Strategy, channel and brand
Question.Marketing Done Right | Why Cold Pitching Fails
Cold pitching fails because it starts with a pitch instead of a question, and the work that actually generates conversations is pinning down the ICP with AI research tools, enriching the data, and then reaching out across email, LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
Last updated 31 August 2026
Running time 2:36Watch it
What does this video cover?
- 01It is all about the questions as far as I am concerned.
- 02We actively use AI research tools to build lists, scrape data and pin down your ICP.
- 03Lots of people talk about this. I do not think a lot of people do it the way I am doing it.
- 04Once the ICP is pinned down, a detailed enrichment process confirms the person is exactly who we are looking for before the data goes into your CRM.
- 05Coupling email outreach with LinkedIn outreach and then following up on WhatsApp is working really well.
- 06WhatsApp has a 95 to 98 percent open rate.
- 07I do not like the SMS part personally. It is intrusive, and texts out of the blue are a bit odd.
Full transcript
What does Question.Marketing actually do?
It is all about the questions as far as I am concerned. I have been doing a lot of research, and hopefully some of you have read the articles I have been posting on LinkedIn, one particularly recently about where LinkedIn might be going and how we think LinkedIn will combat automation, bots and all of that sort of stuff. I will put a link to that blog in this post.
We are actively using AI research tools to build lists, scrape data and then pin down your ICP. A lot of people talk about this. Loads of people talk about it. You see posts all the time in the feed. I do not think a lot of people do it the way I am doing it.
How do you get from a list to a real conversation?
By making sure the person is genuinely the right person before you ever contact them. If we are looking for intent and we are looking for the right people, we can pin that ICP down. Then we run it through a detailed enrichment process to make sure that person is exactly who we are looking for, pull out all of the information we need, pull it into your CRM, and start running the outreach.
Some of the interesting things we have been doing involve coupling email outreach with LinkedIn outreach and then following it up on WhatsApp. The WhatsApp piece, creating the conversation and engaging with the customer that way, is working really well, because as we know, or hopefully you know, WhatsApp has a 95 to 98 percent open rate.
We can also apply a filter to ask whether this person has WhatsApp on their phone, and if not we could send an SMS. Personally I do not like the SMS part. It is intrusive, and texts out of the blue are a bit odd. But a WhatsApp with perhaps a video and some call to action buttons works really nicely.
Why stop pitching?
Because the pitches do not work, and I am on the receiving end of them too. I personally am so fed up with pitches coming through on my LinkedIn, you would not believe. Maybe I was one of the people back in the day, 10 years ago, who instigated a lot of that anyway. That is water under the bridge.
If you want to know more about what I am doing with Question.Marketing, how we outreach to people, how we generate the conversations and how we stop pitching, and if you want to know how to do this properly, please get in touch. I would love to hear from you.
Where next?
The library holds every video we have published. The AEO pages explain the method behind them, what it costs and what the evidence actually supports.