One of my good friends, a founder of an AI company in the sales space, showed me a staggering statistic recently. The volume of cold outreach has jumped by 50x over the past ten years. Thinking a little deeper, however, that makes sense. Emailing people in mass has become easier and easier over the last ten years.
As of today, there is no anonymity with contact info. Between tools like ZoomInfo, Apollo, RocketReach, Huntr, etc, etc you may assume that anyone at any point in time can find at least a few ways to contact you. We also have an ever-increasing number of tools that help you mass reach customers. Outreach and SalesLoft are two of the most well-known, and now there is a rise of AI tools that help you write more contacts faster and even help you with cold calling multiple people simultaneously.
How is anyone supposed to get through? I’ve written a bit of a guide describing how you can break through the noise a bit here. Look at that if you want a tactical, tangible set of steps to help you reach people better.
Here, however, I want to talk more about the philosophy of breaking through the noise.
The core, of ensuring that you break through the noise is to ensure that the person you reach out to feels special. Likely, every person you are trying to reach has 100 other, similar people trying to contact them as well. After all, their contact information is public and outreach automation across all channels is easier than ever.
Why is this so important? Let's talk about an analogy that most people may have experienced: eating at a restaurant. It easy to find a place that has good food. There are a plethora of amazing street food, fast food chains, and long-time mom-and-pop restaurants that have something amazing.
Despite the amazing food, what is the likelihood that you talk about these places to other people? In the case of all of these, you'll likely let someone know if they live near you and are looking for something new to try. But, you're probably not going to go out of your way to tell everyone about it.
“Yeah, there’s a really good sandwich place around the corner.” - You
Now, let's imagine one of these places has great service. There may be an old couple who runs a local deli and makes great sandwiches, and they both are always very kind and helpful when you enter the place. In essence, they make you feel good. Now, your likelihood of telling others about that restaurant has increased substantially.
“Have you gone to Pop’s Deli yet? It’s quite good and the couple who runs it have been running the shop for 10 years. I love the turkey club there. On Rye!”
Alright. So great service separates a place that you're open to go to vs. one that you rave about. But what is it that separates a place that makes amazing sandwiches from a 3-star Michelin Restaurant? Well, according to a 3 star chef, Motokazu Nakamura, the difference is the level of service, not food.
“In terms of pure taste, street eats like takoyaki and okonomiyaki are excellent in their own right. The reason why people come to fine-dining restaurants is to have an uncommon experience in an uncomment venue…. I believe that true service is doing one’s absolute best to cater to every individual diner, whether the customer is aware of your efforts or not. All the factors I have just mentioned make up the complete experience that we call service.”
That attention to detail and service is what sets these top level restaurants apart from their peers. It isn’t the food, the product. It’s the service, the deep understanding of what their customer wants, and the strict delivery of that service in the highest level of quality possible.
Let's apply this framework to our ability to get new prospective customers. We need to treat the prospect as a unique individual, we need to cater to their needs, and we need to make them feel special.
Too often, GTM teams treat their product as the ultimate reward. I am reaching out to people like you to provide a solution that will fulfill all of your needs! Our product (or food in our analogy" is the best product there is!!
Let's flip that to cater to the individual. And focus on "their problem", rather than on "our product".
I am reaching out to you, personally. I have done my research, and I really know who you are. If I have a good grasp on you based on the information I can gather, I think I have a solution that will work to help address your problems. Is there any other way I can help you?
More GTM teams are not doing this level of work because it's just so darn easy to burn through contacts, automate messaging and get meager results. But in the noisy world of automation accelerated by AI, quality will produce better results than quantity.
It's time to be a 3-star Michelin chef, not a sandwich maker.