NPLG 10.6.22: B2B Cold Email Is Dying
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B2B Cold Email Is Dying
My partner at Wing, Tanay, shared with me a powerful post by the team at ChartMogul, a subscription analytics platform. If you have 5 minutes, I recommend you read it.
ChartMogul relies on product-led growth. The company writes: “We spend most of our waking hours thinking about how to build a reliable, beautiful product that helps subscription businesses grow faster using their customer and billing data. This mentality extends, of course, to our marketing strategy, which is why folks still print out our cheat sheets and read our weekly roundup. It also extends to our customer acquisition and sales strategy. More than 90% of our leads come through our 14-day trial. Then, it’s our job to help those businesses get set up, evaluate our product, and ultimately, make a purchase decision. We’ve grown sustainably for six years in this way.”
ChartMogul experimented with outbound sales aka cold emails. The company hired two SDRs (sales development reps) to led this intiaitve. The company trained them on its value proposition, outreach style, and strategy. ChartMogel even consumed the latest and greatest prospecting content from sales leaders like Becc Holland and Josh Braun and took Winning by Design’s 4-week course on prospecting. ChartMogel was thoughtful and intentional about its outbound program.
Now, for the data.
In just under six months:
Set 39 total meetings set from an average of 1,650 emails sent/month (~10K emails sent total)
Create 13 deals (which is less than 1 deals created/month/SDR)
Convert 7 new customers (which is less than 1 sales/month/SDR) at a win rate of 54% and ASP = 1.5x
Ouch! 39 total meetings set from 10K emails (0.4% conversion). 7 new customers from 10K emails (0.07% conversion).
Outbound email, especially to B2B companies who are inundated with outreach, is becoming less and less effective. Sure, ChartMogul could have invested more to improve their outbound stratgey (tooling, messaging, cadence etc), but decided instead to abandon it all together. The team summarized: “We hear a lot about the importance of focus for product teams, but rarely for commercial teams. Sales and marketing teams are all too often pursuing a quick win or growth hack instead of sustainable growth via select channels. It’s essential to keep an eye on your limited resources and use them in the best way possible.”
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Kinda, I mean like.
Bad email is dying, but this has always been the case, I rarely find people going beyond 6+ follow ups and more than 6+ customizations.
The biggest issue is conversion though, I still prefer outbound due to conversion. I rarely would have people sign via cold email, it would payback the money but it was way too much work and no assets at the end of the day were produced