There's a paradox in today's communications: everybody hates cold pitching, and everybody does it. The average efficiency of cold pitching efforts is dancing around 1%, and we seem to make peace with this ridiculously low number. We just gave up to the inevitable humiliation of the process. Don't want to suffer rejection and anxiety? Build relationships, get warm intros, and become significant on your own so "they can't ignore you."
Building great relationships with investors, reporters, or potential business partners is indeed very helpful. It also takes time, sometimes years -- so if you don't have those years to establish personal trust, you are forced to knock at every door on your way with a cold pitch or sales offer.
And here comes the pain.
Most cold pitches are straight-up ignored
You do your research, you verify contacts, you pick the right people from the crowd, you craft your message, you add something personal, you perform a relevancy check -- and nothing happens as if you chilled at Netflix all those long hours. Your work brings no results. 74% of cold emails stay unopened, and 98% -- unanswered.
Most replies to cold pitching are rejections
Choose your poison, whether you prefer to be ignored or rejected. It depends on your character traits what is more painful, but the fact is you'll get either no answer or a No answer. And not all rejection replies will be polite. In some cases, you risk getting a weaponized "Would you please f*ck off" message.
Those who say yes will waste your time
If you manage to induce genuine interest to your offer, people will ask you many questions. They had no idea what you do a minute ago and won't read your landing page or user manual. They will ask you all sorts of stuff, and if answering the questions is not your only job in the project, you'll get irritated.
It hurts!
Overall, cold pitching looks like a business practice that harms mental health. This aspect deserves to be acknowledged. And then we may want to fix it for our sanity's sake!