Chapter 06Cold into warm

Put an invitation inside a cold email and you're playing a different instrument from cold email alone. The inbox, the sending machine and the stranger on the other end stay the same. The result changes by a wide margin, because the first sentence asks for nothing.

Founders often expect me to defend cold email. I don't. When someone tells me it's dead, I agree with them, and then I add one condition:

So I agree, cold email doesn't work. It's super shitty until you marry it with a warm invite.

The uphill battle

Why email at all? Because that's where the decisions get made. Conferences, ads and events are all trying to get you into one place, and I'd rather go there directly:

our realization is that okay it's all about the inbox anyways that's where you want to land and so why not go straight there

The trouble is what most people do once they get there:

once you learn about [cold] email everybody does it wrong in our view which is that they're just asking for stuff

I've watched the same arc play out with founder after founder. They discover the tools, load a list, and send the pitch they'd give at a booth:

And so people learn about cold email, they go out guns blazing. They hit a dead end. They go, oh, it doesn't work.

They're half right.

My business partner Charles has been doing cold email for over a decade. When I joined him I saw the numbers from the inside, and I'll be straight with you about what they said:

direct sales via cold email, truth be told, doesn't work. Okay, it doesn't work. I mean, it works but it's an uphill battle.

The low reply rate is only the first problem. The mailboxes need weeks of warming before they can send. The spam filters are waiting. And if you do get a meeting, you walk into it in the wrong posture:

Once you get on the call even, which is kind of like a desert in itself, you get on the call and it's like, you know, You're subservient trying to sell something to them.

We tried pointing the machine at fundraising instead of sales. It did better, and for some founders it did a lot better. It still felt wrong in the room, and I could hear why on the calls:

the frequency of the call was off. It was our founder entering, and it's like a junior associate. It's like subservient. It's like begging. It's like pleading, and it's like the energy's off, like just from the get-go.

Begging is a posture, and a posture shows up in the first thirty seconds of a meeting, whatever the deck says.

The anomaly

Then something in the data stopped making sense. I tell this part on a lot of first calls, because it's the moment the whole business turned:

But there was one anomaly where when we coupled cold email ... with a warm invite. Our podcast numbers kind of just went through the roof. People don't mark you as spam. Key decision makers end up showing up on the call instead of like Joe, the associate who's like there to filter.

Every rule we'd learned started bending at once. On another call I said it more simply:

whenever we. Ran campaigns where we invited people to our podcast or our customers' podcast, it would break all the rules. Like as in, like we wouldn't need to warm up mailboxes for two weeks.

We used the same tools on the same lists, and changed only what the email offered. On one call in September I put the difference in numbers:

your conversions go from 0.2% to 8%, and you can pretty much talk to anybody.

I don't need you to trust the exact figure. The order of magnitude is the point. Your own test will tell you where your number lands.

Why the invite gets through

Three filters stand between a cold email and the person you want. The software. The assistant or associate whose job is to say no. And the person themselves, who has seen your email a thousand times before you wrote it.

An ask trips all three. An invitation slips past all three, and the middle one is my favourite. In most companies, somebody junior reads the inbox first. When that somebody sees a pitch, they bin it. When they see an invitation for their boss to be interviewed, the opposite happens:

if [the associate] gets our email, he's Walking it straight upstairs to the big boss because it's going to make him look good

The gatekeeper becomes your courier. I said it in one breath on a call in September:

It pierces through all the spam, all the filtration, all the human filters ... and it goes straight to the top dog. Every time.

And the meeting that comes out of it starts in a different place. You walk in as the host, not the vendor at the door:

And the channel does not change ... But the posture changes. See, when somebody shows up on your show, you're a peer. You're not like subservient to them.

You're still sending cold email, only now from a different chair.

Two rules for the first touch

The invitation only works if the first email stays clean. I've watched founders take this idea, love it, and then wreck it with two habits they brought from the old way. So there are two rules, and I don't bend them.

