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#343 · how to get good at sales (just start)

youtube ↗Cold Email

Since cold email is legally tricky in Germany, should I send physical letters to local beauty salons offering Google Ads services instead, or stick with cold email and cold calls?

Once upon a time, yes. Now, no. Simply because it is far more scalable to cold email. Cold calling, while nowhere near as efficient, is still far more efficient and productive per unit time than sending physical mail. There are some use cases for physical mail in outreach, but it usually involves a very small total addressable market. If you have an extremely small niche of people you can work with, then yes, sending physical mail or deliveries to their address with marketing material inside can work pretty well. I'm reminded of a good Silicon Valley campaign where guys showed up to prospects' offices with pizzas around lunchtime, dropped them off and said, 'Hey, have a lovely rest of the day, we're a company that really likes you guys, we just wanted to be in touch, here you go,' and inside there's a letter with more information. That works pretty well when there's like 300 potential companies you could work with, because you can work your way through the list and the cost of a pizza might be 30 bucks — 30 times 300 is 9,000, so you can burn through your entire niche for less than $10,000 and every single one will have a positive impression of you. But at big scale it just doesn't make sense — you could send 3,000 cold emails in a day. I understand your points regarding the legality of cold email in Germany, both GDPR and consent and privacy laws, but you've got to understand that most of these people signed up to LinkedIn anyway, and LinkedIn is a business platform where you're scraping most of their information from to begin with. If they really didn't want to be contacted, they probably wouldn't have signed up to LinkedIn. I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

How do you handle cold email in EU countries where commercial emails need prior consent — think Germany, Spain, etc.? Do you skip email and use LinkedIn ads, calls, or is there a compliant way to follow your playbook?

How do you handle cold email in the EU? It's really not all that difficult. One, and I'm not a lawyer and none of this is legal advice, but when's the last time you jaywalked? Congratulations, you have essentially contravened a law or a rule or a regulation. Cold email is a lot like jaywalking. If you're good at what you do, if you look left and look right and there's no cars oncoming, nobody's really going to care. These laws are also written in such a vague way that if you take their definitions at their vaguest, you're basically always going to be at the behest or at the whims of the legislators. And so if you send really high-quality customized cold emails that provide value to the people reading them, and they don't come across as spam and don't seem like a big issue, you're almost certainly going to be fine. And what's interesting is Germany, Spain, a lot of these other EU countries are starved for cold email right now. If you take the same campaign you're running in the United States, then localize it a little bit — the language is quite similar, but still respect cultural norms of deference and so on — and then run it in Germany, you'll get like a four to five x reply rate. Same thing in Spain, same thing in the Netherlands. These are all places where people are starved for this sort of outreach, and they want to connect and grow their businesses and network. They just don't currently have a way to, because regulation has a stranglehold on a lot of what previously would have been serendipitous. It's unfortunate that the EU has strangleholded people to that degree, but they definitely have. People now are so afraid to even send an email to somebody that they don't know, because they think SWAT teams are going to break in through their windows and get on the floor — 'this is the guy that sent the cold email, loser, I hate people like you.' Obviously that's ridiculous.

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youtube ↗Marketing

What is the GDPR equivalent in Canada?

There is a GDPR equivalent in basically every major country. In Canada it’s the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). It specifically covers email communications, and you need clear opt‑in mechanisms and proper consent. I’m not a lawyer, so this isn’t legal advice, but it’s the main privacy law you’d need to follow.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

What is a suitable strategy for businesses in the EU where GDPR and telecommunication laws prohibit cold email outreach?

You have to work within the regulations. If you follow GDPR and telecom rules exactly, you won’t be able to send cold emails, so you need to use alternative, lawful channels. Some people set up shell companies to route communications, but that’s a gray area and I wouldn’t recommend it. In practice, just be reasonable, stick to the letter of the law, and look for other outreach methods that comply with EU rules.

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youtube ↗Cold Email

With zero budget and no proof, what outreach strategy and daily actions would you recommend to land the first client for an AI receptionist agency using cold emails?

You already have the product, offer, and demo, but you could have validated the market first—sell the idea before building the product. With no budget or proof, focus on hyper‑customized cold outreach: research each prospect deeply (e.g., find an old blog post) and mention it in a personal note. Instead of blasting 100 generic emails a day, send about 20 highly tailored ones and follow up on every platform where they’re active (Instagram, LinkedIn, X, TikTok). This multiplies your visibility—reaching people on three or four platforms can give you two‑to‑three times more exposure than email alone. Assuming a 20% chance of being seen per platform, outreach on several platforms raises your overall view rate to about 50%, which can yield a 25% reply rate. From 600 outreach attempts you might get ~75 replies, ~10 positive, leading to a few calls and possibly one closed deal.

cold emailhyper-customizemulti-platform