Bryan from Entrepid Partners here... we find that highly targetted, outbound cold emails are actually the best place to start prospecting.
In our experience, if you do the extra work to personalize the email and focus in on why your product/service is relevant to the buyer's pain points, we've seen response rates as high as 30% with the majority of those replies turning into an intro call with the buyer.
...are neither scalable nor calls, in my mind. Here's my opinions:
1) I am currently manually building my own unsolicited email list for the purpose of marketing my b2b service. I have good, quality data sources with no bounce rates and right personas, but it is neither cheap nor simple to enter this data manually
2) even if I send these people highly targeted and well-crafted emails that are friendly and insightful and pithy, it is a slow process with diminishing returns...
3)... because most people add me to their spam filter these days. It is trivial to do so.
I would infinitely prefer to invest my time in creating excellent, viral content and offering users a free entry level service with few restrictions.
I would then spend all my time obsessively devoting myself to those users who have a big budget and greatly desire to receive communication from me.
Lastly, I dare say that someone who responds to a cold email will probably just end up kicking tires.
Certainly more than one way to do this, but I agree with Bryan.
Highly targeted email lists are scaleable enough and there is plenty of tech to make them more personal than ever. I disagree a great deal with the idea that cold respondents "end up kicking tires." 100% of my marketing is cold email. 100% of the marketing I do for clients is cold email. I'm happy with my ROI and so are they.
In our experience, if you do the extra work to personalize the email and focus in on why your product/service is relevant to the buyer's pain points, we've seen response rates as high as 30% with the majority of those replies turning into an intro call with the buyer.