Rule one: the first email carries no links. That includes the calendar link, the website, the deck and the "watch our latest episode" line. Links are how filters decide you're a marketer. Here's how I said it to a founder in August, about the calendar link everyone wants to include:

I wouldn't put a calendar link in the first one just because that can end you up in spam so if they say yes then I would send the calendar link. That's like a big cold email no no.

And to another, while walking through the invitations I'd sent founders ahead of a trip to New York:

should I send you a booking link? Notice there's no URLs because that's another no, no. People don't know that if you send a URL and an email, you're going to land in spam.

You ask whether they want the link. They say yes. Then you send it. The yes is the point. It's the first small agreement in the relationship, and it costs them nothing.

It's written into the rules we draft with:

for first time email you should never have URLs

Rule two: the first email carries no pitch. Nothing about what you sell, what you're raising, or how you could help them. The email is an invitation and only an invitation:

whenever you go out into the world with cold email especially and your angle is I want something. It doesn't work.

I've reached the point where I'd rather not take on a founder who won't run the invitation at all:

if you don't have a podcast, we've seen cold email not work. If you're just trying to sell or pitch.

The pitch has a place. It comes at the end of a debrief, with permission, after the other person has spent the better part of an hour telling you what they need. That's chapter 10. In the first email it has no place at all:

To a podcast where you're not seeking something, but instead you're giving something

What the email looks like

Keep it short and plain, with one reason it's them and one question. I described the shape on a call this summer, and the description is better than any template I could print:

we try and keep it short simple

just be like hey whatever blah blah blah saw that you invested in fintech blah blah blah would love to have you on my podcast and then you'll see the conversions go through the roof

Read past the "blah blah blah" and the structure is all there: a greeting, one specific and true thing about them, and the invitation.

The subject line should look like a person wrote it, not a marketing team. I like it in lowercase:

small cap subject line at least looks more like I just sent this out in a taxi and I saw your thing on LinkedIn and I just fired it off

If they don't answer, the sequence follows up a second and a third time, none of them with a link and none with a pitch. When they say yes, the calendar link goes out, and they book the pre-interview. Chapter 7 starts there.

The plumbing, briefly

The engine gets its own chapter later, in chapter 13, but two pieces of it belong here because they protect the first touch.

Never send cold from your main address. If enough strangers mark it as spam, you lose the inbox you run your company from:

My main email just got jeopardized and I'll never be able to send it from that email.

I send from separate domains for exactly that reason:

I don't use sunnyray.com, but I use domains that forward to sunnyray.com because I would never use my normal email

And keep each mailbox's daily volume low. Volume comes from many mailboxes sending a little, never from one mailbox sending a lot:

I personally wouldn't send more than 10 emails a day cold. Why? Because you don't want to be marked as spam.

Arriving warm

Put all of it together and you get something that sounds backwards: a cold email that arrives warm, read by a stranger as a compliment and carried upstairs by the gatekeeper. I said it on a call in July, describing what happens when the email gives instead of takes:

it doesn't come off as being scammy either because you're genuinely interested in that person and putting a spotlight on them. And essentially you systematically turn your cold market into a warm market.

The channel is the same one everyone else uses. The posture is the opposite. That's why it works when everything else in the same inbox doesn't.

Try this week

Go back to the outreach email you wrote in chapter 2, the one where you underlined every sentence about you.

Rewrite it as an invitation. Keep the same recipient. Then hold it to the two rules and a short checklist:

1. No links at all. If a link feels necessary, replace it with a question: "should I send you the details?" 2. No pitch. Delete every sentence about your product, your round, your results or your help. 3. One specific, true sentence about them. Something you could only write if you'd looked. 4. One question at the end. Would you come on the show? 5. A lowercase subject line of a few words that reads like a person typed it.

Now count the words about you. Your name in the signature doesn't count. Everything else does. Aim for zero. If you're above ten, you're still asking, and the reader will feel it before they finish the first line.

Send the new version to twenty people from the list you built in chapter 4. Send the old version to nobody. At the end of the week, count the replies and how many came from someone more senior than the person you'd have reached with a pitch.

What would your inbox look like if every email you sent this month asked for nothing?