Overengineering your cold outreach


There was a time when I made the lion's share of my income through cold outreach.

What I learned that worked included...

  • Keep it short
  • Open a dialogue
  • Explain clearly what the offer is and what's in it for the recipient

It's always going to be a numbers game, but following the above three rules made sure I got better results than most.

Yesterday, I got a really bad outreach email.

Usually, I ignore and move on with my day.

But this guy also booked a slot in my calendar through a hidden link. So I decided to do an analysis of the bad outreach.

If you wanna see it, it's live in the community below.

Check it out here

Golden rules for cold outreach?

Respect the recipient's time, be clear, offer a solid CTA, aim to open a dialogue.

Do that, and you're ahead of 99% of cold outreach fools.

Speak soon,

Pete

P.S.

Want a little more direct help from me? Here's a few ways I could help out.

Vagrants, Vagabonds, and Villains Ltd, Unit 16535, 13 Freeland Park, Wareham Road, Poole, Dorset BH16 6FA
Unsubscribe · Preferences

Growth Models

I've spent ~10 years helping digital brands grow. I share what I know and what I'm experimenting with in this newsletter.

Read more from Growth Models

Picture this... You've identified the problem in your business. Where things break down and money is being lost. You analyse, design the fix, and set everyone on the path to implementing that fix. Time to pop the champaign right? Nope. After you've built that awesome fix, you see... nothing. No improvements, no meaningful changes, no new sales. And you're back to square one. It's a problem I see a lot. People fixing the symptom, but completely missing the cause. here's what I mean. I worked...

If we were to sit down and go through all the things I've done right in my career, and then all the things I've done wrong... ... the time split would be like a 10/90 split. I've failed so much more than succeeded over the years. They're good teaching moments. But, one of the more dangerous things in business isn’t choosing the wrong tactic. It’s committing to it. Once you’ve got buy-in from yourself or your team, you want it to work. So you keep pushing it longer than you should. Case in...

A big name marketer shared the results of a study he did last week on how brands are marketing in 2026. Long story short, most of them are... Cutting ad spend Cutting content/online PR Removing agencies ... all because the lead quality is trash. It went on to explain how people are moving back to in-person marketing and the established methods are dying off. Which ain't exactly true. Look, brands are cutting spend. And yeah, I agree that in-person stuff - or at least non AI stuff - is gonna...