Are you net-fishing or spear-fishing?
The biggest mistake agencies make with outbound:
Starting with the wrong list.
When I was building Scorpion from $20M to $150M, we discovered that most outbound campaigns fail before they even begin—because they target too many of the wrong prospects.
I call it "net fishing" vs. "spear fishing":
Net Fishing:
- Get a list of 10,000 potential clients
- Send them generic emails
- Hope for a 0.1% response rate
- Burn your domain reputation in the process
Spear Fishing:
- Identify just 20-30 perfect-fit prospects
- Research each one deeply
- Send them highly personalized gifts
- Follow up with precision
The net-fishing approach treats your total addressable market (TAM) like a commodity to be blasted. The spear-fishing approach treats them like human beings worthy of your attention.
With gift-based outbound, your ROI comes from quality, not quantity. We spent $25-75 per gift, which means we couldn't afford to waste them on poor-fit prospects.
The perfect outbound list is small enough that you can give each prospect your full attention, but large enough to hit your growth targets.
Quality over quantity. Always.
CQ
