> How do they generate business then, if not cold outreach?

There are tons of ways to get warm interest, whether that's permission to email, a conversation with a salesperson, or a request for more info. Some obvious examples are content marketing (with a way to provide your email for a mailing list and/or account), trial downloads, product tours/webinar registrations, trade show booths, and user group sponsorships.

Literally any interaction except emailing a complete stranger can, and often does, lead to someone giving a salesperson or a company permission to contact them.

(Related: Needing to guess who needs a product, email them out of the blue, and be wrong 50-99% of the time, is often a sign that the company is failing at marketing. Generating warm leads is not hard.)

With the exception of trade shows, I call that 'marketing' though, that's an entirely different department. Everything else you've mentioned does not fall into the sales/BD category. Which is fine, I know some companies do not have or need a sales staff at all- I'm just commenting on the ones that do. If they have sales or business development in their job titles, they are probably reaching out to strangers a decent amount.

You don't really need outbound sales folks for B2C, but 95%+ of the time you do for B2B/enterprise

> I call that 'marketing' though

That's fair, but marketing's main job is to find prospective customers. In a successful organization, marketing and sales scale roughly in lockstep, so marketing is generating enough warm leads for sales.

One can debate how warm/qualified they need to be - and sales and marketing teams do - but the answer isn't "They've expressed no interest at all and might not have ever heard of us."

Your comment applies to cold emails to strangers, too: that's marketing, not sales. It's ineffective, often expensive marketing because it's performed by people with the wrong skill set and goals. Generalizing, a company doing that has over-invested in sales and under-invested in marketing.

Didn't see it as a gotcha! Love the curiosity :)

I can only speak for the businesses I have been involved in (software, product marketing for software, marcomms, real estate), but cold outreach -- if done at all -- would be the longest of long tails: low conversion, increasingly high maintenance (esp. because folks like me send petulant ICO/GDPR subject access requests to clog up organisations sending unsolicited emails).

So speculative cold outreach is crazy inefficient and frankly not on-brand for most companies (yes, eastern European outsource software teams can do it, but e.g. AWS can't).

Most companies look to qualify their leads by having some degree of engagement: whether it's impressions > clicks > landing page. They might do this in addition to cold outreach, but the companies I've worked for (and started) focused on marketing (SEM, TV, print, radio, trade shows, PR, networking events). All of these generate either inbound or permission-based selling: if you're attending a trade show or responding to a TV advert, then you're giving us implicit permission to talk to you.

We are not sending an invasive message into your inbox which is a personal place, whether it's a corporate or personal inbox.

Marketing is effective - especially at the point of intent (e.g. when someone Googles "buying new motorcycle helmet" rather than just "motorcycle helmet") and not dumb/broadcast.

The gun analogy illustrates: if you removed all sales people from all organisations, then nobody would need any salespeople: companies would still have needs for e.g. software and would still find companies through marketing. It wouldn't result in companies losing revenue. OP (not sure if it was you or not) was conflating marketing and sales.

>then you're giving us implicit permission to talk to you

Certainly. Although I'm guessing that at least some of the people on this thread most objecting to cold outreach would still classify something like an email after getting a badge scan at a trade show as spam. You're right that lead acquisition happens in a lot of ways other than the spam I get in my inbox offering to sell me address lists. However, a lot of people still get mad at emails that are the result of casual interactions. Honestly, it's the way the business world works but people are still going to object to it.

>The gun analogy illustrates: if you removed all sales people from all organisations, then nobody would need any salespeople: companies would still have needs for e.g. software and would still find companies through marketing. It wouldn't result in companies losing revenue. OP (not sure if it was you or not) was conflating marketing and sales.

And then some company would figure out that, at least for certain types of products, having someone who directly cultivates a relationship with buyers is a really effective way to increase revenues relative to the competition.

> an email after getting a badge scan as spam

And IMO they are totally right to do so. That behaviour is so ludicrously dumb that I can't believe people do it. Your company is exhibiting in a room full of potential customers. If someone doesn't come and talk to you then you have no right to reach out to them IMO.

> a lot of people still get mad at emails that are the result of casual interactions

Hey, if I gave someone my email address that's fine. I expect them to contact me. If I gave a conference organiser my email address, I do not expect the exhibitors to be able to contact me.

> And then some company would figure out…

For sure. But OP's point seemed to be that money stops being spent in a world without sales people. It's an interesting thought experiment. My hunch is that the same money is spent: sales people are not, in general, getting more spend out of customers overall. Salesman X might get Customer Y to spend more money with _their particular company_, but not money that would not have been deployed in the market anyway.