By Charlie Foster, Sales Director
You send cold emails, personalizing them with info scraped from their LinkedIn profile and websites by AI. No responses.
You go to conferences, make great connections with a bunch of people. Follow up after the show and… nothing.
You work through your LinkedIn connections, sending messages to people you haven’t talked to in years and probably can’t remember how you know them. You get a few catch-up conversations with people from school, sports teams or old jobs, but no business.
The problem? The average C-suite executive receives 120–150 emails a day, and cold email response rates have dropped to just 5.1%. Your targets are inundated with emails, ads, LinkedIn posts, InMails, and phone calls all day long. They don’t have time to read a sales pitch, let alone respond.
Everyone has personalization. Almost no one is insightful.
AI tools have made it trivially easy to auto-populate a first name, reference someone’s latest LinkedIn post, or mention their company’s recent funding round. Every vendor is doing it, and buyers have learned to tune it out. Personalization used to signal effort. Now it signals you have the same tools as everyone else. What cuts through isn’t knowing who they are, it’s knowing something about their business that they aren’t aware of yet.
What do you know about their business that no one else does?
To break through, your first sentence needs one of three things:
- 1. A missed opportunity
- 2. A risk they’re not seeing
- 3. A benchmark they’re underperforming against
Missed Opportunity: Acknowledge what they are doing, introduce the missed opportunity, highlight the consequence:
“You’re running $200K a month in Meta spend, but [Company] has zero presence on NerdWallet, Bankrate, or any top comparison site. You’re paying to create demand that competitors are capturing at the decision point.”
Risk: identify something they are doing right, then show the downside of that exact thing: “You scaled paid search spend 40% last quarter, but CAC went up, not down. The likely reason: 68% of buyers in your category visit a comparison site before converting. SoFi and LendingClub are featured on every one of them. You’re not, which means you’re funding demand that a competitor is closing.”
Benchmark: start with a norm, imply a gap, then hint at consequence:
“Fintech companies see an average of 25% of conversions come from comparison and review sites like NerdWallet, Money.com, and BestMoney. [Company] isn’t present in any of them. With LQ’s publisher network, you can be; quickly and cost-effectively.”
Personalization gets you opened. Insight gets you answered.
If your first sentence could be sent to 100 other companies, it’s not going to work.
If it makes them pause and think, “wait… is that true?”
That’s when you get a reply.