Earlier this year, I was in the middle of doing outreach to potential sponsors who I’ve worked with before and customers who’ve previously attended one of my previous events.
After I scheduled everything, I was feeling pretty gross, honestly. I don’t like this kind of outreach, nor do I like asking people to give me money, even if it might seem like it’s easy for me.
Many of the people in our community are dear friends outside of business, and I don’t want anyone to think that my friendship is reliant on money exchanging hands.
I simply want to offer things to people to help them grow and grow in turn, but that doesn’t always come across. It definitely doesn’t feel like it.
So, I wrote this post:
It’s cold outreach week at Hapitalist, which means sending emails to like 500+ people that i’ve been writing for the whole month.
Easily the worst part of sales. “Hi, I know we have a good relationship now, but can we now monetize that relationship so I can buy goods and services” is not how I want to spend my time.
That said, sometimes it must be done. It’s the Barney Stinton of business. “HAAAAVE you met this new thing?”
Ugh. I hate it.
Until Wednesday I just gonna brood and assume everyone will hate me now.
Is this cold outreach or lukewarm outreach? And does it matter?
It honestly feels colder than the coldest outreach because I know most of these people who I still care about just don’t care at all about what I’m doing.
I have to go through the motions to find the few that do, while knowing most people would not mind if I dropped dead in front of them, and I hate it.
Quickly, somebody wrote this back:
Whoa, can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read this kind of honesty at the process.
I’ve just been getting acquainted with your work. I’d first like to say how soothing it is to my nervous system - especially the business ecosystems 😮💨 I’m curious how you feel that doing this cold outreach even though you hate it relates to your energy output? Which on the SCALE are you? (I could guess but want to see how you identify first!)
I have a lot of feelings about this, so I wrote back this:
This is a great question. So, my main SCALE path is Collaborator. with a hefty dose of Spotlighter and Launcher in there, and all of those require some amount of outreach right?
If you’ve never been on a show, you have to reach out to get on their radar. While doing joyous things is how we grow, I don’t think every moment needs to be joyous.
Like, I just got done doing stretches and body weight exercises, and they suck, but I like my body not being in pain all day, so I accept some amount of pain in order to waken my body up so it doesn’t ache the other 95% of the time.
As you go through your business, you accumulate all these contacts, and we just assume somehow they will figure out what we’re doing, but you almost always have to explicitly tell them.
If you want to be on a podcast, you have to say “Hey! I would like to be on your podcast”, which is cold outreach.
I think the way around that is to really believe that you have something to offer them that is valuable, and make your case, knowing most people will say “No thanks”.
Hapitalist is a great choice for all these people, who have either joined one of our programs, or sponsored something from us, so it’s giving that little pain now to hopefully grow that relationship in the long term.
does that even come close to answering your question?
So, I thought today I would share with you the actual emails I sent, along with commentary. I’m only gonna share them with paid members though, so fair warning the paywall is coming.
There’s a lot of value already, and I hope you found it, but I only want to share the actual nitty-gritty with people behind the paywall.