| Hi, I'm Ian, the author of the blog post. Thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm a little late to this thread. I'm a fan of your posts and listened to the the interview you gave (eh the link escapes me) and found it super interesting. After listening to your interview, one thing that I thought of was the advantage you had in at least starting with an industry that you know exists. You can speak their lingo already, you may have some theories on their problems, etc. But what if you are starting from scratch? In my case, I'm going totally blue sky and just contacting random industries. I contacted farm inspectors, CNC milling companies, elevator repair companies, OSHA consultants, and other random companies. And how honest would you be about your approach, and your ignorance of their industry? So far I've taken the approach of being as honest and authentic as possible. Perhaps to a fault, I should probably fake up some confidence. Another thought I had, I think you may have mentioned this in the podcast interview, is in addition to "making it about them" is to offer something of value in return. I have a background in IT support and consulting. So one thing I was thinking to offer was a free IT assessment of their network. Maybe even include an attached invoice with the amounts zero'd out. I know that the cold email approach is inferior to calling, but I wanted to dip my toe before I took the plunge into cold calls. For what it's worth the one on-site interview I got just lead to a second interview with a different company last week. So I wouldn't say these emails are totally worthless. Also, what's your workflow for finding cold prospects? I found the most time consuming task was just creating a spreadsheet of contacts, and googling for companies. Maybe I should go to a business library and work with a librarian or something. |