Cold intro
An outreach attempt to someone you have no prior relationship with, no mutual connection introducing, and no specific shared context. Has a 1-3% reply rate at best - and is exactly what an event lets you replace.
A cold intro is the default form of B2B outreach: pull a list of contacts, write a generic message, send at scale, hope for a reply. It works at low volume (every reply is upside) but it is the lowest-leverage version of relationship-building because the recipient has no reason to spend social capital on you.
Industry benchmarks put cold-email reply rates at 1-3% even for tuned campaigns. LinkedIn cold-connect-plus-DM averages around 3-5%. Cold calls to senior buyers convert below 2%. None of those numbers are wrong - they're the cost of starting from zero.
The reason events matter so much for sales and founder outreach is that a ten-minute in-person conversation followed by a 24-hour follow-up converts a cold channel into a warm one. The reply rate on "great chatting last night at [event]" is 40-60%. That gap - the difference between 2% and 50% - is what makes a well-prepped Luma event worth more than a week of cold outbound.
Related terms
- Warm intro - An introduction made by someone you already know. At events, the "warm" can come from physical proximity: you ...
- ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) - A short description of the type of person, account, or context you are trying to find. In B2B sales it lives in a CRM. A...
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