Fixing a Broken Agency Lead Gen System

I have 338 sales emails sitting in a folder. I’ve been collecting them for the past ~6 months, so I guess I average about 2 per day. That probably seems really low to some of you, but I can promise you that my spam folder is getting even more enticing offers.

I collect them, more or less, as a reminder that me and my clients are probably getting ignored when we do cold outreach in a vacuum. That was reiterated recently through some chatter I saw in a Slack group. 

I fully realize that I have unrealistic organizational tendencies (I’m sorting inbound lead gen emails for christ’s sake), but this is a departure from what we’re used to seeing in the email space - 10,000 unread emails is a lot. Five years ago most people read their emails. Now, most people don’t. That’s because it’s no longer a primary communication channel and volume is getting out of control. We have other channels where only qualified senders can message us (e.g. Slack). And what we do receive via email is increasing in volume while decreasing in quality. In the last five years, the global daily average of emails sent per day has increased by 75 billion(!). 

What’s an agency business development person to do?

No one answers the phone. Emails don’t get read. LinkedIn messages are indistinguishable from spam. Outreach is moving from annoying to invisible. 

It’s very tempting to see personalization as the cure - and so many tools are promising AI-driven “enrichment” to make that happen. But the issue is far more contextual than that. 

If they don’t know anything about you, they’re not going to open their front door for you. 

At one point in time, a prospect got your message, and if they were even remotely interested, they would look you up. That’s where your content did its heavy lifting. But now, it’s very rare that anyone even gets to that step. Their awareness of you has to come first. 

It’s easy to assume that “awareness” can come from something as simple as a LinkedIn connection. But most of the time it’s going to have to be stronger than that. And that often comes down to the larger strategy of who you’re targeting. Are you creating channels for people to get to know you? That means things like attending events, networking within client organizations, publishing regularly, or appearing on podcasts. 

Outreach has a far better chance to work when it’s the second thing someone sees. And if that doesn’t hit home, consider this:

You don’t like getting cold outreach messages. Behave like someone you want in your own inbox.