> But in sales and recruiting, “no” doesn’t always mean “no”.
Where I should start?
I dived too deep into dating - partly because I was in the process of writing "Dating for Nerds", and partly because my ex-girlfriend was a sexologist/sociologist (who at that time was writing her master's thesis "Market Metaphors in Dating").
There are many sales metaphors for dating, especially in PUA lingo (including all about the target, pitch, funnel, and close). What I've found even more interesting is that there are many parallels between the ethics of both. While for doing things against someone's will it is obviously wrong (and a crime), there is a dark-gray zone of things that are not a crime, but still - are rarely done in good faith, and can hurt the other person. If something is a gray zone in one, very often the other tells if it is OK-ish to a--holish.
And 'no' in business is the same. Yes, people can change mind. Yes, 'no' sometimes means "maybe... but if I said that, you would have assumed 'yes' and put me in a really uncomfortable situation".
There are pushy salespeople that after "no" they act as if they heard yes. This strategy may work, especially on people who are less assertive, less confident, etc. But it is a dick move, so don't.
A lot of classic PAU is based on these pushy tactics. They even call when the next day a girl regrets they have had sex "buyer's remorse".
Yes, some people would react differently if they've heard more, or maybe need time to consider things, or would benefit from some encouragement.
I am so grateful to all salespeople, and recruiters, who after hearing "no" respected that work. And treated me like a person, not a ripe bag of gold.
Pre-dotcom bust there was this lady from The Daily Deal. She harassed the shit out of us with her perkiness. No way we would spend IBM's money on a new website. But she was a no means yes woman. I asked her for $50,000 of free inventory to test if it was as good as she said it was. Free is always best and it kicked ass. Then she gave birth to twins and named them Joe, my boss, and my name. That was a bridge too far. Daily Deal became a favorite of IBM's and they ended up investing millions in it for B2B marketing. Sometimes stalking works. But I don't recommend it.
I'm seeing some negative comments that focus on the article specifics. So I thought I'd say well done Patrick for reaching your goal using creativity and the right kind of persistence. Thank you for showing the actual steps you took and sharing your thought process.
I've been in software almost 20 years and due to some incredibly poor timing am in need of finding my own door of opportunity, so I found your post inspirational. Thank you.
thanks, Pedro! yep. you can adapt the idea of research, add value, and handle objections into whatever permutation works best for your situation. that's the strategy part. best of luck, you can do it :)
Great advice if you absolutely want that ONE job at this ONE company. If you are in that boat then it's probably worth it to spend ~10 hours creating something valuable to offer.
Most people generally have a set of companies that are ideal for them in a tier'ed manner. In that case, more efficient way would be to choose ~5 companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If it fails, choose next ~5 and so on.
It falls somewhere in-between spending 10 hours of effort on 1 application & mass applying to 50 companies without any effort whatsoever. This is also how effective sales teams work.
You get part of those 10 hours "for free" just from the basic due diligence that you should apply to determine if you want to work for the company/department/team in the first place.
I'm the person who gets these sorts of emails at my company, and just a few words in one of his emails really caught my attention!
"Would love to work on this mission with you and the team" .. yeah, yeah, generic blah, everyone says that.
"and I won't take it for granted." Ok, wow, I rarely have people make promises like that. It sounds genuine and even if it's not, it's a point I can pull someone up on later on if they're screwing around.
Sending off some generic corporate speech will rarely work with me, but if someone acts a little more personably and shows they have some sort of emotional skin in the game, I'm all ears.
> if someone acts a little more personably and shows they have some sort of emotional skin in the game, I'm all ears.
Which why generic corporate speech is just an arms race of faking that you have emotional skin in the game. Saying you'd "love to work on this mission with you and the team" was once enough. Now, you also have to say that you "won't take it for granted" to catch your attention. I wonder what the next step will be.
This is a great point and also very applicable to sales generally. There's definitely a continuum between "hyper target / completely customized" and "spray and pray" and each person/company needs to find the right point on that continuum for themselves.
