The Power of Cold Emails: Why Senior Leaders Are Surprisingly Responsive

There’s a paradox of seniority: people get more messages, yet they are even more responsive.

This is especially true for important emails.

Here’s why:

The IC Life

As an Individual Contributor, your work (outside of certain roles) mostly is internal to your company.

You can spend the vast majority of your day in Slack for responsive tasks.

Email responsiveness matters, but it’s not the most important thing.

THE Middle Manager Life

As you become a middle manager, email starts to matter more.

You’re hiring folks externally, making calls on agencies… And there’s lots of rapid decision-making to be done cross-functionally.

Responsiveness ramps accordingly.

The Exec Life

When you finally become an exec, everything changes. It blew my mind.

You have investors, consultants, agencies, and coaches all communicating on email. And everyone is 24/7 online.

The job becomes connective tissue. Email responsiveness reaches extreme levels.

The Takeaway

A lot of ICs miss the takeaway: Even though YOU don’t care about your email inbox, hiring managers and execs do.

Of course, execs are also experts at ignoring unimportant emails.

So you can’t expect the average status update or info email to get a response.

The Job Seeker’s Opportunity

What this means is you have an opening, but it’s not easy: an important cold email.

It’s hard to construct something “important”. You can’t automate it.

But the best do it for response rates of >50%. It unlocks jobs, opportunities, and more.

The Skeptical View

The skeptics are thinking:

“That’s a work-life balance nightmare.”

“The response rate is not worth your time.”

“Why is another person promoting cold emails?”

I, honestly, used to be in your camp. Until I started to see these things work later in my career.

Harsh Truth

So I’m writing this to share reality:

You should understand communication dynamics at different levels can make or break your career.

Understand the world to then shape it.

Next Steps

So how do you write cold emails to get responses… even interviews and jobs?

Learn from this deep dive, where I go 201 on cold emails.