u/EducationBro18

So about 5 months ago I hired a VA to take over some of the campaign management because I was drowning trying to run outbound for my own business while also doing the actual client work and something had to give. Found someone through a recommendation, she had some marketing background but zero cold email experience which I actually preferred because I figured Id train her on my exact process and she'd just execute it

Wrote up detailed SOPs for everything. How to build lists on apollo. What filters to use. How to structure the email. What the follow up sequence should look like. Subject line conventions. CTA format. All of it documented step by step the way I had been doing it for almost 2 years with consistent results around 2.8-3.2% reply rate

First couple weeks she followed everything perfectly and the numbers looked normal. Fine. System works. Exactly what I wanted

Then I started noticing she was going off script

First thing I caught was that she was writing follow ups that didnt match my templates at all. My SOPs said follow up 2 should share a case study metric and follow up 3 should ask a relevant question about their business. Standard stuff. Her follow up 2 was something like "hey [name] totally get it if this isnt on your radar right now. Just figured id mention we helped a [industry] company recently with something similar and it went well. No stress either way" which reads like a text message from a friend not a cold email follow up. I almost told her to fix it but the campaign was mid flight so I figured id let it run and correct her after

Then I noticed she was building lists differently. My SOP says filter by job title, company size, industry, and technographic signals. She was doing all of that but then spending extra time going through each companys website and removing anyone whose business "didnt feel right" which is not a filter that exists in any database. I asked her what that meant and she said "I dont know some of them just look like theyre not the type of company that would respond" which is the vaguest most unscientific targeting criteria I have ever heard and I was fully ready to tell her to stop doing that and just follow the damn SOP

Except her campaigns were pulling 3.8%. Then 4.1%. Then one campaign hit 4.6% and I ran the numbers three times because I thought something was wrong with the tracking

I went through her work meticulously trying to figure out what she was doing differently and it wasnt one thing it was a bunch of small things that all pointed in the same direction

Her emails sounded like a normal person because she IS a normal person who doesnt know what cold emails are supposed to sound like. She never read the twitter threads about optimal email frameworks. She never took a course on cold email copywriting. She doesnt know what a "value prop statement" is. So when she writes an email it just sounds like a person talking because thats the only way she knows how to write. Meanwhile my emails which I spent 2 years perfecting and optimizing sound like cold emails because I have been steeped in cold email best practices for so long that I cant NOT sound like a cold emailer anymore. My "optimization" was actually making my emails more generic not less because I was converging toward the same frameworks that everyone else in this sub uses

Her "doesnt feel right" list filtering was actually a form of intuitive qualification that my rigid SOP filters couldnt capture. She was looking at company websites and making judgment calls about whether the business seemed like a real fit based on things like how professional their site looked, what their about page said about their team size and culture, whether they seemed like the kind of company that would actually buy a service like ours. None of that is in apollo. None of it is quantifiable. But it was working because she was removing prospects that technically matched the filters but practically were never going to convert and that was cleaning up the list in a way my data driven approach wasnt catching

Her follow ups were warmer and lower pressure than mine and prospects responded to that because my follow ups despite being "optimized" had this underlying energy of im trying to get you on a call that I couldnt see because I was too close to it. Her follow ups had the energy of im just letting you know this exists and its cool if you dont care which counterintuitively made more people care

The part that really messed with my head was when I tried to go back to writing campaigns myself using what I learned from watching her and I couldnt do it. I couldnt write like her because I know too much. Every time I start writing an email my brain automatically goes to the frameworks. Observation plus value prop plus soft CTA. Keep it under 40 words. Dont start with I. Use their company name in the subject line. All these rules Ive internalized over 2 years kick in automatically and the result is an email that follows every best practice and sounds exactly like every other email written by someone who follows every best practice

She doesnt have any of that baggage. She just writes what she would say to someone and it turns out what a normal person would say to another normal person is more compelling than what a trained cold emailer would say to a prospect because the trained version has been optimized into sounding like everyone else

Im not saying throw away your SOPs or that experience doesnt matter because the infrastructure and targeting and deliverability stuff absolutely requires knowledge and discipline. But the actual writing part, the words that end up in someones inbox, might genuinely be better when its done by someone who has no idea what theyre doing because they havent learned all the habits that make cold emails sound like cold emails

She still works for me. I stopped correcting her copy. Her campaigns still outperform mine. And every time I see her reply rates I have a small existential crisis about what exactly I spent 2 years optimizing