My company actually just put out a blog post last week on this showing how to quickly create customized emails while still leveraging templates [0].
Spam like this earns an immediate "remove all email addresses from your lists @ourdomain.com and let me know that you are suppressing them from your future mailings", ccing your mail provider's abuse address. The second mail gets your domain blocked and I tell your provider they're on notice.
A lot of people may think this blog post is either over complicating stuff or stating the obvious. While slightly true, you'd be surprised at how many people miss the points highlighted by the author. I get so many cold emails that don't hit any of these points and I just end up deleting them immediately.
This blog post over complicates and mythologizes an extremely simple process. That is to not be embarrassed or ashamed to ask people you want something from what you can do to get it.
Additionally, this is survivorship bias. His emails sounded very professionally immature and while this companies leadership may have found it endearing, I could easily see other groups of people finding it off putting.
What this guys effort signaled to me is that he’s probably annoyingly overeager, but willing to basically do whatever I want him to do whenever and however long I want him to do it. In other words he’d be a good lackey.
If you want to shamelessly signal that you’d be a decent lackey for an obscure to medium startup this may be decent advice. And this may not be a bad thing, I know Casey Neistat’s employee Jack Coyne did something similar and it opened up a lot of doors for him.
I think it also depends what you're looking for. If you're applying for one of multiple already-existent temporary positions for inexperienced people enthusiastic about learning on the job, appearing to be desperately keen on working for that company specifically probably gives you the edge over many other candidates that might have slightly more impressive universities on their CV. Some fields like marketing might appreciate creative approaches to hacking their recruitment process too, though they'll be more interested in whether your powerpoints are actually good.
If you're a mid-level software engineer trying to get a well-paid job at a company working on completely different technical problems to your skillset and not actively hiring, it's probably wasted effort.
Also, the message and approach should be very different depending on who you're reaching out to and for what reason (example: getting a job versus getting a client).
Providing value is important, but the goal of the first email is simply to get someone to reply, not overload them with info upfront (like what was suggested as one of the examples, a 13-page PowerPoint deck with data analysis).
I find providing 1-2 specific concrete ideas related to your product, service or ask and tailored for your prospect's business is enough to get an interested reply. Some good templates for this here: https://artofemails.com/new-clients
I also read the CEO’s first response as, “it looks like you already have a job, but if you’re looking next year, we’d love to have you.” versus the author’s framing of, “No thanks. Try again next year.”
Unless I’m mistaken, the author never indicated that he was looking for a Fall internship until the second email. I doesn’t feel like he was ever actually rejected.
> willing to basically do whatever I want him to do whenever and however long I want him to do it. In other words he’d be a good lackey.
This is unnecessarily condescending. When having to choose from a crowded field of seemingly-competent candidates, it's natural to want someone who is passionate and willing to go the extra mile. And as someone who is genuinely passionate to work in a certain industry or to work for a specific company, it is also smart to signal your dedication using tactics like what the author described.
Neither of the above warrants condescending to someone as "being a good lackey"
> Definition: a person who is obsequiously willing to obey or serve another person or group of people.
Patrick, if you’re reading this, I enjoyed this article. It reminds me that if you spend a little bit more time researching your prospect, you are more likely to get positive results. Another lesson is that it helps to focus on a few prospects you really want to work with, rather than spray and pray. Thank you for sharing.
thanks, Danial! exactly. the strategy isn't the literal tactics I took (e.g., spending ten hours, reaching out to one company, etc.) the strategy is thinking about cold outreach as a sales process and adapting it to your situation.
I think this post tries hard to claim something that wasn't quite the case. The author did not overcome a "no". They "overcame" a "sure, next summer might work". Which, given that they were a student, was really a "sure, whenever you are free might work"; the company assumed that they would be studying during the fall.
So what remains is that in the initial mail, the author presumably failed to mention that they would be free already in the fall. If they had, it looks like the company would have happily interviewed them for their fall internship program.
So my reading is that there really was no "no" at all to overcome, just some unfortunate initial communication. Including the fact that the company created the impression that they "weren't hiring", while in fact they were.
