Small number of customer outreach question I wonder about the best methods to reach out to a small pool of people.
Let's say, I really want to talk to 100 people in Private Equity. Yes, they are on Linkedin. Yes, I can find their emails. But cold outreach probably wont take me very far (and it hasnt) - with average reply rates at 5% I get maybe 2 convos out of it and then I am out of people to email.
So, what is the right way to do this? I keep running into this problem of having very specific and (well) defined pools of people but it means that the n seems way to small for cold email.
Maybe more generally: how should I approach thinking of channels in general?
Two conversations here I think, one around GTM and one about marketing/channel mix modelling. In the PE space there aren't that many channels to use. Email, LinkedIn, etc.
Data providers = Dakota, Pitchbook, Preqin, etc.
Advertising = PEI, Linkedin (upload contacts/accounts), PE Insights, Informa, and a couple others.
5% from cold email sounds okay... even 'really good' considering the industry you're targeting. Maybe consider increasing your pipeline so the 5% is larger. include LinkedIn and other strategic channels such as ensuring your brand or personal brand looks trust-worthy.
and then the mentality that I would take is "people hate to be sold, people love to buy" make sure your copy is something that someone would pay to recieve.
imo if your tam is like 500 contacts than do all the channels - linkedin, cold email, cold call, gifting etc. What I have seen work in extremely small market is to you need to be ABM motion and have to hit all the channels. You can score them and then select channel or channels
Would suggest it's more of a broader GTM conversation around your TAM rather than focusing on conversion ratios. 5% is a very healthy reply rate in PE. Are you just looking at a specific sub-set of PE GPs?
Disagree or spot an error? Submit a correction here. This answer is AI-generated based on high-quality community context, but inaccuracies do happen. Your feedback helps us maintain the best information.
Have experience with the tools discussed here? Share your honest opinion.