Long game outreach manifesto
January 2022
If you sell services, you should be doing outreach. You need new clients, they have to come from somewhere, and contacting potential prospects directly is the quickest way to find them.
But outreach sucks. We hate it. It’s shady, spammy, inauthentic, discouraging. Sending all those emails and getting a 1% open rate. Making all those calls and getting hung up on, or told to fuck off, over and over.
You’re right to resist outreach if that’s how you see it.
It doesn’t have to be like that, though, and it shouldn’t be.
You shouldn’t send mass emails, or spend an afternoon calling people who’ve never heard of you.
Instead, outreach should be a continual practice that naturally extends your network in the direction of the kind of people you want to know.
It should be slow.
You should play the long game.
Playing the long game requires you to operate at two levels:
Strategic
- Identify aspirational connections who seem way out of your league (think celebrities, Fortune 500 CEOs, influencers in your industry, or dream clients)
- Analyze their network and identify interesting people they know, whom you’d also like to know
Tactical
- Make small, authentic overtures and connections to people who know the people who know the people … who know your ideal connections
- Maintain this behavior consistently, forever
You can’t do this in an afternoon. You can’t bUiLd A LiST and send templatized emails. You can’t run it on autopilot, or delegate it. But you should do it anyway.
You should take time, each week, to revisit your list of aspirational connections - make sure they’re still people you want to know one day.
Then you should take time to reach out - with careful deliberation and genuine interest - to people that live on the long and friendly pathway to that connection.
You can do this alone, but it’s easier to go with friends.
That’s what the Long game outreach club is for. We meet weekly for brief discussion and a 30-minute working session.
We do outreach. It’s not spammy. It works. Come join!