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RIP outbound

Remember last year, when I analyzed 4 years of my inbox to show you what AI has done to it? I get more spammy cold mail than ever before, it's all selling me the same stuff, and it's all (badly) written with the same AI tools.

They say that outbound is dead. That may be true. But this week, I looked in detail at the last six months of outbound I've received. 68% of the 650 messages I analyzed contain some totally avoidable error that guarantees their failure.

Maybe outbound is dead? But based on this data, the people writing the cold mail look like the executioners.

Hi, I'm Kiernan Synder

The starting lineup of my high school field hockey team included Kieran, Karen, Kirsten, Kristen, Kristin, Kathy, Kellee, and Katie. That was fun!

Look, I get it. Names can be complicated. Across my lifetime, I've been called Keiran, Kiran, Keeran, Kiernan, and many more. Kiernan always specifically confounds me -- like where are you getting that extra N from? -- but it's by far the most common.

Of the 650 messages in this data set, 88 of them spell my name wrong. That's 13.5%.

Spelling is hard, but you know what is harder? Having your prospects immediately delete your message.

I am not your CEO

It's true, I was the CEO of Textio for nine years. I stepped down from the role just over a year ago. It was publicly announced, it was in the press, and I updated my LinkedIn and the bio on my personal site immediately when we announced the changeover.

Given this, it's amazing how many people write me messages like the one below, a year later:

The reason this is amazing is that these people are not just casual acquaintances bumping into me at a party. They are trying to sell me something where they have presumably identified me specifically as a strong potential buyer.

Of the 650 messages I analyzed for this piece, 174 address me as the CEO of Textio. In other words, 27% of the people trying to sell me a B2B product or service have no idea that I haven't been qualified to buy it for over a year.

Delete!

I did not go to business school

Along with such pillars of society as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the United Health CEO shooter, I went to the University of Pennsylvania for college. I also went there for my PhD.

I did a lot of cool things at Penn and in Philadelphia! I love Penn! However, in contrast to all three of the illustrious alumni mentioned above, I did not take a single class at the Wharton School of Business. But 6% of the cold email I get refers explicitly to my time at Wharton, invariably in some kind of gallows humor/crisis bonding kind of way, sent to me by Wharton alumni who assume that I am one of them.

The Wharton misunderstanding is highly specific (I went to Penn and I was a CEO, therefore I must have studied at Wharton). However, it embodies a much broader class of issues where the person writing me the cold message confidently refers to some fact about me that is not actually true.

Over the last six months, I've received cold mails confidently asserting that:

• I live in Toronto, Phoenix, and Austin, TX
• I have done a TED talk
• I have sold two companies
• I am an expert on vaccine design
• I have had a long and illustrious career as a professional soccer player

In fact, almost half the emails I analyzed include this kind of misguided attempt at personalization.

If I built a resume with all the accomplishments people have credited me with, you would hire me for sure.

Sigh. Delete.

If outbound is dead, then you killed it

All told, 440 of the 650 messages contain at least one of the mistakes above. That's more than two thirds of all the messages I receive. And this doesn't even consider the rest of message copy, which is almost universally generic, bland, and indistinguishable.

Getting real for a sec, I'm obviously an inbound kind of person. Many of my data stories go viral, and that helps me build credibility to teach others to tell data stories to drive inbound of their own. There may be lots of reasons that outbound isn't working for you.

But the unforced errors in 68% of your cold mail make it certain.

Thanks for reading!

Kieran

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kieran@nerdprocessor.com
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