Good negotiating is a fact-finding mission. "No" is data that tells you something. "No, not this thing" is not the same as "Drop dead!"
The email response he got wasn't even as ugly he framed it in this piece. They were clearly interested and telling him when he could potentially connect with them.
Countering that with more information about his side of the equation -- that he was willing to take any role they had and his target date was the fall -- turned up more information and helped them reach agreement.
Generally speaking, it's fine to treat no as specific to X and not interpret it as a blanket rejection. And most CEOs will not be coy about letting you know that their "no" means "Sorry, you are just not a good fit for our company." They usually didn't get to be CEO by being a milquetoast.
That's not really comparable to trying to sort out how aggressively you should pursue some woman that you're probably taller than, stronger than and so forth. These are just not good points of comparison.
I'm annoyed by the "no means maybe" thing. He tries to cover himself by saying that "in dating, no always means no." But I wish he just hadn't gone there.
Too many people are already disrespectful pricks. They don't need any openings to help them justify their lousy behavior.
Anyway, congrats and thanks for the write up. It's good info, even though I think it unnecessarily steps in it on that one detail.
FTA: " Following up is so crucial that enterprise sales teams have software to automate follow ups."
As someone on the receiving end of sales solicitations, a lack of follow-up is the most frustrating thing imaginable, and I don't believe that it is a solved problem right now.
I suspect that some widely used enterprise sales software (maybe Salesforce?) recently developed a bug that messes badly with the follow up process.
I have recently seen many interesting and perfectly targeted outreach messages in my inbox, for products that I am genuinely interested in. So far, so good - something is obviously going right. But then I reply to the message, and instead of the sender following up with me, I start getting multiple copies of the first message delivered from random people at the same company.
Replying to these messages only increases the flood of solicitation messages, until I have to resort to blacklisting the entire company domain. What a waste of my time, and what a lost opportunity for the companies running the flawed software.
I wonder how significant it is in the US, but in France, securing an internship is hardly difficult.
Interns tend to barely get paid (when they do) and a lot of companies have no problem letting them rot for half of the internship duration.
You could probably get an internship almost anywhere if you're willing to do the most annoying crap half of the day, and nothing the rest of the time.
So, I don't know how significant is "I got an internship through this method" to prove that a method is good (but then again, maybe in the US culture it's actually something significant !)
In most industries, internships are just another class differentiator.
Tech is different, in that the best internships actually pay, but in other fields internships are one of the main entrypoints into a field. If you can't afford to live in, e.g., NYC and work for free, that door isn't open.
I wonder if the people that are condescending about Patrick's effort have ever done cold outbound prospecting and sold anything in their lives. But who am I to make assumptions...
Patrick, great job for:
1) trying something different and being persistent and polite, but not annoying
2) reaching your objective, and
2) documenting it in a post.
You've got the result on your side, and you found one possible way to get there. Are there others? Sure! Get an intro via a mutual connection, etc. You chose the one that worked for you given your constraints / circumstances.
When I saw your slide, my immediate reaction was "he must have been at Accenture". Looks like the templates haven't changed since I left in 2013 :-)
> I wonder if the people that are condescending about Patrick's effort have ever done cold outbound prospecting and sold anything in their lives. But who am I to make assumptions...
I'm sure cold outbound prospecting is very hard and has a non-zero success rate.
The fact that it might be hard for the person doing it doesn't mean it's not an unwelcome intrusion for the rest of us.
I appreciate that this high touch approach worked for the author, but I think the most important thing to understand about cold outreach is that it simply won't work 99.9% of the time and plan accordingly.
I did cold outreach for a startup I was working on many years ago. I wasn't even selling anything, just trying to do some research. I called and emailed dozens of people. Nobody responded. I then went and showed up in person at a dozen or so offices of people who I wanted to learn more about. The most polite among them told me they were too busy to talk and when I told them I could wait they asked me to leave. The worst slammed doors in my face and swore at me. I tried a number of different sweeteners. I offered our service for free for varying amounts of time. I even offered hundreds of dollars of cash up front just to speak for 30 minutes. On average I could barely finish one sentence of my pitch before people said no.
