Are business introductions a waste of time? The lead marketer at an Israeli tech company claims they are.
Iris Shoor claims she got meetings at Twitter, LinkedIn and GitHub not by asking for a liaison to make an introduction but by hunting down people at the companies she thought might be interested in what she was selling and then often guessing their email addresses.
Shoor's company, Takipi ("server debugging doesn't have to suck") went into public beta five months ago. Shoor says she used cold calls and intros. The former led to seven meetings and five installations. Intros prompted nine meetings and two installations.
Targeting the right people made cold emails more effective, Shoor wrote. "By using cold emails I was able to reach exactly the right people in the organization, and that usually made a huge difference. You need to reach certain people, not companies."
How do you reach those people?
First Shoor made a list of companies that she was interested in. Then she skipped LinkedIn and searched Twitter and YouTube for terms like "Java scholar" and the company's name. Slideshare and Speaker Deck. "People with a high social profile are more likely to answer," she says. If she didn't find the right person at a particular person, she'd move on to the next one.
See also: 5 Tips for Cold-Emailing Your Dream Employer
Once she found the right person, instead of using LinkedIn to message them, Shoor would try to find their email address. She used Rapportive, a Gmail-based contact management system, and then try out a few email addresses to see which ones were connected to the target's LinkedIn/Twitter or Google+ account.
Shoor continued:
"Each company has its own email convention – firstname.lastname, first letter from the first name + last name, etc., so sometimes I look for a random email address of someone from this company (just Google “@companyname.com” or look for the biz-dev/ evangalist/ support emails (which are easier to find) and match the convention.
From there, Shoor says she would give people a few days to respond to her query — if they were a developer, she'd give them a day or two, "with other people, four to five days," she told Mashable.
Shoor's emails were short and to the point. Here's one example:

By contrast, Shoor found that intros were often a waste of time:
Unless it’s a very small company these intros usually consume lots of resources and don’t lead to the right person. You have a great meeting with the CTO, he refers you to someone else, who refers you to someone else who is usually, well, mmm, how to put it, not the busiest guy in the company. Or, in other words, after three meetings you get to someone who is not your ideal user but is basically someone who has the time to meet other companies.
She concludes: "I think you have better odds with emails."
Before you rush out to emulate Shoor's cold email technique, though, consider the alternative case. Steve Rubel, chief content strategist for pr firm Edelman, says Shoor's approach won't work for everyone. Shoor had a leg up on her competition because she is a known quantity, with a CrunchBase profile announcing her tech pedigree. The firms she targeted also made a difference, Rubel says. "Silicon Valley companies I have found are much more open to meeting people," he says. "I find that culture is welcoming towards people who have smart ideas....I don't think it would work as well if she tried to email banks."
Dan Schawbel, the author of "Promote Yourself, disagrees that intros are useless. "The best way to meet a new contact is through other people, whether it's to get a job, date or anything else," he says. "By getting introduced to someone through one of their beers, you are standing out and are perceived as more credible. Cold emails only work if what you're offering is exactly what the other party is interested in or they've already heard of you because you're famous in their industry."
Shoor is not convinced: "With intros I always felt that my analogy is it's like cooking something you find in your refrigerator rather than going to the supermarket and getting what you want."
What do you think? Are intros still useful? Let us know in the comments.
Image: iStockphoto, Shironosov