In this article, Marina Vaz, CEO of Scooto, talks about the failure of cold prospecting and uses her email inbox as an example.
People, I come here to ask for mercy.
This is a screenshot from the beginning of October, from my inbox (of what didn’t end up in spam).
The approaches range from “so-and-so mentioned you in the conversation” (he wrote “mentioned”, which gives away that he wrote it himself), to a case in which the same person sent me an e-mail two days in a row with “Proposal” in the title and another with “Return of proposal” as if he were returning a proposal that I had asked for. I didn’t ask for a proposal.
In another post, I saw a prospecting email headlined “Letter of resignation”, but it was really just a trigger to get me to open the email.
I know you want leads at any cost, but that’s not possible. What do you think the result is when all the companies use the same robot to send templates to all the people in decision-making positions on LinkedIn?
Long before the LGPD took hold, Google and LinkedIn blocked you, and if you passed, the company blocked you. With a snot on your finger.
And how do you approach people? You buy a drink, strike up a conversation on a subject you think the person will like, talk about soccer at the reception, talk about celebrities in the lounge, you study your audience to find out how to make an impact. Then you get to B2B prospecting and everyone wants to be the bad boy who “hacked” the system with a 50% open rate, hiding the fact that the next day their email doesn’t get anywhere.
I’m going to teach you how to **sell to me**, in the hope that my inbox will see better days:
Do you want me to open your e-mail? Show me that you know Scooto, that you’ve read a piece of mine and that something made an impact on you, that you’ve seen Scooto in X place and that’s aroused some curiosity in you, and be specific about that curiosity. I’ve got a lot of text published here, there’s Instagram, there’s videos of me all over the place, there’s a podcast that I even talk about from my childhood (Desnegocio, of course), all packed with useful information for prospecting.
You can’t do that with everyone, but you can be much more assertive, you can get useful answers, you can even get a little space in the diary because you’ve stroked my ego. Please, people, it’s not just by increasing opportunities that you increase sales. It’s by increasing conversion, improving the price, shortening the sales cycle…
But there’s no robot for that. And then the scoundrels cry because, well, they have to work.
Marina Vaz, founder and CEO of Scooto.