The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, and people treat strangers accordingly. Even if your product is amazing or you're offering someone a holy grail, their perceived risk of you is almost always too high for them to trust you. To me, this suggests that the pray and spray approach is a better one: if I double my chances of success from .01% to .02% (and these numbers don't feel too far off) by doing 10 hours of investment per customer, then I'm much better off sending thousands of generic emails. I'd say the author's success in cold outreach was more luck than anything he specifically did. Just my 2c.
About half the positions I staff are from referrals and half are from randomly submitted online resumes. The quality of team members have ended up being roughly equivalent.
I'm not sure how those two statements go together. Do a lot of people really refer individuals they don't know at all outside of a cold outreach just for a shot at a referral bonus?
All three jobs I've gotten in the last 20 years have come through people I know. (One was a referral; the other two were getting hired by someone I knew.) But these were people I actually did know and had worked with in some manner.
How do you suppose referral works when you don't have any contact with the company you're eyeing? I've applied for every job I've had online, save for the first one. It can be a messy process, but if you bring real value, you get noticed fairly quickly.
There are hundreds of tools available for finding everything from email addresses to phone numbers to physical addresses for work. Apollo.io, Hunter.io, LeadIQ just to get you started. Most have some tier of "free" if you only need a handful of contacts per month.
[email protected] has worked for me in the past. When I was in college I met a CTO at a campus event and emailed him this way, ended up being offered a job.
[+] [-] stared|6 years ago|reply
Where I should start?
I dived too deep into dating - partly because I was in the process of writing "Dating for Nerds", and partly because my ex-girlfriend was a sexologist/sociologist (who at that time was writing her master's thesis "Market Metaphors in Dating").
There are many sales metaphors for dating, especially in PUA lingo (including all about the target, pitch, funnel, and close). What I've found even more interesting is that there are many parallels between the ethics of both. While for doing things against someone's will it is obviously wrong (and a crime), there is a dark-gray zone of things that are not a crime, but still - are rarely done in good faith, and can hurt the other person. If something is a gray zone in one, very often the other tells if it is OK-ish to a--holish.
And 'no' in business is the same. Yes, people can change mind. Yes, 'no' sometimes means "maybe... but if I said that, you would have assumed 'yes' and put me in a really uncomfortable situation". There are pushy salespeople that after "no" they act as if they heard yes. This strategy may work, especially on people who are less assertive, less confident, etc. But it is a dick move, so don't. A lot of classic PAU is based on these pushy tactics. They even call when the next day a girl regrets they have had sex "buyer's remorse".
Yes, some people would react differently if they've heard more, or maybe need time to consider things, or would benefit from some encouragement. I am so grateful to all salespeople, and recruiters, who after hearing "no" respected that work. And treated me like a person, not a ripe bag of gold.
[+] [-] anticsapp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PedroCandeias|6 years ago|reply
I've been in software almost 20 years and due to some incredibly poor timing am in need of finding my own door of opportunity, so I found your post inspirational. Thank you.
[+] [-] patrickrivera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] steve76|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] amirathi|6 years ago|reply
Most people generally have a set of companies that are ideal for them in a tier'ed manner. In that case, more efficient way would be to choose ~5 companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If it fails, choose next ~5 and so on.
It falls somewhere in-between spending 10 hours of effort on 1 application & mass applying to 50 companies without any effort whatsoever. This is also how effective sales teams work.
[+] [-] whatshisface|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|6 years ago|reply
"Would love to work on this mission with you and the team" .. yeah, yeah, generic blah, everyone says that.
"and I won't take it for granted." Ok, wow, I rarely have people make promises like that. It sounds genuine and even if it's not, it's a point I can pull someone up on later on if they're screwing around.
Sending off some generic corporate speech will rarely work with me, but if someone acts a little more personably and shows they have some sort of emotional skin in the game, I'm all ears.
