When There's Blood In The Streets, Email
What You Can Learn About Outbound Outreach From Carl Icahn
I’ve recently become obsessed with Carl Icahn. There’s a documentary about him on HBOMax that I’d highly recommend called Icahn: The Restless Billionaire.
Icahn is a polarizing figure.
For some, he’s a financial Batman: fighting bloated management teams on behalf of the pensions of teachers and firefighters. For others, he’s Gordon Gecko from the movie Wall Street.1
Whatever you believe about him, I’m not interested in adjudicating that in this post. Partly because that’s not the point of this. But mainly because, no matter what you think about the fellow, he’s good at what he does.
And I believe that if someone is good at what they do, no matter what it is that they’re doing, you should learn from them and apply that to whatever it is that you’re doing.
One of Carl Icahn’s most famous moves in his career was his investment in Texaco. Just to tell the story briefly: Texaco and Pennzoil got into a lawsuit over their acquisition of Getty Oil. Pennzoil sued Texaco and won a judgment of $11 Billion. Texaco’s stock plummeted and they went into bankruptcy protection to save themselves from creditors.
Seems like the worst possible company to invest in, no?
Not according to Carl. He saw that the company was still fundamentally sound and could be successful, as long as they got rid of this lawsuit. So, he invested and then reached out to Pennzoil’s lawyer: Joe Jamail (the fella in the picture above). They sat down and negotiated the settlement down to $3 Billion. The company was saved, recovered… and Carl Icahn sold his position in the largest sale in Wall Street history at the time.
When talking about it in the documentary, Carl says
You have to buy things where the rest of the world are looking at you and thinking you’re a little bit crazy. You’re going against the trend…
A lot of times, events are overblown. Overblown on the good side and overblown on the bad side.
This is reminiscent of the famous Nathan Rothschild quote, “the time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”
“Okay…” you’re saying to yourself, awkwardly, while looking around like a dinner party guest who is trapped in a conversation with someone’s crazy uncle, “what does this have to do with cold emailing?”
I think the same principle applies to cold outbound.
There are a lot of things in cold outbound that are generally avoided, for good reason. For example: people don’t like to reach out between 4-5pm. The thinking goes: this person is packing up to leave. The last thing they want is to hear from me.
Or, if you follow my Twitter diligently, you’ll probably remember that I spoke about emailing people on the last week of the year. Nobody does this: people aren’t in the office, you’ll get a lot of OOO messages, and - the thinking goes - that people will be pissed to get an email from you when they’re on vacation. Wouldn’t you be pissed?
But, if nobody else is emailing your prospects at that time of the year… then that probably means that their inboxes are empty. And, if you’ve ever been on vacation, you know that - as fun as it is - you do get bored sometimes. Especially if you’re a C-Suite executive at a Fortune 500 company. You got to that position because you’re great at your job. And you’re great at your job because you love doing it.
Imagine you’re your prospect. You’re on Week 2 of family time. Your son just got into a fight with your daughter because he put his buggers in her mac and cheese, and your wife/husband is complaining about… something. You don’t really care.
You open up your phone, looking for something to distract you… and poof! You see a cold email. Work. You’ve started to miss it, actually.
Yes, most people wouldn’t open it, but there are a lot of people who would.
This is a little outdated - the holidays are well over. But I had some success yesterday with the project that I’ve been working on by applying this same principle, so I thought I’d write a post about it.
This isn’t to say that you should build your entire approach based on emailing people at the “wrong” times with the weirdest and wackiest outreach strategies. Norms are norms for a reason. And if there’s a whole industry of people who do things a certain way, it’s likely because there’s some credence to those strategies. Contrarianism for the sake of contrarianism is even worse than blind conformity.
But… I think it also makes sense to ask yourself: what are some of the sacred cows in my outbound strategy, and how can I upend them?
What are some things that you’re saying, “of course I have to do it this way” - and then ask yourself, “why?”
Play Devil’s Advocate.
To use the example from above, if you’re thinking, “of course people don’t want to be emailed on the holidays, they want to spend time with their families” - interrogated that concept further. Granted, not everybody is Tom Brady, who comes out of retirement after having to spend two weeks with his family: but most people are somewhere on that continuum.
And, if you can come up with a good reason why everyone might be wrong: then it might be worth testing it out.
To go back to the Carl quote and emailing people at certain times of the day: a lot of the ideas about the best times to email people are overblown. People think it’s way better to email people at 9am than it actually is, and people think it’s way worse to email people at 7pm than it actually is.
Maybe you’ll find a new, interesting approach that will give you an edge.
And if you do - please let me know.
You would be excused for making that comparison because the character is actually based on him, and there are segments of the “Greed Is Good” speech that are lifted from Icahn, word for word.