Why "send 500 cold emails" is the worst export-sales advice still being given in 2026

Published December 8, 2025 ยท by Tom Runsten

I want to start with the piece of advice I hear most often, and have heard most often for the better part of a decade. It goes something like: "Send 500 cold emails a week, the math will work out, just stay consistent." I have watched newer export salespeople build their entire first-year plan around this sentence. I have done it myself, in 2018, sitting in a coworking space in Gothenburg with a list of 1,200 European distributors I'd scraped off a trade-association directory, a Gmail account that hadn't been warmed up, and a lot of enthusiasm.

It didn't work then. It really doesn't work now. And the people still recommending it have, I suspect, not personally tried it on a foreign buyer in a while.

What actually happened the last time I ran the experiment

I'll show working, because that's the only way to make an argument like this stick. In Q1 of 2024 I had a quiet stretch and, partly out of curiosity, partly to settle an argument with a friend who runs sales training, I ran the cold-email playbook properly. I built a list of 480 prospective buyers in three target markets (Germany, the Netherlands, France) for a category of industrial filtration components I'd been representing. I used a paid email-finder tool. I warmed the sending domain for three weeks. I A/B tested two subject lines, two opening lines, two CTAs. I sent over a four-week window. I followed up three times per prospect, properly spaced.

The numbers, if you care:

One meeting from 480 carefully researched cold emails. That meeting, by the way, came from a buyer whose company I had also seen show up in customs records the month before, and who I would have reached out to anyway through a different channel. The cold email arguably didn't even cause the opportunity, it just got there first.

Why the playbook stopped working specifically for export sales

There's a perfectly good debate to be had about whether cold email still works in general. I'll leave that to the SaaS folks. What I want to argue is narrower: cold email is uniquely bad for cross-border B2B because of three structural things that the generic advice ignores.

First, foreign buyers in industrial categories filter ruthlessly. A purchasing manager at a Dutch wholesaler gets cold emails from suppliers in twenty countries every week. Most are functionally identical: "We are a leading manufacturer of X, please find attached our catalogue." The ones in fluent local-language outreach often aren't from native speakers and the buyer can tell instantly. The signal-to-noise ratio is brutal.

Second, the buyer's actual decision process is nothing like a SaaS pipeline. They aren't going to "book a 15-minute discovery call" because they don't have a problem you're solving today, they have a supplier they're moderately unhappy with and a logistics setup they don't want to rebuild. Cold email assumes a buyer in motion. Most foreign buyers, most of the time, are not in motion.

Third, and this is the one nobody wants to admit: the deliverability environment for unsolicited B2B email got dramatically worse between roughly 2021 and 2024. Google and Microsoft tightened authentication requirements. Spam filters got better at recognizing template-driven outreach. EU members tightened enforcement on commercial email under existing rules, and the International Chamber of Commerce has been pretty vocal that the bar for cross-border B2B outreach has moved. None of this killed the channel, but it made it noticeably harder for a 1-person export operation to land in the inbox of a foreign buyer who doesn't already know them.

What I do instead

I prospect from observable signals. If I can see, through public or paid data, that a foreign company is moving inventory in the category I sell, that's a starting point. If I can see they're switching suppliers, or expanding into a new product line, or paying duties that suggest they'd benefit from a different sourcing route, even better. I cover this at length in my three signals I look at before I pursue a foreign buyer piece. The short version is that I want a reason to reach out that has nothing to do with hope.

The second thing I do is read customs records. Yes, really. I made a habit of it in 2022 and have not stopped. There's a separate post on why this customs-record habit changed how I work. The relevant point here is that customs data gives me a list of buyers with a verified, dated, named transaction in my category, which is roughly a thousand times more useful than a list of 480 plausible-looking distributors from a directory.

The third thing I do, and this is the one that gets eye-rolls from the cold-email crowd, is slow down. A focused list of fifteen buyers, where I know what they import, where I have a credible angle, where I've actually read their company news, beats five hundred sprayed names. The reply rate isn't 11%, it's closer to 35%. The meetings convert. The pipeline is built on something real.

The cost of bad advice

I'm not cranky about cold email itself. I'm cranky about the fact that we are still telling new exporters, in 2026, to model their go-to-market on it. It eats their first year. They burn their domain reputation. They get demoralized when the math doesn't work. They conclude that export sales is broken, when really it's just that this specific tactic, in this specific market, against this specific buyer profile, doesn't perform.

If you're starting out in cross-border B2B and someone tells you to send 500 cold emails a week, ask them politely when they last did it themselves. Ask them what their reply rate was. Ask them how many of those replies came from buyers who weren't already aware of them through another channel. The answers will tell you whether they're describing the world that exists or the world they're nostalgic for.

For me, the world that exists rewards buyers who can be observed, evidence that can be cited, and outreach that can be defended. None of that fits in a template.