As a CEO of a small business, I am inundated with over a few dozen cold outreach attempts daily. This isn’t just my experience right?
My day often starts with a barrage of cold calls, many of which are from spammers. LinkedIn has become a hub for BDRs sending long-winded pitches, and my Gmail inboxes, both primary and office, are overflowing with sales-driven emails. It’s overwhelming and frankly, quite irritating.
I once experimented with gated com, which asked cold emailers to donate a few bucks to my chosen charity for a response. Sadly, very few took this step, showing a lack of seriousness. Downside of using app was that even my known contacts were getting these automated messages.
Now, I’m exploring several options to manage this situation better:
- Creating extensive filters in Gmail to automatically direct such emails to spam (especially using spam words like “book with me”, “just following up”, “wanted to reach out to you”, etc)
- Considering sanebox, which smartly categorizes emails and identifies cold outreach emails.
- Looking into marketplaces like fozzie io and leaderpro, where individuals would compensate for my time. I’m thinking of setting a rate, say $200 for a 30-minute slot, and directing all cold outreach to these platforms. So alteast these spammers pay for my time at the very least and i could then take them serious (b2b meetings are $1000 upwards, so why not i get my share lol)
- Still left with cold calls and linkedin though
Thoughts or strategies on managing this menace?
After 7 years and thousand of inbound calls, 95% of which are for loans, I have few answers.
Although, when I switched to a cloud phone system & the caller had to select option 1 or option 2, I eliminated nearly 95% of the garbage (all the loan calls). When I added a contact center, they screamed out the majority of the remaining 5%.
On a positive note, on the rare occasion that I would answer a call, early morning or in the evening, I would give the caller 20 seconds to make their ‘elevator pitch’. The only 2 who ever pulled it off, I do business with, a contact center who answers our calls live and a local insurance agent who has my policies now for 6 years. At the time, I asked the insurance guy to call me in 9 months since I had just renewed my policies. Impressively, he called me 9 months to the day.
Sounds like you should hire that sales guy, he’s on it!
That’s interesting the only cold caller I ever talked to was an insurance guy I let give me a quote. He also called me 9 months later as promised. Thanks Sal…. Insurance went up a surprise 33% this November and was looking for options.
What state are you in?