A B2B software marketplace

The other day I received a really well targeted, well written cold sales email from another startup who was trying to sell us on-demand programmers. We had no need at that time, but would likely in the future.

While I was checking out their company, I realized they were actually a pretty good fit for our own product (talkjs.com). So, I sent him one of our own sales email pitches in return, which was favourably received (yay!). 

The majority of these sales emails however are not successful like this interaction, and every working person with an email address can probably relate to how annoying all these misdirected emails are.

This process got me thinking. There must be thousands of carefully crafted email drip campaigns being sent out each day, from startups/products just like us. All these companies define their perfect target market, find and collect all companies in that category from various sources online, grab/guess the email address of the right people in that company, copy + paste them in some sales email tool, and finally press “play” to start the email drip campaign. Then hope for the best: the emails will actually arrive, don’t go straight to spam, get opened, and hopefully read with some form of attention.

This all feels unnecessarily tedious. There must be a better way. A process that’s more efficient as well as pleasurable for both parties.

By Joshua Schoenaker

I’m a designer and entrepreneur. Currently working on talkjs.com — Chat API with pre-built UI and notifications included.