[goatherders]

"Low touch / no touch" sales is also known as "marketing." I don't know you or your intentions so this may not be directed at you, but I've found that most people looking to develop a low-touch sales engine are really saying "Ew...sales...I don't want to have to do that. Maybe if I blog enough and my site looks good I won't have to actually, you know, TALK to potential customers."

I also find that anything above about $70/month MRR is going to require talking to the person. $70 is a limit that most companies will allow to be expensed without much question. MAYBE you can get that number to $100 in the right market. Above $100? Good luck. And if you are selling a $100+ product with no-touch then you are really missing out on TONS of business that could come your way if you just put in some actual sales effort.

[anoncoward111]

If I could offer some perspective from someone in the sales trenches:

Cold calling does not work. No matter how good your script is, your email, your personality, your talk track, your data sources, your persistence, cold calling does not work. It is a poor ROI.

All real sales are made either through the customer opting in to communicate (response to an email blast, inbound lead from the company phone, a referral etc)... or through nepotism and cronyism and ivy league networks of multi millionaires. Hint: this is how Oracle is alive to this day.

If I was in charge of selling a product over $100, I would create the most awesome, viral content you would ever see about our product. I would release a free version to 99% of the world that is truly usable and awesome.

This is what join.me did to compete with Webex and Skype for Business and GoToMeeting.

Remember: if you don't have an existing network, you don't have any business.

Start marketing before you start selling.

[bharris315]

Bryan from Entrepid Partners here... we find that highly targetted, outbound cold emails are actually the best place to start prospecting.

In our experience, if you do the extra work to personalize the email and focus in on why your product/service is relevant to the buyer's pain points, we've seen response rates as high as 30% with the majority of those replies turning into an intro call with the buyer.

[anoncoward111]

Hi Bryan :)

>highly targeted, outbound cold emails...

...are neither scalable nor calls, in my mind. Here's my opinions:

1) I am currently manually building my own unsolicited email list for the purpose of marketing my b2b service. I have good, quality data sources with no bounce rates and right personas, but it is neither cheap nor simple to enter this data manually

2) even if I send these people highly targeted and well-crafted emails that are friendly and insightful and pithy, it is a slow process with diminishing returns...

3)... because most people add me to their spam filter these days. It is trivial to do so.

I would infinitely prefer to invest my time in creating excellent, viral content and offering users a free entry level service with few restrictions.

I would then spend all my time obsessively devoting myself to those users who have a big budget and greatly desire to receive communication from me.

Lastly, I dare say that someone who responds to a cold email will probably just end up kicking tires.

Tire kicking is automated away with my free demo.

[goatherders]

Certainly more than one way to do this, but I agree with Bryan.

Highly targeted email lists are scaleable enough and there is plenty of tech to make them more personal than ever. I disagree a great deal with the idea that cold respondents "end up kicking tires." 100% of my marketing is cold email. 100% of the marketing I do for clients is cold email. I'm happy with my ROI and so are they.