Heard a guy at a meetup say cold DMs are dead, got me second guessing everything

At the Atlanta Tech Village happy hour last Thursday, this founder told me he deleted his LinkedIn after getting 4 replies out of 300 DMs last quarter, which made my 2 out of 50 look almost good. But then he said he closed 3 deals just by commenting on local startup posts and DMing people who replied to him, so it's more about the timing and context than the template. Has anyone else seen a bigger return from engaging in threads versus sending unsolicited messages, or is that just survivor bias in a small room?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_lucas2d ago

Damn, FOUR replies out of 300?! That's brutal. I get that cold outreach is getting harder, but that number makes me want to toss my whole approach in the trash. The thread engagement thing makes sense though. People are way more likely to talk to you after you've said something smart in public, it's like a warm intro without the intro. I've gotten a few decent conversations that way, but nothing that turned into a real deal yet. Maybe I need to stop treating DMs like a numbers game and start treating comments like the actual funnel.

the_riley2d ago

Those 300 DMs probably got opened by maybe 30 people max, and the real problem is your subject line, not the approach itself.