Coffee?

I love coffee.

Five or six cups a day. Sometimes more if I've accidentally wandered into a proposal deadline.

So this isn't an anti-coffee article. It's an anti-coffee-first article.

One of the questions I get asked most often is how to improve cold outreach. Subject lines. Timing. Sequences. Follow-ups. CTAs.

And at some point, with the same inevitability as me starting the day with two coffees before 6am, somebody always asks whether they should finish their first email with:

"Fancy a coffee?"

Almost every time, my answer is the same.

Not yet.

Look, I'd happily have a coffee with all sorts of interesting people. Clients. Prospects. Founders. Competitors. Friends.

I'd probably even buy.

But a coffee isn't free, not really.

It costs something considerably more valuable than the £4.20 you'd spend at Costa. It costs 30 minutes of my attention - that's the bit that people miss.

When you ask a complete stranger for a coffee, you're asking them to invest their most finite resource before you've given them a compelling reason to do so.

Offering to pay doesn't really change the equation. I can afford the coffee.

What I'm less certain I can afford is another half-hour meeting that starts with fifteen minutes of introductions before gently meandering towards a sales pitch I could probably have read in two paragraphs.

The problem isn't the coffee. Coffee is great. Please see above.

The problem here is that you are asking for value before you've created any.

That's a pattern I see everywhere in agency outreach.

We ask for meetings before demonstrating expertise. We ask for time before earning curiosity. We ask for conversations before giving people something worth talking about.

There's a reason I bang on about introducing value, not yourself.

Good commercial relationships rarely begin because somebody accepted a calendar invite.

They begin because somebody thought:

"That's interesting."

Or...

"I hadn't considered it like that."

Or...

"These people seem to understand my world."

Those reactions earn the coffee; the calendar invite is just the consequence.

To be clear, I'm not saying never ask someone for a coffee. Some of the best commercial (and yes, fine romantic) relationships I've had started over one.

I'm just suggesting you earn the right first. Create a little curiosity. Share something useful. Teach me something. Make me glad your email landed in my inbox.

Then ask.

Then I'll probably even buy the coffee.

I love coffee.