Is traditional outbound sales dead?

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser · Mar 9, 2022

Traditional outbound sales is not dead — only its tactics are changing

Buyers now self-educate and decision makers are inundated with cold outreach, but relying purely on marketing-driven inbound means growing slower than you could, and most of the largest companies on the planet have a strong prospecting organization

32:29 20 Sales: The Stripe Sales Playbook; Who Should Create It, When Should it Be Done, Where Do Many Go Wrong | How To Identify 10x Sales Hires and How To Structure the Hiring Process in Sales with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Head of Americas Revenue & Growth @ St

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser · Mar 9, 2022 · hedged

Three sales fundamentals remain unchanged: in-person connection surfaces things phone and Zoom can't, a well-architected sales process with defined stage exit criteria, and quantified ROI for what you sell

Deals with legitimate quantified ROI move with more velocity

Scope: hesitation about the in-person point because COVID changed things

33:18 20 Sales: The Stripe Sales Playbook; Who Should Create It, When Should it Be Done, Where Do Many Go Wrong | How To Identify 10x Sales Hires and How To Structure the Hiring Process in Sales with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Head of Americas Revenue & Growth @ St

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

Traditional outbound is not dead — it is the most important thing in sales, and a team not doing it is doing sales wrong.

Pipeline is what determines quota attainment and pipeline is built through outreach; it typically takes about five messages before someone responds, and if you genuinely solve their problem, cold outreach is good for both sides.

Scope: assumes you're offering a solution the prospect actually needs

36:25 20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp

Mark Goldberger · Apr 19, 2023

The fundamentals of sales — cold calling, cold emailing, pipeline generation, qualification, champion building, getting to the economic buyer — have not changed and never will

44:32 20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp

Rich Liu · Jun 7, 2023

The perfectly crafted personalized outbound email is dead as a tactic; creative multi-touch outreach across channels is what works now

He personally won't take many calls but will respond to a text, voicemail, video or LinkedIn touch, and he's shocked how few reps use those channels

Scope: applies to SDR/AE outbound prospecting

45:15 20Sales: PLG and Early Adopter Sales are Gone, How to do Sales Forecasting in 2023, Why You Cannot Do PLG and Enterprise from Day 1 at the Same Time and Which is Easier to Start, How to Onboard, Manage and Scale Reps with Rich Liu, CRO @ Everlaw

Kevin Egan · Jul 12, 2023

Great written communication is the sales tactic that has not changed in the last five years

Writing that shows grasp of the business problem and the solution demonstrates you have a plan and can execute it

31:43 20Sales: Slack, Atlassian, Dropbox: Five of the Biggest Lessons on Starting, Scaling and Managing Sales Teams from 25 Years Leading the Best with Kevin Egan, Global Head of Enterprise Sales at Atlassian

Lori Jimenez · Aug 2, 2023

The core of selling — good listening, connecting with the buyer, and bringing value in response — has not changed

Selling is an art and a science, but at its core people buy from people

46:55 20Sales: Why The Founder Has To Be The One To Create The Sales Playbook, When To Hire Your First Rep, Why Junior is Better Than Senior, How to Manage Sales Rep Compensation, How To Onboard New Sales Reps and more with Lori Jimenez, CRO @ WorkRamp

Matt Rosenberg · Oct 4, 2023

Great discovery is the sales tactic that hasn't changed and remains always important, while cold calling has died

Nobody picks up their phone anymore

46:06 20Sales: Why the Founder Should Not Be the One to Create the Sales Playbook, Why You Should Hire a Sales Leader Before Sales Reps & Why You Should Not Hire Sales Leaders From Big Companies with Matt Rosenberg, CRO @ Grammarly

Chris Degnan · Nov 10, 2023

Prospecting and cold calling are not dead and anyone who says they are is crazy

He was Snowflake's original SDR building his own lists and scraping websites, and still uses the same approach today when recruiting — calling, emailing and messaging people on LinkedIn

34:20 20Sales: Five Lessons Scaling Snowflake to $1BN ARR, Why Customer Success is BS and Should Be Removed, Why All Sales Reps Should Do Eight Calls Per Week & Why You Should Hire a Head of Sales Sooner Than You Think with Chris Degnan, CRO @ Snowflake

Larry Shurtz · May 10, 2024

Outbound is not dead in 2024; done well it remains a powerful instrument, and AI will enable the right outbound teams to do it better rather than kill it.

AI's main effect is augmentation — helping people do their jobs better — so good outbound teams get more effective rather than displaced.

Scope: applies to outbound 'done well' by the right teams

49:08 20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ Genesys

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024 · hedged

Outbound keeps working for the few people who really nail it, and he won't commit to predicting its death

He has declared the death of outbound for many years and been wrong each time, despite personally disliking the channel

Scope: explicitly declines to commit to the prediction; works only for the few who figure it out

49:07 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Ashley Kelly · Jun 7, 2024

There is no silver bullet in outbound; companies fail when they chase the new shiny object and take their eye off the fundamentals

They follow trends like sheep and put all their eggs in one basket, abandoning what made outbound work

6:19 20Sales: How Rippling Built Their Sales Machine: How to Hire, Train and Manage the Best SDRs, What is the Right Comp Package for Sales Teams & The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024 · hedged

SDR teams report that getting cell phone numbers and cold calling is now more effective than email and LinkedIn messages

Message channels are saturated, so outreach has reverted to old-school phone calls

Scope: secondhand from SDR practitioners; Chad does not think phone calling is terribly effective either

46:16 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Dan Fougere · Nov 22, 2024

Outbound still works in 2024; reps just have to get better and become the signal amid the noise.

