What's Your Number?

What's an acceptable number of times to try something before considering it a failure?

Cold emailing isn’t glamorous. In fact, it’s right up there with cold calling. I often times get nasty responses and have even had a few folks reach out to my boss. But it was a response last week that truly caught me off guard.

I sent an email out to folks that have been on my list for a long while. The prospects continue to open emails and visit our URLs, so, I keep sending them messages. My email talked about “persistence” and mentioned the number of emails I had sent each prospect.

This prospect emailed me back and said: “I’m not in sales, but after four (4) times of emailing someone without a response…I would give up.” I was stunned.

My Response

I responded with a simple message: “Mr. Smith (name changed to protect the guilty), If your engineers came to you and said ‘we tried creating this new feature…in fact, we tried four times and it just doesn’t work. So, we quit and we’re moving on to something else.’ Would you be OK with that?”

I then sent the below image:

What are your thoughts? Is four times an acceptable limit to say “I tried” and then quit?

What's your number?