u/ConstantFar1969

After 7 years in sales, I can say outbound in 2026 is the hardest it has ever been!

This isn't a cold list blast with a generic template. Every email has been personalised using signals.

I've reached out based on: relevant new hiring, news articles, Linkedin posts, new products they've launched. My emails are kept short, simple, tying the relevance into the value proposition with a clear CTA.

And still, the response rate is abysmal!

My response rate with these methods used to easily be 10% + a year or so ago!

My email health score seems to be at 70, so maybe that's partially it too. (If anyone can recommend a reliable way to check this please let me know)

Cold email used to be some companies biggest channel. Today, its the worst.

My not-so-hot take is that buyers are flooded with irrelevant spam constantly.

Thoughtful outreach is completely diluted, making it near impossible to get attention via email.

I'd like to hear everyone else's experience. Does cold email work for you? What have you found that works?

Earlier this year, my cofounder and I launched a product we quickly pivoted away from after spending months getting to that point.

And I feel like we could've saved months of work if we did it correctly...

We ran a free pilot for 12 weeks with 3 customers (the business had a freemium model).

We had 5, but 2 pulled out or got too busy to continue.

Even with the 3 pilot businesses - meetings were pushed, sometimes they didn't even show up to the meetings. Usage was on/off. Feedback was minimal. (In hindsight, the writing is on the wall here...)

I tried finding more pilot companies but this was eating up runway and delaying our launch (+ we were bootstrapped at that point)

After 12 weeks, we decided to launch. I ran some outbound, made content, had some word of mouth, and we got a couple hundred sessions over 4 weeks. But no one was converting from free to paid. Literally, no one.

I started running user interviews and I quickly realised that in its current state, the product wasn't really solving a problem businesses would pay for... We would have to spend months of runway in development to build out a lot more features with the hope that we could get it into a state that they might pay for this. But we weren't convinced.

It was from these interviews though that new problems arose and that led us to the pivot.

After the pivot, I decided to run a PAID pilot. (Which we're still currently in). Completely different model - bigger contracts that aren't freemium.

7 weeks in, we have 5 new businesses onboard - 3 live, 2 in onboarding.

Every week they show up. They're power users of the product. The feedback is in depth. They're super engaged on our calls and they're telling more stakeholders in the business about us and our results.

Now you could say that some of this is just a symptom of building a better product with more PMF. And, a lot of it is.

But I also think that running a free pilot doesn't allow you to draw strong enough conclusions about what you've built.

You don't know if businesses are 100% willing to pay, so you lose the ability to truly validate. Plus, future investors take this way more seriously!

Stakeholders also dont take your time and the partnership as seriously when its free for them..

Is running a free pilot ever actually the right move?

In my experience, a paid pilot has been better in every way.

Is cold email nearly dead?!

Free vs Paid Pilot. I did both. Here's my take..