u/Fine_Front8524

Not going to pretend I have it all figured out. But here's what I'd tell 2016-me if I could:

1. Cold email isn't dead. Your cold email is dead.

The "{{firstName}}, saw you're the {{title}} at {{company}}" stuff stopped working around 2021. We were sending 8,000 emails a week and getting reply rates under 1%.

Switched to 40 hand-researched emails a day. No automation, no sequences. Just one paragraph that proved I'd actually read their last earnings call or LinkedIn post. Reply rate jumped to 14%. Pipeline doubled. Took half the headcount.

The lesson wasn't "cold email is broken." It was that we'd industrialized the only part that ever mattered — the part where someone feels seen.

2. We spent $380k on a "content engine" that produced 11 SQLs.

Same year, our CTO wrote one honest Reddit comment in r/devops about a problem we'd solved internally. 60+ inbound leads. Two became six-figure deals.

I'm not saying don't do content. I'm saying the org chart we built around content (writers, SEO leads, distribution managers, an "editorial calendar") was theater. The thing that worked was a smart person being useful in public.

3. LinkedIn ads are a tax on people who can't think of anything better.

I've spent ~$2M on LinkedIn over a decade. Maybe 15% of it was actually well-spent. The rest was buying impressions from people who were never going to buy from us, just to fill a dashboard.

Retargeting? Fine. Cold prospecting on LinkedIn ads? Set the money on fire, you'll get the same result faster.

4. Webinars work, but not as a lead-gen tactic.

We kept treating them as gated content. Hundreds of "registrants," 30 attendees, 2 leads, everyone disappointed.

Then we stopped gating them, stopped optimizing for sign-ups, and started treating them as one good 45-minute conversation we happened to record. Attendance went down. Pipeline influenced went up 4x. Turns out the people who'll watch a webinar without being bribed are the ones actually buying.

5. Events are the most under-measured channel in B2B.

Every CFO I've worked with has tried to kill the events budget. Every CRO has fought to keep it. The CROs were always right and could never explain why.

I think I finally know why: the deals you close from events look like they came from outbound or referrals six months later. Attribution lies. Trust is the channel; events just generate it faster than anything else.

6. The biggest lever is who you hire, not what you spend.

One marketer who genuinely understands the product will outperform an agency of ten every time. I've watched it happen on three different teams now. Stop looking for tactics and start looking for people who care.

1. your subject line is not supposed to sell anything its supposed to look like an internal email. the best performing subject line ive ever used was literally just "tuesday" and i know that sounds insane but the open rate was 71 percent because it pattern matches to how a coworker would email you not how a vendor would, and once you see this you cant unsee it, every "Quick question about [Company] growth" subject line is basically wearing a sign that says please send me to spam.

2. the first sentence cannot be about you or your company under any circumstances. i dont care what your framework says i dont care what your manager taught you, the second a prospect reads "my name is x and im reaching out from y" their brain has already filed the email under sales and youre done, instead open with something about them or something about the world or honestly just open mid thought like youre continuing a conversation because that creates curiosity instead of resistance.

3. shorter is not always better but boring is always worse. everyone parrots "keep it under 50 words" but ive sent 200 word emails that crushed and 30 word emails that got nothing, length doesnt matter what matters is whether every single sentence earns its place and gives the reader a reason to read the next one, if you can cut a sentence and the email still works cut it but dont artificially shrink something that needs the room to breathe.

4. stop personalizing with stuff anyone can scrape. mentioning that they raised a series b or hired a new vp of sales used to work in 2019 because it signaled effort, now every tool does this automatically and prospects can smell it from space, real personalization in 2026 means referencing something a bot could not find, a comment they made on a podcast, a specific line from their last earnings call, the way their pricing page is structured differently than competitors, that kind of thing.

5. your CTA should ask for almost nothing. "do you have 30 minutes next week" is a huge ask from a stranger, "worth a quick reply" or "should i send over the 2 minute breakdown" or even "is this even on your radar this quarter" all convert way better because the prospect can say yes without committing to anything that feels like a meeting, you can always escalate to a calendar link in the second email once theyre warm.

6. send from a person not a brand. emails from sarah@company hit different than from sales@company or hello@company, and emails that have a tiny human signature with just a first name and maybe a phone number outperform the ones with the full corporate footer logo banner social icons disclaimer block by a huge margin because the corporate footer is basically a giant sign saying this is a marketing email please ignore.

7. the follow up is the actual email. everyone obsesses over the first touch but if you look at any honest sales teams data the majority of replies come from email 2 or email 3 not email 1, which means the first email is really just permission to send the second one, so stop putting all your best material in the opener and save some firepower for the bump because thats where the meetings actually come from.