[+] [-] travisjungroth|6 years ago|reply
Which why generic corporate speech is just an arms race of faking that you have emotional skin in the game. Saying you'd "love to work on this mission with you and the team" was once enough. Now, you also have to say that you "won't take it for granted" to catch your attention. I wonder what the next step will be.
[+] [-] scottfr|6 years ago|reply
My company actually just put out a blog post last week on this showing how to quickly create customized emails while still leveraging templates [0].
[0] https://blaze.today/blog/best_sales_cold_email_templates_and...
[+] [-] _jal|6 years ago|reply
Some of us still take spam seriously.
[+] [-] mkchoi212|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlackCherry|6 years ago|reply
Additionally, this is survivorship bias. His emails sounded very professionally immature and while this companies leadership may have found it endearing, I could easily see other groups of people finding it off putting.
What this guys effort signaled to me is that he’s probably annoyingly overeager, but willing to basically do whatever I want him to do whenever and however long I want him to do it. In other words he’d be a good lackey.
If you want to shamelessly signal that you’d be a decent lackey for an obscure to medium startup this may be decent advice. And this may not be a bad thing, I know Casey Neistat’s employee Jack Coyne did something similar and it opened up a lot of doors for him.
[+] [-] notahacker|6 years ago|reply
If you're a mid-level software engineer trying to get a well-paid job at a company working on completely different technical problems to your skillset and not actively hiring, it's probably wasted effort.
[+] [-] Ayraa|6 years ago|reply
Also, the message and approach should be very different depending on who you're reaching out to and for what reason (example: getting a job versus getting a client).
Providing value is important, but the goal of the first email is simply to get someone to reply, not overload them with info upfront (like what was suggested as one of the examples, a 13-page PowerPoint deck with data analysis).
I find providing 1-2 specific concrete ideas related to your product, service or ask and tailored for your prospect's business is enough to get an interested reply. Some good templates for this here: https://artofemails.com/new-clients
[+] [-] rsp1984|6 years ago|reply
For sure I'd much rather invite / interview him as opposed to one of the 100s who just send their CV via email with not much else.
[+] [-] thrav|6 years ago|reply
Unless I’m mistaken, the author never indicated that he was looking for a Fall internship until the second email. I doesn’t feel like he was ever actually rejected.
[+] [-] dannyw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whack|6 years ago|reply
This is unnecessarily condescending. When having to choose from a crowded field of seemingly-competent candidates, it's natural to want someone who is passionate and willing to go the extra mile. And as someone who is genuinely passionate to work in a certain industry or to work for a specific company, it is also smart to signal your dedication using tactics like what the author described.
Neither of the above warrants condescending to someone as "being a good lackey"
> Definition: a person who is obsequiously willing to obey or serve another person or group of people.
[+] [-] danial|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] patrickrivera|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tom_mellior|6 years ago|reply
So what remains is that in the initial mail, the author presumably failed to mention that they would be free already in the fall. If they had, it looks like the company would have happily interviewed them for their fall internship program.
So my reading is that there really was no "no" at all to overcome, just some unfortunate initial communication. Including the fact that the company created the impression that they "weren't hiring", while in fact they were.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|6 years ago|reply
The email response he got wasn't even as ugly he framed it in this piece. They were clearly interested and telling him when he could potentially connect with them.
Countering that with more information about his side of the equation -- that he was willing to take any role they had and his target date was the fall -- turned up more information and helped them reach agreement.
Generally speaking, it's fine to treat no as specific to X and not interpret it as a blanket rejection. And most CEOs will not be coy about letting you know that their "no" means "Sorry, you are just not a good fit for our company." They usually didn't get to be CEO by being a milquetoast.
That's not really comparable to trying to sort out how aggressively you should pursue some woman that you're probably taller than, stronger than and so forth. These are just not good points of comparison.
I'm annoyed by the "no means maybe" thing. He tries to cover himself by saying that "in dating, no always means no." But I wish he just hadn't gone there.
Too many people are already disrespectful pricks. They don't need any openings to help them justify their lousy behavior.
Anyway, congrats and thanks for the write up. It's good info, even though I think it unnecessarily steps in it on that one detail.
