Talking to a salesperson friend of mine she said 

"I keep sending emails and nothing ever happens".

She uses emails in two different ways.

1. To get an initial contact, so cold outreach with a prospect.

2. To move opportunities along.

In both cases, she find that she gets very little response, if anything.

In the first, her prospects, if they are like me find this constant bombardment of email from people I don't know is an irritant.  I for one, create rules so that if spam me in email, then I won't see your emails again as they will automatically be taken to the waste paper basket.

Afterall, Hubspot says that email marketing has a 97% failure rate, see article and research here.

In his blog "email prospecting is dead", cold calling advocate, Anthony Iannarino states 

"The average business person receives 127 emails each day and sends 40 emails. Let's assume on average, it takes you three minutes to read and respond to an email. The email from your client takes you eleven minutes, and the emails that don't require any action take almost no time at all. At three minutes an email, it would take you 6.3 hours to respond to the 127 emails.


Most people are overwhelmed by the amount of email they receive each day, with most unaddressed and pushed off the first page as another 127 emails flood in behind it each day.

Whether the email is automated, sent with the loving care of a salesperson with the intention of helping the client improve their business results, or an InMail on LinkedIn, it is immediately suspect and will be greeted by a firm press of the delete button."


You have to understand that all of us, yes all of us have been bombarded with email in the past and a new person reaching out, we are automatically going to think

"I don't like you, I don't trust you and all I'm going to do is block you".

2. The same if you are chasing business through email, you have a high degree of being ghosted as people don't see email as a place where people, especially salespeople, provide any help, insight, support. Or as some people might say, "value".

Yamini Rangan, from Hubspot backs this up, she says "we are inundated with email, especially busy executives and we are overwhelmed.  So how do you cut through this, that is where the key is?" 

Yamini Rangan, says "everything that was represented in the physical world are now represented online.  Buyers are way more savvy than before. Way more access to information then they did before.  These conversations are taking place throughout the customer life cycle, they are not just at the front end.  This is one trend that will continue to grow in 2021 and 2022." she goes on to make a great point, with regard to sales and marketing professionals.

"This year, has taught us we can so more productive and so much for efficient by using digital to connect with our prospects and customers."

This is very true, digital and social allows us to do more for less, it enables us to increase our output at less cost.

If you look at cold calling, I have one call with somebody it takes 10 minutes, with the example I show below, social enables you to scale.  Eric for example, (see example below) posts something, it takes 10 minutes and he gets 6 C-Level meetings.

You cannot get that sort of result from advertising, cold calling or email marketing.  Just think if you scaled that across your business?  Just think of the pipeline and revenue impact that would make for your business?