Youdon't have to be a 🔔🔚 to do marketing.

February 19, 2025

AKA fuck the pitch slap and fuck James Watt.

There is a long-standing myth that marketing is about persuasion, that our function is to prod people into buying. To interrupt their eye-line, to pop up whenever we can, thrusting our unique selling point into their faces until they relent and give us their money.

I mean, sure, some people do do that. We see it every day in our DMs, in our inboxes, in every single thing James fucking Watt does.

But is it effective?

Yes. Yes it is. But with a caveat.

For every James fucking Watt - and fucking is his middle name by the way, probably, I mean he would at least pretend to have changed it to that for publicity - who knows how many similarly-minded prophets of shite have failed?

It's survivorship bias.

Performative survivorship bias.
It has no methodology, it has no proven roadmaps to success.

Some douche has made it work for him (and it usually is a him), so it must work for you. I mean, it could work for you. OK, it might work for you. Um, you got me, no idea if it will work for you, but download my white paper and buy my book.

Same with Stephen fucking Bartlett. Good for you, you go -ahead grifter you.

Their success means nothing. It's all built on sand.

See also the pitch-slappers on LinkedIn.
It must work right? They tell us all the time how many Xs they have got for their clients, how many frankly unmanageable volumes of meetings they have booked for businesses they assume are like yours.

And yes, to some degree it does work. So long as you cast yourself broadly enough that your targeting is all over the place and you have so many contacts in your send that teeny response rates can reap rewards. I mean, a 0.01% response rate is great if you carpet bomb 2,000,000 random suckers.

But again, it's more luck than judgement. It's not based on any empirical evidence of efficacy. It's based on spraying enough shite in any direction that statistically some will stick. Most of it will stink, and make people hate you for throwing shit at them, but some might land in a garden patch and help the weeds grow.

Now, at this point I should fess up that I have been using outbound for many years.
For myself, for the businesses I have helped lead and for my clients. And yes, it is cold outreach.

But, and it's a big but - and I love big buts and I cannot lie - it is not hit and hope. It is not insistent. In fact it is as undemanding of the recipient as it can be.

Why?

Because more often than not people don't care about what you are trying to sell, and pissing them off isn't a smart business tactic.

The key purpose of marketing is not to persuade, it is to be relevant and memorable.
Relevant to the broad needs of the recipient, and memorable so that when those needs are urgent they know that you are an excellent option.

So what do I do?
Well, firstly I start off by being very, very specific. If you find yourself on one of my contact lists it is because you will, do or should be buying whatever it is I am ultimately hoping to sell.

Ultimately is doing the heavy lifting there too, because part of the approach is to establish if they are going to be in market for whatever you are selling.

So, highly specific data AND seeking permission to engage.

How do you that?

Well, it's quite simple. Start from the principle that people buy benefits and not features.

Give something. A stat that is relevant to them, identify a problem that is relevant to them.
And ask if they would be interested in more detail. Not a call. Not a fucking Calendly link. Not a manifesto or a sales pitch. More detail or insight into the problem which they might want hep solving.

And never, ever fucking ever, ever ever vapid promises about how you will specifically impact their business, which you know absolutely nothing about.

A few recent examples I've had.

The lead gen company who has promised me more meetings in a month than I can physically handle as a one person business.

Get in the bin.

The SEO company promising to increase my business, even though my website really isn't a primary channel for me and my company is just a legal entity. I am the business.

Get in the bin.

The recruitment firm sending me CVs when, as I said before, I am a one-person business, and by design.

Get in the God damned bin.

And an example of what I do.
I identify a pain point, I offer some insight and ask if they'd like to know more.

If they do I send them a short video where I describe the pain point and how effective marketing can take it away.

I then follow up days or weeks later to see if they found the video interesting.

Guess what? This brings me a steady flow of pre-qualified prospects.

Cheers

Right. The Obvious Questions Answered.

Does aggressive outreach and cold messaging actually work?

Sometimes. And that's the problem with using it as evidence. The visible successes of spray-and-pray outreach are classic survivorship bias. You see the person claiming they booked 47 meetings from a LinkedIn sequence. You don't see the thousands who tried the same thing, annoyed everyone they contacted, and generated nothing but blocked sender addresses and a damaged reputation. The unit economics only work at enormous scale. For most businesses, those volumes aren't available, and even if they were, the reputational cost of carpet-bombing irrelevant prospects is significant and slow to recover from.

What does effective outreach actually look like?

Targeted, relevant, and built on prior familiarity wherever possible. The more your prospect already knows you exist, through content, shared networks, or having seen your brand in relevant contexts, the warmer the outreach and the higher the response rate. Effective outreach starts from the buyer's situation: what they're likely dealing with, what problem would be relevant right now. Not 'here's what I do' but 'here's a problem I suspect you have, and here's evidence I understand it.'

Is LinkedIn outreach still worth doing?

Yes, when it's done properly. Increasingly no, when it follows the pitch-slap playbook. Buyers have become extremely good at ignoring automated connection-request-plus-immediate-pitch sequences. The signal-to-noise ratio on LinkedIn outreach has collapsed as the volume has increased. Getting through requires genuine relevance, genuine personalisation, and ideally some prior context that makes the message feel like a natural continuation rather than an interruption.

Does being more human in marketing actually convert better?

Yes, and there's solid evidence behind it, not just intuition. Marketing that resonates emotionally outperforms rational, feature-led marketing on virtually every effectiveness measure. People buy from people, from brands they feel some connection to. That connection is built through consistency, through personality, through communication that treats the buyer as a thinking person rather than a conversion rate. Being human in your marketing isn't soft. It's commercially superior to being robotic.

How do we do outreach without feeling sleazy?

Start from genuine relevance rather than volume. If you wouldn't be comfortable saying it face to face to that specific person in that specific context, don't send it. If the message is relevant only because you've assumed a problem they might not actually have, acknowledge the assumption. The test is simple: would the recipient honestly think 'this person has done their homework and this might actually be relevant to me'? If not, don't send it.