/2¢
[+] [-] deepspace|6 years ago|reply
As someone on the receiving end of sales solicitations, a lack of follow-up is the most frustrating thing imaginable, and I don't believe that it is a solved problem right now.
I suspect that some widely used enterprise sales software (maybe Salesforce?) recently developed a bug that messes badly with the follow up process.
I have recently seen many interesting and perfectly targeted outreach messages in my inbox, for products that I am genuinely interested in. So far, so good - something is obviously going right. But then I reply to the message, and instead of the sender following up with me, I start getting multiple copies of the first message delivered from random people at the same company.
Replying to these messages only increases the flood of solicitation messages, until I have to resort to blacklisting the entire company domain. What a waste of my time, and what a lost opportunity for the companies running the flawed software.
[+] [-] dvasdekis|6 years ago|reply
Free trial available.
[+] [-] C4stor|6 years ago|reply
Interns tend to barely get paid (when they do) and a lot of companies have no problem letting them rot for half of the internship duration.
You could probably get an internship almost anywhere if you're willing to do the most annoying crap half of the day, and nothing the rest of the time.
So, I don't know how significant is "I got an internship through this method" to prove that a method is good (but then again, maybe in the US culture it's actually something significant !)
[+] [-] _jal|6 years ago|reply
Tech is different, in that the best internships actually pay, but in other fields internships are one of the main entrypoints into a field. If you can't afford to live in, e.g., NYC and work for free, that door isn't open.
[+] [-] snazz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] peterwoerner|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perl4ever|6 years ago|reply
If you're willing to do that, you don't need an internship.
[+] [-] scapecast|6 years ago|reply
Patrick, great job for:
1) trying something different and being persistent and polite, but not annoying
2) reaching your objective, and
2) documenting it in a post.
You've got the result on your side, and you found one possible way to get there. Are there others? Sure! Get an intro via a mutual connection, etc. You chose the one that worked for you given your constraints / circumstances.
When I saw your slide, my immediate reaction was "he must have been at Accenture". Looks like the templates haven't changed since I left in 2013 :-)
[+] [-] Macha|6 years ago|reply
I'm sure cold outbound prospecting is very hard and has a non-zero success rate.
The fact that it might be hard for the person doing it doesn't mean it's not an unwelcome intrusion for the rest of us.
[+] [-] tschwimmer|6 years ago|reply
I did cold outreach for a startup I was working on many years ago. I wasn't even selling anything, just trying to do some research. I called and emailed dozens of people. Nobody responded. I then went and showed up in person at a dozen or so offices of people who I wanted to learn more about. The most polite among them told me they were too busy to talk and when I told them I could wait they asked me to leave. The worst slammed doors in my face and swore at me. I tried a number of different sweeteners. I offered our service for free for varying amounts of time. I even offered hundreds of dollars of cash up front just to speak for 30 minutes. On average I could barely finish one sentence of my pitch before people said no.
The world can be a cruel and dangerous place, and people treat strangers accordingly. Even if your product is amazing or you're offering someone a holy grail, their perceived risk of you is almost always too high for them to trust you. To me, this suggests that the pray and spray approach is a better one: if I double my chances of success from .01% to .02% (and these numbers don't feel too far off) by doing 10 hours of investment per customer, then I'm much better off sending thousands of generic emails. I'd say the author's success in cold outreach was more luck than anything he specifically did. Just my 2c.
[+] [-] arturm|6 years ago|reply
Does anyone still apply online?
[+] [-] joejerryronnie|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|6 years ago|reply
All three jobs I've gotten in the last 20 years have come through people I know. (One was a referral; the other two were getting hired by someone I knew.) But these were people I actually did know and had worked with in some manner.
[+] [-] Etheryte|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] minkzilla|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yread|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] reese_john|6 years ago|reply
https://sivers.org/gethired
[+] [-] mrfusion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goatherders|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonfw|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dannyw|6 years ago|reply
With enough dedication you should be able to find some contact details.
[+] [-] dt3ft|6 years ago|reply