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You have a built in Effort Detector.
It’s why you feel that drop in happiness or patience when you realize something personal, isn’t.
We all know an AI scraped someone’s LinkedIn to write this: “I see that you drive strategic growth for venture or private equity backed B2B SaaS technology firms in the greater Chicago metropolitan area…”.
Absolutely no one reads that and thinks ‘Wow, someone researched me. Whatever I read in the next sentence is going to be valuable.”
Every day you get emails and LinkedIn messages that start this way.
Your Effort Detector shuts them down faster than someone in an elevator who says “Mind if I fart?”
Yes, stranger, we mind.
Deep inside our psychology we know that the message required zero effort, and it turns us off.
Here are some tools I use with clients who want to do cold outbound: seamless, apollo, mailshake, lusha, coldiq, outreach.io, revnew, clay, instantly, and a bunch more.
Sometimes their goal is to scrape a prospect’s LinkedIn profile or other data source and create a personalized cold message with AI.
Nobody ever stops to ask “Do people like receiving these?
Do you like receiving them? Don’t you delete them?”
People are fantastic at recognizing work you put nothing into.
Don’t assume prospects are dumber, less jaded or less busy than you.
They’re not.
Use tools. The tools are great. Automate and scale. But figure out how to show effort to a reader you’re asking effort from.
No-work messages won’t resonate.
Only people doing work, do.
Every reader that your tool reaches out to has an Effort Detector. It’s just as powerful as yours. Your gimmick won’t work on them.
Once you know who you’re sending to, even if it’s automated, put some work into the words.
People will know. And they’ll respond better.
I know they will, I have stats 😀