Show Notes
A client was getting ready to invest in cold email outreach tools — subdomains to protect deliverability, conversion tracking, the whole stack. Expensive. Time consuming. And when it works, it works.
Scott told him no. Not yet.
The question that stopped him:
“How many emails have you sent personally with this exact same message? What’s your response rate?”
“I’m not sending the email. I’m waiting to get the tools.”
He was about to send at scale a message he had never tested once.
What happens next is predictable: the messaging doesn’t land on the first try — it never does — the campaign underperforms, and he concludes cold email doesn’t work. The tool didn’t just cost money. It taught him the wrong lesson.
The alternative — do the work that doesn’t scale:
Draft the email you want to test
Send 20 a day, personalized, from your own email
One week. 100 messages.
Set a hypothesis: “This email generates a 3% response rate”
True or false. Not maybe. Not close.
If it’s true, you’ve got a message worth amplifying. If it’s false, tweak and run it again.
What the client actually did: Week one missed. Week two, he tweaked the message and it improved. Week three, closer still. Three weeks in, still no tools.
“This is terrible. I hate it.”
“You hate it. Well — earn the tool.”
The principle underneath it: Dan Sullivan says the number one job of the entrepreneur is to protect their confidence. It’s Scott’s first core principle. Lose your confidence and you start the doom spiral. Crawl, walk, run.
Don’t fall into tool-first thinking. The tool won’t solve your problem. It amplifies the problem you already have. Zero response on one email is still zero response on a thousand.
You can’t amplify chaos. If it doesn’t work manually, it won’t work at scale.
Beta testers wanted: Scott is working with a group of entrepreneurs to beta test the methodology behind his third book — how he took his businesses from five and six figures to seven and eight. If you’re in that range and want in, reach out: scotttodd.net/ask
📜 Full Transcript (Click to expand)
I told them no, don't do it yet. Let me explain. I was meeting with a client and they were telling me that they were preparing to invest in tools that would help them with their uh email outreach, their cold email outreach. Now, if you're not familiar with the concept of cold email outreach, it's very simple. You find your ICP, your ideal client profile.
And then you send them emails. They don't know who you are. So it's cold. Anything that's cold, they don't know who you are. It's cold email outreach to your ideal client profile, your ICP. And there's lots of tools out there. And the tools would have you buy like or use subdomains so that you're not burning through email domains to send all of this email in case someone reports it as spam, conversion rates, deliverability, all of this stuff. You do.
you you can use these tools to go do this and it's a whole process. It's a whole thing. And it's expensive. It's time consuming. And when it works, okay. It's pretty cool. Right. Like I give that to him. It works. When it works, it works. Now, whether or not I agree with with cold email outreach or not, we can save that for another day. In but in this situation, he was looking at it. And I told him, you're not ready for this yet.
And he said, What do you mean? And I said, Well, how many emails have you sent personally with this exact same message? Like, what's your response rate on that email? And he said, I'm not sending the email. I'm waiting to get the tools. And I said, But you're going to send emails out at scale. You have no understanding, no concept of whether the messaging even works or not. And as a result of that,
What's going to happen is you're going to pump out these emails that probably won't work because we're not going to get our messaging right on the first try. It probably won't work. And then you're going to look at this and say, it doesn't work. Because X, Y, and Z invested all this time. But what if we slow down? And instead of going first to the email, to the technology, we go to our personal email. Draft an email that you want to test.
Send it out 20 times a day to targets that you've identified. Just 20. Just not 100 in a day. Just 20. Make it personalized. Do it. Do the work. Do the manual work. Do the stuff that doesn't scale. Send 20 messages for a week. That's 100 20 messages a day for a week. That's 100 messages. Monitor the results. Run a hypothesis on it. I think this email is going to generate 3% response rate.
Remember, we talked about this on the channel. Hypothesis are either true or false answers. We're testing something that's either true or it's false. It's not a maybe. It's not, uh, it's close. It's true or false. The the hypothesis is that this email is going to generate a three percent response rate. That's just people raising their hands saying, Hey, I'm interested in talking to you. I'm interested in learning more, whatever. Maybe it's two percent for you.
Run the test for a week. Do the work manually and see what happens. Because if it's true that you get your desired response rate, well, now you know you have a message that you can amplify. But if it doesn't work, then you go back for another week and tweak your message. Try it again. The whole idea here is that instead of we're instead of us burning through cash for technology.
Because we want to go buy some tool that's going to do this stuff because a sales rep has told us or the marketing is really, really good that we need this to protect X, Y, and Z. Do the stuff that doesn't scale. Understand what that looks like. And then as a result of that, now we can lead with confidence. Once we get it dialed in, we can lead with confidence and say, yeah, this works. Now we can amplify the message. Because remember,
We can't amplify chaos. It doesn't work. If something doesn't work manually, it's not gonna work at scale.
Dan Sullivan has this saying that I've adopted into one of my seven core principles. And for me, it's number one. And he says this all the time the number one job of the entrepreneur is to protect their confidence. And so everything that I do, I do with this mindset that I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna test it or I'm gonna do it in a way that protects my confidence.
Because the minute that you lose your confidence as an entrepreneur, the minute that that happens, well, you start to go down this doom spiral. And that's what we're trying to avoid. We have to protect our confidence at all costs. And if that means that we have to go slow and like crawl before we can walk, before we can run, that's what it means. It means that that's what we have to do. We have to take this order: crawl, walk, run. That's that's what we have to do.
So as you think about tools, I don't want you to jump into tool first thinking. That's what I tell my clients. Do not jump into tool first thinking. And tool first thinking basically says that this automation, this AI, this tool is going to solve all my problems. It won't. It will not. The only thing that it's going to do is it's going to amplify the problems that you already have.
If you get zero response on an email and you send it hundred times, you have zero percent is still zero. You do it to a thousand, it's still zero. Protect your confidence, go slow, do the work that doesn't scale in the beginning, test out the messaging. And then when you have something that's workable, something that's going to give you the results that you want, then we can start to talk about the technology. Then we can start to invest in all of this time and money into this, into these tools.
But until then, all you're doing is wasting your time and money testing tools. You're going to be stuck over there. And then you're going to have this just expensive software bill, which is going to burn through through cash. It's all it's going to do. And that's what I tell my clients. That's what I tell them to think about that. So that's the methodology that I want you to do. And so let me tell you what he did is he went out and he did the work for a week. He sent messages for a week.
And he got he did not get the response rate that he thought. So then for the next week, he tweaked the messaging a little bit. And it got better. And he kept tweaking it. And over a three week period, he got closer to what he wanted to do. But after three weeks, he still wasn't on the tool. He still wasn't using the tools. He was still using the manual stuff. And he told me, he's like, This is terrible. I hate it. Right. You hate it. Well, earn the tool. Get what you get what you want.
Get the desired result that you want, earn the tool.
I'm Scott Todd. I'm the author of two books so far: Fix This Next for Real Estate Investors and Think First, then Automate, which comes out next October. And I'm currently working with entrepreneurs, a group of entrepreneurs to beta test what will become my third book. And I'm looking for entrepreneurs who are in the five and six figure range who want to go to seven and eight. And I have a methodology of how I've taken my businesses there.
And I'm looking for beta testers. And if that's you, if you're interested in that, I'd like to hear from you and learn more about your business. If you could head over to ScottTodd.net/ask I'm looking for beta testers for my methodology that could end up in a book. So if that's of interest to you, I'd love to hear from you. I appreciate spending time with you. And I will see you in our next episode.