Cold Call vs. Cold Email: Which One Actually Works in 2025? | Matt Tharp - 1913

Should you email or call prospects? Which method is best for effectively reaching your clients? To find out, listen to my chat with Matt Tharp, the CEO of Hunter.io. He provides data and insights on why businesses should focus more on cold email than cold calling.

Meet Matt Tharp

• Matt might be perceived as biased towards email since he's the CEO of Hunter.io, but he was drawn to the company precisely because of its commitment to email.
• He enjoys working with fast-moving businesses that prioritize high velocity and product-led growth strategies. He believes this approach helps build a robust pipeline with marketing, while the sales motion supports and supplements that pipeline.
• Sales-driven models, heavily dependent on closing the next deal, can make it challenging for new sellers or businesses to find their footing. Relying solely on cold calling makes pipeline building particularly difficult, and the current business environment is only making cold calling harder.
• Matt shares his own experience as a decision-maker: if someone cold calls him unexpectedly, he's likely to get annoyed because it almost always interrupts something he's doing.

Marketing Strategy for Email Outreach

• Matt and his team conducted research to determine which marketing strategy prospects prefer. The results showed that 61% prefer cold emails, while less than 10% prefer cold calling. He also found that individuals in the US prefer digital outreach 71% more than calling.
• To successfully begin email outreach, Matt suggests keeping two key things in mind:

1. How you build and segment your email list.

2. How you write your content.

• He advises against trying to reach everyone when building your list. Instead, personalize it and make it relevant to your target audience. Keep your audience segments under 100 contacts to help maintain message relevance.

Subject Line Trends

• To create subject lines that generate clicks, Matt emphasizes the importance of addressing a problem the buyer is facing.
• It's better not to be overly playful. Instead, speak to a problem that prospects genuinely care about, and in the first one or two sentences, demonstrate that you are there to solve it. Then, explain how you will solve their problem. The final step involves adding a clear and easy call to action at the bottom of the email.

"Looking at current trends for business scaling investments, it's clear: phone calls are becoming less and less effective." - Matt Tharp.

Resources

If you need help scaling your business with email outreach, consider Hunter.io (I highly recommend it).

If you like more guidance with improving your sales skills, join my Sales Mastermind Class.

Thinking about starting a podcast yourself? Learn more about Blue Mango Studios.

Sponsorship Offers

1. This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.

With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.

2. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.

Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.

3. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.

Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin.

Credits

As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast, Google Podcast, Stitcher, or Spotify. Audio provided by Free SFX, Soundstripe, and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.