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wow, I kind of disagree. I don't know what businesses you've been in but I find that if you think your "business aim" is something that it "might" help to "han

wow, I kind of disagree. I don't know what businesses you've been in but I find that if you think your "business aim" is something that it "might" help to "hang off of something else the callee might find desirable" - then your approach is really tough. Businesses exist because customers love paying them. There are few to no business aims that you could possibly fulfill without being inherently interesting to the people you're writing or being in touch with. If you don't have an offering that is interesting, it's not that you should hang your offer on something that is of interest - it's that you need to fix your product/market fit! That said, there are appropriate and inappropriate venues. As shown by my shopping habits, I love buying groceries, or paying for utilities - but that doesn't mean I'd like to see emails about either. So I can see that you might have to overcome the limits of your channel. Overall, however, you should be able to find channels where your business aims align easily with what customers want.

petercooper 13y ago
In my main day to day business we do no outbound marketing or cold e-mailing/calling as we are overrun with business from companies who randomly find us. That said, if were to use outbound, I'd still come up with a separate, more intrinsically intriguing Thing™ to talk about than the nuts and bolts of the business. In my original post, I was just pulling on experiences with ancillary projects, particularly content driven ones (e.g. interviews are a great way to launch a blog) or in my role as chair of a a commercial O'Reilly conference, where e-mailing potential speakers or inviting them to give interviews, etc, is a common technique that works well. As ever, YMMV.
- wslh 13y ago
  The major part of my company prospective customers came from the web but I really want to tackle the outbound marketing/sales "mistery". They are two different beasts, we can close a USD 20K sale in less than two weeks in the first case but it can take months or years to close a sale with someone from an outbound channel. Obviously if you are working for an O'Reilly conference the inbound flow can make you forget the other side of the problem. Our company participated in the MIT G-Lab program [1] to help us in the outbound part. They helped us a lot, mainly because they can interview prospective customers as MIT students and in this way people are less reluctant to talk. [1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/labs/g-lab-info-for-hosts.php http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/labs/g-lab-info-for-h...
6d0debc071 13y ago
> There are few to no business aims that you could possibly fulfill without being inherently interesting to the people you're writing or being in touch with. If your marketing costs are low - like you only pay for hits or something - then you can afford to brute force the problem. Which is the underlying idea behind spam and door to door. Rather than solving the hard problem of how to identify the people who are likely to be interested in your product.

petercooper 13y ago

In my main day to day business we do no outbound marketing or cold e-mailing/calling as we are overrun with business from companies who randomly find us. That said, if were to use outbound, I'd still come up with a separate, more intrinsically intriguing Thing™ to talk about than the nuts and bolts of the business. In my original post, I was just pulling on experiences with ancillary projects, particularly content driven ones (e.g. interviews are a great way to launch a blog) or in my role as chair of a a commercial O'Reilly conference, where e-mailing potential speakers or inviting them to give interviews, etc, is a common technique that works well. As ever, YMMV.

wslh 13y ago
The major part of my company prospective customers came from the web but I really want to tackle the outbound marketing/sales "mistery". They are two different beasts, we can close a USD 20K sale in less than two weeks in the first case but it can take months or years to close a sale with someone from an outbound channel. Obviously if you are working for an O'Reilly conference the inbound flow can make you forget the other side of the problem. Our company participated in the MIT G-Lab program [1] to help us in the outbound part. They helped us a lot, mainly because they can interview prospective customers as MIT students and in this way people are less reluctant to talk. [1] http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/labs/g-lab-info-for-hosts.php http://mitsloan.mit.edu/actionlearning/labs/g-lab-info-for-h...

6d0debc071 13y ago

> There are few to no business aims that you could possibly fulfill without being inherently interesting to the people you're writing or being in touch with. If your marketing costs are low - like you only pay for hits or something - then you can afford to brute force the problem. Which is the underlying idea behind spam and door to door. Rather than solving the hard problem of how to identify the people who are likely to be interested in your product.