We Get This A Lot: Why Can’t I Do Cold B2B Email Outreach Myself?

When clients come to us, we get this question a lot, or some variation of it. After all, what we do seems simple on the surface, and you might think you can probably save some money by doing it yourself in-house – and this is relevant information whether you’re a Fortune 500 company with a huge sales floor, or a small business just getting started with B2B email outreach.

“It’s just e-mail, right? I can get MailChimp, buy a list, write a few emails and start cleaning house!”

It might seem that way… however, as with anything, appearances can be deceiving.

So in this post we’ll break down some of the actual risks vs. rewards of building out a massive in-house B2B lead-gen machine that achieves scale – and hopefully we’ll show you how to avoid some painful lessons along the way (lessons that we learned the hard, expensive way).

Note: When I say ‘achieves scale’, I mean a program that can reach 10’s of thousands of your ideal customers – not just 1 or 2 at a time which would be common with a cold-calling scenario – and grows your pipeline every single month.

It’s taken us years to perfect our method, and it’s led to some huge successes for our hundreds of clients, and many, many, painful and expensive setbacks for us along the way – working through those setbacks is what led us to build a business around solving this one huge problem most businesses will face at some point:

“How to get interested top-level decision makers in your ideal customer market to continuously reach out to you with genuine interest in your product and ditch cold-calling forever”

Take a look at some of the most common pushback we get about B2B email outreach, and why maybe you too, think cold email prospecting can be done successfully in-house, even though the reality is probably the opposite:

1.     Why Can’t I Just Buy My Own List or Scrape it Online?

You can do this. No one can stop you. However, it’s not unusual for bought lists to have inaccurate information for as much as 30% of the names on the list. That’s a heck of an error rate! And, you still will likely pay thousands for the list. And unless you have a reliable way to clean and maintain your list, you’re going to run into all kinds of problems including blacklisted domains, your emailing reputation, etc.

Many ‘lists’ that you can find online on the cheap have been purchased hundreds of times and other  companies have already marketed the living daylights out of them. And most email marketing vendors don’t let you send to bought lists anyway.

Scraping consumes a ton of time. And if you use software to scrape email addresses, you’ve potentially broken the law and violated the CAN-SPAM act in the United States. Professional email marketers know not to do it.

2.      Can’t I Just Write My Own Emails?

You sure can, but you’ll get abysmally low response rates and poor quality leads, if you get any at all. Think of it this way: how long have you been writing cold emails? There’s a reason why copywriters can charge a huge premium on their services, getting this right is the difference between failure and success.

Just like any other business process, email marketing takes skill and is learned through experience. You will fail multiple times before you finally give up in disgust. You may finally figure out what works, but it takes professionals years of experience and trial-and-error before they learn what to do.

Do you have years to wait before you generate the red-hot leads your business needs? When you outsource to a vendor, you skip this learning curve and get leads in your door much sooner.

3.     Why Can’t I Just Use Mailchimp, Aweber, GetResponse, or Constant Contact?

Again, you can use any of these to do cold email outreach. But, you’re only going to get yourself in trouble and waste your own time and money.

These e-mail newsletter platforms, and all their direct competitors, are designed for permission-based opt-in list building. To protect their businesses, they monitor carefully for companies sending outbound cold e-mails. When (not if), they catch you, they’ll suspend or ban your account.

In the past, we’ve had accounts suspended for sending just 200-300 cold e-mails. And, you need much more volume than that to get leads in your door when you e-mail on an outbound basis. A system like that costs you $3,000 – $6,000 per month.

4.      “Can I Hire Someone In-House To Do This?“

Sure you can. No one can stop you. But, here’s the problem with that: we can do this successfully for you for the equivalent of $15 per hour.

And here’s what that rockstar will need to do:

  • Connect you with the most powerful executives at the top levels of the business (the decision makers)
  • Get you leads in your ideal customer market
  • Send email campaigns with 10,000+ weekly or even daily contacts
  • Clean and maintain these lists of 10,000+ contacts
  • Write high-converting copy designed to get decision makers to raise their hands and say ‘Yes! Give me more information!’
  • Protect your company’s reputation during the whole process

Try finding a rock-star person or team that you can hire for $15 per hour to do the same. Have you ever hired a superstar employee for a low hourly rate like this?

5.      “It Would Be Cheaper To Do This Myself”

It certainly could be cheap if you skimped in many areas, but you’d have absolutely nothing to show for what you spent. So this statement is 100% not true. Take a look at the ballpark costs you’d have to run an effective cold e-mail outreach campaign:

  •         $2000 – $6000 – Buying an email system that effectively handles massive volume. Remember, this doesn’t include operating it in a CAN-SPAM compliant way that protects your reputation. That falls on your employee’s skill.
  •         $400 – $1500: Hiring a copywriter at $50 – $150 per hour for 8-10 hours of work. That doesn’t include major revisions if your campaign doesn’t produce the desired results. That could easily add another $250 – $500.
  •         $1000 – $2500 for a 10,000-record email list. Lists generally cost around 10¢ – 25¢ per record, sometimes all the way up to 50¢ per individual contact! Then, you have to remember to buy a list targeted at the right prospects. Or, it could be a stale list even if the targeting is correct. If it’s not targeted correctly, you have to buy a new one and start over.
  •         $4000 – $10,000 monthly – That’s the rough employee costs. Yes, you can hire cheap labor. But, you’ll get what you pay for. And, that might mean a negative ROI.
  •         PRICELESS: a company that can maintain and protect your reputation while helping you grow your pipeline at scale.

Total cost done yourself: $7400 – $20,000 for the first month. And then on an ongoing monthly basis, somewhere around $5400 to $14,000 per month.

At Prospectr, you get high-converting copy, management of the email, the list itself, great service, and what you really want – red hot leads – for the equivalent of a $15 per hour employee. And you don’t have to deal with repurchasing lists, supervising the employees, or any of the many unexpected obstacles that come with starting a new business process.

I hope this helps if you are just getting started out figuring out how to build a B2B outbound lead generation process within your company or if you already have a successful sales team. We would hate to see you front all these costs only to see the campaign bomb and your reputation or email sending domain blacklisted.

If you’re ready to schedule a FREE sales funnel consultation with us right now, click here, fill out the short form, and pick a time to talk with us.

On the call we’ll analyze your sales funnel, show you what is and isn’t working, and give you a blueprint for your sales success. It’s 100% free and zero obligation. We do have limited availability for these, and demand is high, so please claim a time now.

Travis

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