Whether it's crafted by AI or not, outbound is spam, and only scammy companies use it these days.

I've always been a relationship seller. I agree that a lot of the AI hype surrounding outbound is going to be short lived. When everyone can do infinite outbound, no one will be able to break through. The AI arms race to get a slight edge on response rates is going to destroy that channel.

I've been working on https://humancrm.io to scratch my own itch. A CRM that helps me stay focused on relationships. I'm explicitly not adding any AI or automation to it.

I've been doing GTM for I dunno... 20+ years now, I'm told I'm excellent at it. Never liked outbound, I've never found it's a good part of a GTM, and tbh it's always something I've considered mostly belongs with the folks who think "growth hacking" is a thing...I strongly believe in the pillars of traditional, early 1900s GTM... that is, build real trust, have a credible brand story, get word of mouth going by consistently exceeding expectations, and let your delighted customers become your most effective marketing channel. If you're going to do outbound, go to events or find places real customers might be hanging out and not annoyed by you talking to them. Inbound marketing and community-driven growth strategies have always seemed significantly more durable to me. When people genuinely need and seek out your product, when the recommendation comes from trusted peers rather than relentless cold emails or hyper personalized spam, your sales become robust, resilient, and scalable in a sustainable way, the problems with sales is they're always chasing the next lead. Maybe outbound might yield short term wins...but personally I've always thought... if you want lasting competitive advantage, invest your energy in creating a brand people truly want to share, that's how I've always thought about it anyway, and people have always seemed to enjoy my brands.

Outbound will never die, but fingers crossed lazy-ass sales and marketing does!

I've got the misfortune of being connected to former sales colleagues on LinkedIn, so I see the kind of posts they are liking.

And I can't tell you how many of them are complaining when people complain about cold calling and mass sales emails. I've got a fairly even take on sales, but the absolute entitlement they feel about your time...

Outbound can't die soon enough.

Sometimes I wonder if we as internet people are special in that it seems we can pretty immediately spot vanilla-LLM generated text. I'm sure others have noticed the same, but maybe 20% of my inbound recruiter pings on LinkedIn are straight from GPT and subsequently are immediately dismissed.

I posted a job on UpWork last month and probably 60% of the replies were LLM, some of them seemingly automated as they came in moments after I posted. Obviously these were immediately rejected.

Is this something we'll have to get used to?

I got my first internship in 2015 by cold-emailing the CEO of a Waterloo startup that I thought was really cool. At the time, reaching out directly over email with a thoughtful and earnest introduction was a good way to set yourself apart. I'm not sure that's the case anymore.

I would put a finer/pithier point on it:

The "attention economy" is out, the "trust economy" is in.

> Having a good Twitter/social media presence will become a compulsory pre-condition. The company owned channels (like websites, email lists or apps) where you have direct access to customers will become key demand generation pipelines.

The ability to control their own media presence is what still makes me believe that ActivityPub has a future, but it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it; instead of just sitting on their hands and chasing the audiences wherever they think they are going.

Doesn't everybody on here have filters good enough to route all "outbound" to spam?

By virtue of what I do, I interact with quite a few of our SDRs who do outbound calls all day long AND I am frequently on the receiving end of someone else's calls. It is a hard job. Attention is a very scarce commodity and the shotgunning of the LLM swill that has completely taken over the outbound has made it even scarcer.

A fun thing happened recently. At sales kick off I was having lunch in the mountain skiing and a few young SDRs joined me with their burritos. We were chatting and I got an inbound call from some random numberI picked up and sure enough it was an SDR from some random SaaS that's been trying and failing to reach me. I told that SDR, hey, you got me and 3 of your fellow SDRs here, take your best shot, you will be rated by people who do your job. Ha, he did pretty good! Our SDRs gave him a bunch of sh*t about not using the right call dialer management. It was a "closed lost" opportunity for them.

This is why the “Lean Startup” movement popular in early 2010s ultimately died: The market eventually got tired of every new startup being some vaporware product market fit test where a product wasn’t even fully built out because the founders wanted to push risk onto customers instead of going all in.

So now you have to do all the big things upfront and come to market with a fully polished professional offering to be taken seriously.

AI good enough to pitch me but not good enough to read my email and alert me of products I should actually care about seems like the dystopian outcome ad-tech typically reaches.

In the face of this AI-powered sales onslaught, customers will use AI-powered tools to analyze and evaluate all corporate products and services to make their purchasing decisions, without talking to anyone. Personal connections won’t be the solution to sales when customers trust their personal AI agents even more than real-life contacts.

While the post has good points - you can't talk about this subject without defining what price points you're selling at.

A company will have radically different sales motions if they are selling a good/service costing:

  * < $5k 
  *   $5-50k
  *   $50-500k 
  *   $500k +

Seems to me this post is probably targeting the top 1 (or 2) bullets/segments.

> Eventually, humans are going to get used to the constant spam and start mentally tuning out these hyper personalized initiatives.

Maybe I just live in a bubble, but don’t most people already tune out ads and marketing emails while online?

> While I think these AI powered sales products are going to perform very well in the short run, this is also going to cause a certain about of fatigue for the users and customers.

I mean, speaking for myself, the fatigue is real and it’s been here for years.

I don’t think LLM content is going to make cold emails seem any warmer. I’ve never opened one and thought “if only this high-volume automated text were slightly more personalized.”

That said, I keep getting them. Seems like nothing can kill outbound, and I doubt LLMs will either.

Can we skip to the part where unsolicited emails, calls, and texts go away? This sounds amazing.