

Once again, if you want to stand out from the low-tier service providers who do a crappy job for a low price…

Put more effort into your outreach.

Build a more targeted list.

Spend time thinking about what you can give to your prospects in a non-pushy, non-needy way that would actually help them.

Brief audits. Reviews of their work if they want. Reports on industry trends that will affect them. Checklists for doing something they actually need to do.

Help people take a step in the right direction and PROVE that you know what you’re talking about, BEFORE you ever ask them for half an hour of their time.

Which is closely related to the third reason to not do spammy cold-pitch outreach…

It doesn’t give you a chance to show the value you can truly bring to the table

Burning through leads is bad.

Having 100 people - who might have been good prospects for you - decide that you’re worthless because of a lazy sequence of LinkedIn messages is bad.

But even beyond the negative impressions that this style of outreach makes in your clients…

Is the fact that it doesn’t let you show the value that you truly bring to the table.

Because your prospects immediately put their shields up when they see something “salesy” (or spammy), they’ll never understand how good you actually are at what you do.

You might spend all afternoon trying to figure out how to cram your most impressive results into 150 words so that people will “get it”…

And all that happens is that those people put up their sales shield because they’re so sick of getting sold to.

But those people on your prospect list really do need your services.

But they don’t understand what you can do for them. They don’t realize that your business is exactly what they need to solve some of their most pressing problems.

Because that 150 word message where you go on and on about “we help ___ make $XXXXX by ____” sounds exactly like every other annoying, spammy message they’ve ever gotten, so they chuck it in the trash can without a second thought.

And they have no idea that the solution to their problems (you) was on the other side of that email all along.

It’s not enough to make claims about your results with cold outreach.

People don’t care about - and often don’t believe - your results until they realize that you understand them.

So making your outreach focused on them and not on you is - paradoxically - how you can show off more of what you’re capable of.

So rather than pitching…

Ask.

Ask about their problems.

Ask if a resource would be valuable.

Ask if they’d like a quick audit or review of something they’re working on - not if they’d like to give up an hour of their time for a “free” discovery call.

And when they reply…

You can show another facet of how good you are at what you do.

Not because you’re droning on about your results and your wins and your case studies.

But because you’re showing the kind of detailed interest in them & their problems that only an expert could have.

Conclusion

We looked at three big problems with doing “cold pitch” outreach the way almost everybody in your industry does it.

• It burns through your best leads
• It’s what all the low & mid level people in your industry are doing
• It doesn’t give you a chance to show the value you can truly bring to the table

And we looked at the fundamental thing you can start doing today to improve your outreach:

Stop pitching, and start looking for ways to actually give something valuable to your prospects.

This takes more effort, but it’s effort that most of your competitors simply aren’t going to put forth.

So dig in, spend a few hours of research, and offer them something valuable and free.

NOT a “free” discovery call that actually costs them their most valuable resource: their time.

But a report that’s relevant to trends in their industry. A checklist that will save them some headaches. A quick video recording auditing their website.

This REAL value is something that most “spammers” would never dream of creating.

So it’s among the best ways to stand out in the inbox when you do your outreach.