Cold Outreach

Contacting prospects who have no prior relationship with you, by email, calls, or social, to open a sales conversation. The engine of outbound sales.

Why it matters

Cold outreach lets you target exactly the customers you want and start pipeline immediately, which is invaluable early on. Its success rests on relevance and personalization, the opposite of mass spam.

For example

A founder emails 30 hand-picked prospects a day with a message tailored to each company's specific problem, and starts real conversations.

Worth your time

The Ultimate Startup Guide to Outbound Sales Close · guide A practical, tactical guide to outbound that treats cold outreach as a craft, targeting, messaging, follow-up, rather than a numbers game. Open close.com →

How the Fastest Growing B2B Businesses Found Their First Ten Customers Lenny's Newsletter · article Where the first customers actually came from across dozens of B2B startups, grounding cold outreach in what really works. Open lennysnewsletter.com →

Related terms

Go deeper

See how founders actually handle this on Getting your first customers, part of the Starting Up hub.

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