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?

  • just2quixotic@alien.topBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    I changed my first name on LinkedIn to an emoji character and put my full name in the last name field . When a sales team buys a contact list or uses an automation tool I get filtered out because the emoji breaks the script or I get an email that starts with “Greetings [emoji]” and those are also easier to filter out on my end.

    Oh thank you! I am so going to steal that idea. That’s beautiful.

    As for

    use a title like “cat herder”

    Not only do I use a self deprecating title, I tend to elevate my people’s titles. In a bakery I have, I make some of them things like “X Company VP of West Coast Foods Production”