The shift from cold email blasts to warm intro requests in just 3 years

Back in 2021, I was sending out 500 cold emails a week for my B2B SaaS product and getting maybe 5 replies. Fast forward to last quarter, and I watched a colleague land a $15k deal just by asking a mutual connection for a warm intro on LinkedIn. The change is crazy. What caused it? I think it's two things: people got sick of inbox spam during COVID, and tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator made it way easier to find who knows who. Now my whole approach is different. I spend 80% of my time building relationships in niche Slack groups and only 20% on outbound. Has anyone else seen their open rates tank on cold email compared to 2020?

2 comments

2 Comments

alicec869d ago

People got sick of inbox spam during COVID" - thats so real. I had a guy reply to a cold email last week just to tell me my subject line was the only reason he didn't delete it instantly, then he blocked me anyway lol.

cameron_chen9d ago

Cold emails are basically digital spam now.