I have 2 stories & 3 lessons for you based on emails I got from people I know yet 1 sent me a cold email and another sent me a half-warm email…

1st Story goes like this:

I got a cold email from a vendor I hired in the past…

looked like they started a new campaign and they clearly didn’t check their list.

The ol’ ‘spray and hope something lands’ approach.

But that wasn’t the worst part…

The awkward part was that the email was from someone pretending to be the CEO of the company.

I personally know the CEO and this guy on the email wasn’t it.

Why did they do that?

Because an email sent from a CEO has a higher likelihood of authority, response rate… yadda yadda

But in this case they had someone pretend to be the CEO so the actual founder wouldn’t have to field the replies and do admin work.

On the email the CTA was a to book a call, with some other random stranger…

2nd Story:

I had a founder do a mass email outreach to their warm network.

The goal of the email was to watch a Loom video.

The email, although from a warm contact, bypassed the relationship and went straight to the CTA.

In the video, you can tell it was a canned video message sent to hundreds of people (not an issue)

The issue was that I didn’t watch it.

The goal of the email failed.

Why?

Because it overlooked the relationship and the email might as well have said “hey, hope you’re still breathing. Watch this”

3 Lessons:

1 – Don’t Lie

Being honest and transparent actually helps you sell better.

2 – Keep congruency

Just like adding another step in your funnel, adding random people your prospects have to talk to can lower conversions.

3 – Focus on the relationships, even at scale

Take 2 extra minutes to actually add personalization to your outreach.

Rough math:

if taking 2 minutes per contact can increase your response rate by 2x (remember this is just by a couple of % points), allowing you to send FEWER emails & get MORE results, is that worth your time?