I’ve accidentally stumbled upon people losing their jobs at an astounding rate...and it should terrify the entire market

I use cold outreach as a way to get new business. 

I have done it for years and I am pretty good at it. 

That is not to brag but rather say: I know my benchmarks. 

Right at 40% of my emails get opened (Sales Tip: all lowercase subject lines and conversational in tone)

I make sure to send about 7 follow-up emails for each sequence. 

And I aim for 1% or less bounce rate. 

I hit these regularly. 

At least until recently when my bounce rate hit over 7%.

What I found

Let me just underline, I clean my lists twice and I build them myself. I want to make sure I am reaching out to relevant people and I want to make sure my domain doesn’t get flagged for spam. It’s not hard, it just requires a little extra effort to verify the email addresses before you send. 

I tend to bundle my work, so I will spend the time building a large list and then break it down into chunks to send the campaigns. I'll send a few hundred one week and then a few hundred more another week, and so on. 

I built and cleaned the list about a month ago and sent out the first batch of emails and hit my benchmarks. I took a couple of weeks off from this list to focus on another sector and then came back to it recently. 

That is when I started getting the incredibly high bounce rates, which is indicative of an email address being pulled down and that person no longer working there. I also got auto-responder after auto-responder that person x no longer works here. 

Between bounces and auto-responders 1 in 11 people emailed were no longer in their jobs. 

I go into this detail as it is important to understand what the numbers mean and the extent of the issue. 

Who was I sending emails to

It is also important to understand who I was emailing: GMs and MDs of SMEs in the UAE. Bear with me and all those abbreviations!

Simply put, I was getting in touch with the top leadership of businesses 20-100 people large across the entire UAE. 

And over the course of just a few weeks, they just disappeared, or at least their jobs did. 

This is the backbone of a large part of the economy and the senior leadership, not to mention anyone underneath them, has been removed. 

Between bounces and auto-responders 1 in 11 people emailed were no longer in their jobs. 

Those are scary numbers, and not just for the people and businesses I reached out to. It is terrifying for the entire market. 

What this means

Post-Covid survival starts now. 

Not only is your client base shrinking, so is your potential pipeline. 

This isn’t unique to the UAE, this is a global issue. However, if you are in a small market, ensuring you have enough future business coming through the door is imperative to your business’ survival. 

Ask yourself: do you have enough business either currently or that is about to hit to make it until December? How about one year from now? These are tough questions especially with the immediacy of other issues. 

But don’t lose sight of what has to happen in the medium term.

If you are worried about your pipeline and future revenue, reach out and I will try to give you some quick-wins that can make a big difference in your business. Also, if you want to have a better understanding of what else we do, check us out at uaesalescoach.com. Keep pushing forward and keep staying safe!