The definition of spam and cold calls is pretty simple — it’s outreach that the recipient didn’t ask for. If you do cold outreach, you’re showing that you’re not an expert and you’re not really “marketing” to folks.
I recently read (part of) a book called “No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls.” by Latané Conant, largely because the title grabbed my attention. I talk about this stuff a lot, so I was curious to see their angle. It wasn’t good.
Early on, Conant shares the experience of being super busy with life (arms full, dropping the kids off at school, worried about a meeting later that morning) and being disrupted by a cold call. It’s the worst, no doubt. The book is very clear that cold calling is awful, which I completely agree with.
However, later in the very first chapter, she shifts gears with this:
“If you follow that rule— if you only send emails to people you know a lot about and who are in- market— it’s nearly impossible to spam. When you deliver content you know people are interested in, right at the time when it’s useful to them, that’s not spam. It’s just a good customer experience.“
By their definition, it’s not “cold” or “spam” if you research your targets ahead of time. Does that really track? I don’t think so.
So what is spam?
Seth Godin says spam is “the email you didn’t ask to get” and that it’s “not moral to steal people’s attention“.
David C. Baker asks if any other experts ever reach out cold, saying “divorce attorney, or maybe it’s a medical practitioner, an expert, or maybe it’s somebody that’s trying to get you out of a tax issue or something, did any of these people call you ahead of time and ask for your business?“.
Baker also shares that “outreach is unprofessional and unbecoming of the expert firm“.
The bigger problem is what Conant says above, with “when you deliver content you know people are interested in…” because every spammer thinks that way. They (hopefully) believe that their solution will help people, and therefore it’s their duty to send it to as many people as possible. Maybe they’re right, maybe they’re wrong, but either way it just doesn’t scale. If every company that thought they had the solution to your problem cold called you, your phone would literally never stop ringing.
I hope that the product or service that you’re offering is truly valuable and that you make a ton of sales, but I also hope you do marketing the right way so you can be part of the solution rather than part of the problem.
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