I'd love things that are particularly targeted at speakers, if possible, but I know that generally sales is applicable regardless of industry. My biggest struggle is dealing with the awkwardness of cold-emailing college administrators (my clients), I put it off if I don't have a connection.
Well, if you're dealing with college administrators, I think speaking on the phone is going to work better than email.
However, if cold email is the route you want to go, you gotta get over the awkwardness. You need to re-frame this: "I am selling something that will help them with X. My email isn't annoying, it's something they'll want to read".
If the possibility of a non-response is making this awkward for you, then realize that it's not that they don't want to respond to you, it's that they're too busy. Which means you need to contact them again.
When I am doing cold-email campaigns to retail store owners, I will email 4 times. If they respond even somewhat interested, then I will continue emailing/calling
indefinitely until I get a "ok here's my order" or a "fuck off!". If you don't have one of those two responses, then you aren't emailing/calling enough. You should not have anyone in the pipeline that is an unknown that you are not regularly trying to get ahold of.
I use quickmail.io to auto-follow up on my cold email campaigns. Then, I use Pipedrive to manually manage any warm/hot leads and keep track of re-orders.
The Quickmail.io blog has lots of good of articles on cold emails:
https://quickmail.io/blog/Also Alex Berman's youtube channel has fantastic videos on cold emailing:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtkcfOqeArMZ0xlzB8TnQEvgkYrJRkNUa