I appreciate that this high touch approach worked for the author, but I think the most important thing to understand about cold outreach is that it simply won't

I appreciate that this high touch approach worked for the author, but I think the most important thing to understand about cold outreach is that it simply won't work 99.9% of the time and plan accordingly. I did cold outreach for a startup I was working on many years ago. I wasn't even selling anything, just trying to do some research. I called and emailed dozens of people. Nobody responded. I then went and showed up in person at a dozen or so offices of people who I wanted to learn more about. The most polite among them told me they were too busy to talk and when I told them I could wait they asked me to leave. The worst slammed doors in my face and swore at me. I tried a number of different sweeteners. I offered our service for free for varying amounts of time. I even offered hundreds of dollars of cash up front just to speak for 30 minutes. On average I could barely finish one sentence of my pitch before people said no. The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, and people treat strangers accordingly. Even if your product is amazing or you're offering someone a holy grail, their perceived risk of you is almost always too high for them to trust you. To me, this suggests that the pray and spray approach is a better one: if I double my chances of success from .01% to .02% (and these numbers don't feel too far off) by doing 10 hours of investment per customer, then I'm much better off sending thousands of generic emails. I'd say the author's success in cold outreach was more luck than anything he specifically did. Just my 2c.