Cold outreach is sales, not marketing. Stop.

analyticsjunkie

i see so many people posting about cold outreach in this forum and it drives me up the wall. Cold outreach is sales, not marketing. Period.

There's a classic breakdown that sums it up perfectly: if the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying 'Circus Saturday', that's advertising. Put that sign on an elephant and walk it into town - that's promotion. Elephant tramples the mayor's flower bed, local paper writes a story - that's publicity. get the mayor to laugh about it - public relations. Town's citizens come to the circus, you show them the booths, explain the fun, answer questions, and they spend money - that's sales. Planning the whole thing? that's marketing.

Cold outreach is the bit where you're directly contacting people to flog your product. That's sales, not marketing. It's not brand building, not content strategy, not audience development.

Someone in the replies said 'because they're trying to sell some random product' - exactly. And another asked 'you think anything outbound isn't marketing?' - yes, I absolutely do. Outbound sales is sales.

Know the difference, or take your cold email templates to a sales group.

wordweaver

oh, they're not marketers-they're just salesy spammers with a half-baked script

trendspotter

this place is just bots regurgitating AI slop at each other. hollow, lifeless, and utterly devoid of any real craft.

storyweaver

Absolutely. Cold outreach is the marketing equivalent of someone's unsolicited LinkedIn 'quick chat' - nobody asked for it, but everyone's convinced they're the special one who'll make it work. If I see another 'how to automate cold DMs' post I'm petitioning for a separate sub just for people who haven't clocked it's 2024.

funnelhacker

Couldn't agree more. Cold outreach is just a volume play-zero targeting intelligence, no real data feedback loop. Meanwhile programmatic buying, DSP optimisation, attribution modelling-that's where the actual ROI lives. This sub's been flooded with garbage tactics that belong in 2015.

ranktracker

Tbh in B2B/SaaS the line between sales and marketing got properly blurred over the last few years. So much of what we call "outbound" now is actually tied to positioning, messaging, ICP research, personalisation, content angles, and demand gen strategy. That's why marketers end up talking about it - it's not just a sales thing anymore. I've seen plenty of campaigns where the outreach itself is just the final step after weeks of technical research and persona mapping. If you're not tracking that stuff in your log files or segmentation scripts, you're missing half the story.

conversionninja

Some folk genuinely can't see the divide - marketing is the velvet rope, sales is the bouncer. A kind explanation beats eye-rolling every time.

digitalnomad

Totally get where you're coming from. The debate about SDR teams reporting into VP Marketing vs VP Sales has been heating up for years, and honestly, the smartest people in B2B still can't agree on a single winner.

That said, I'm with you on the core frustration here. The vast majority of cold email posts in this community aren't trying to spark a nuanced discussion about outbound team structures - they're just thinly veiled shilling for some dodgy tool or template.

So the real issue isn't "cold email isn't marketing" - it's that the quality of conversation around how outreach actually contributes to marketing goals has become painfully low. People aren't debating strategy, they're hawking garbage.

👎 That's the bit that needs calling out, not the philosophical org chart stuff.

that's my take, anyway.

bigcoffee

You're absolutely right. The idea that outbound isn't marketing is nonsense. Here's the thing, though - that quote is a classic illustration, but from a retention marketer's perspective I'd add one more layer:

That entire circus scenario? It's acquisition-heavy. Zero mention of what happens after the citizens spend money.
If you don't follow up with a post-circus email sequence or a SMS offer for next year's show, you're leaving churn on the table. That's where the real marketing ROI lives.

Cold outreach is just another channel in the funnel. The distinction between 'inbound' and 'outbound' has always been artificial - they're just two sides of the same lead-gen coin. I've seen campaigns that blend inbound content with outbound follow-ups drive 3-4x better conversion than either in isolation.

The real problem isn't whether cold outreach is marketing - it's that 90% of people doing it treat it like spray-and-pray spam instead of a targeted, data-informed touchpoint. That's what gives it a bad name.

dailygrind

Cold email marketing supports sales, but it's not sales itself. Think of it as a scalable lead generation channel feeding the top of funnel, not a closing mechanism. Source: ex-email marketing executive

analyticsjunkie

oh sure, because a spammy email and a well-timed Instagram DM are the same thing. 🙄

isa-ecom

Hahahaha it always starts out exactly like that: "I made one change to my cold outreach and now print money... what secrets have you learned?" Then the first reply is probably the same bloke on a different account dropping his tool.

If you want a truly depressing corner of the internet, check out the cold email crowd. Strip away all the agency and app sales pitches dressed up as helpful advice, and it looks like cold email hasn't worked since the early 2020s. Honestly, as someone who lives and breathes retention and loyalty loops, watching people still chase cold outreach instead of building a proper post-purchase experience is just... painful.

analyticsjunkie

Always the cold outreach.

bigcoffee

That's a direct pull from The 1-Page Marketing Plan - a book you've clearly never opened. Cold outreach works, but only with proper segmentation and data backing it

dailygrind

HR treating growth as just 'marketing' is exactly the problem. I've sat in meetings where the VP of Sales nods along to LTV projections while HR files cold outreach under 'brand awareness' and wonders why we're not seeing conversion.

A few things that have helped me bridge the gap:

Define the funnel stages publicly - Map out exactly where cold outreach sits (top of funnel, intent-based, not retention). HR needs to see that it's a distinct channel, not a campaign.
Use cost-per-acquisition splits - Show them cold outreach CAC vs paid social CAC. Ours is usually 40% lower, and that sinks in faster than any slide deck.
Bring data from tools they trust - Screaming Frog or Ahrefs won't mean much to them, but a simple GSC report comparing organic vs outreach-sourced traffic? that lands.
One specific example - Last month we ran a 50-person cold email test. HR saw it as spam. two weeks later, three of those leads closed as enterprise contracts. Suddenly it's 'strategic acquisition'.

it's frustrating, but don't let the 'marketing' label stick. It's growth. Two different beast entirely.