The same complaint about outbound being saturated has recurred throughout his entire career.

14:57 20Sales: What I Learned Scaling Datadog from $60M to $1BN in ARR | How to do Outbound in 2024 | Why Discounting is Dangerous and Contract Sizes are Misleading with Dan Fougere

Matt Plank · Dec 20, 2024

The claim that outbound is dead is absurd; people saying it are either engagement baiting or have never scaled something large

There is no way to build a large business relying only on marketing form fills; Rippling schedules ~1,000 outbound demos a month and books half of them over the phone

Scope: outbound is harder and different than before

8:46 20Sales: Rippling's CRO on Why Founders Should Not Create Sales Playbooks | Why Discounting is BS and How to Create Urgency in Deals | The Biggest Lessons on Pricing and How to Win the Pricing Game with Matt Plank

Carlos Delatorre · Jan 24, 2025

The claim that outbound is dead in 2025 is wrong — cold calling still works, and he is happy for competitors to believe otherwise

21:39 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness

Chris Degnan · Oct 10, 2025

Outbound is not dead; it is harder now but reps still have to work the phones and find ways to prospect

People receive far more email than before, so outbound requires more effort rather than abandonment

Scope: acknowledges outbound is harder today than in Snowflake's early days

13:13 20Sales: Scaling Snowflake from $0-$3BN in ARR | Snowflake vs Databricks: My Biggest Lessons | Why Customer Success is BS and What Replaces It with Chris Chris Degnan

Carles Reina · Feb 14, 2026

Traditional outbound methods, including cold calling, still work today

He watched his own team cold calling in the office and saw them building real pipeline with the right hustle mentality

Scope: effectiveness depends on the market

38:15 20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina

Jason Lemkin · May 6, 2022

Great outbound works better than ever, while the templated mass-email outbound playbook perfected five years ago has declined sharply in efficacy

Buyers are overloaded with apps and don't have time to do their own discovery, so genuinely tailored outbound that names their actual problem still lands; blasting 10,000 people through sequencing tools still works but is decaying

Scope: distinguishes 'great' outbound from 'mediocre' outbound; mediocre outbound still works, just less well

41:38 20VC: Why the Traditional Seed Fund Model No Longer Works, Why Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed Bring Signaling Risk but also Less Pressure, The One Criteria All Potential Sales Hires Need to Have and The Clear Signs of 10x Sales Hires with Jason Lemki

Stevie Case · Jan 25, 2023

Clari runs the best sales process she has experienced, because every touch was human, high-quality and thoughtful — her rep engaged her as a person rather than cold outbounding, which made her want to help him win

The rep commented on her LinkedIn posts in a human way and engaged her as a person; combined with proving real value before signing and a strong end-of-quarter offer, it closed the deal despite a budget freeze

Scope: the product itself also had to deliver and prove value

45:23 20Sales: Why You Should Not Do PLG and Enterprise Sales at the Same Time | How To Move Into Enterprise Sales Gradually | How To Make a Comp Plan For Sales Teams | Why Discounting is Good and Can Be Used with Stevie Case, CRO @ Vanta

Matt Rosenberg · Oct 4, 2023

Connecting dots across available data lets a team prospect efficiently by surfacing exactly who to go after

At Compass, public real estate transaction data let him identify counterparties, assess their volume, and ask customers for warm introductions, then surface those opportunities in Salesforce

Scope: example drawn from real estate where transaction data is public

35:05 20Sales: Why the Founder Should Not Be the One to Create the Sales Playbook, Why You Should Hire a Sales Leader Before Sales Reps & Why You Should Not Hire Sales Leaders From Big Companies with Matt Rosenberg, CRO @ Grammarly

Matt Rosenberg · Oct 4, 2023

Prospecting today is done very poorly, largely because AI has caused a proliferation of generic outreach that presumes the recipient's problem

His own LinkedIn inbox is full of messages asserting he has a pipeline problem, which is insulting because the sender has no basis for the claim

37:29 20Sales: Why the Founder Should Not Be the One to Create the Sales Playbook, Why You Should Hire a Sales Leader Before Sales Reps & Why You Should Not Hire Sales Leaders From Big Companies with Matt Rosenberg, CRO @ Grammarly

Steve Goldberg · Dec 13, 2023

Prospecting effectiveness is about quality of calls, not volume — two well-researched, well-timed conversations a week beat high-volume outreach.

You need to do the research and understand who you're talking to so you catch them at the right time.

Scope: declines to name a specific number of calls

6:13 20Sales: How to Close Sales When Selling to CFOs, How to Guarantee You Win Every Renewal, Core Questions All CFOs Ask Today When Buying, Why Revenue Operations is the Most Important Role in a Company with Steve Goldberg, CRO @ Salesloft

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

Effective outbound comes from extreme focus on one audience: by studying a prospect's background and past job moves you can infer their motivations before the first call, and rule out ~95% of the market as not worth calling

The jobs someone took and when they took them reveal what motivated them, so you can align what you have to offer with what they want before you ever dial

Scope: drawn from his experience recruiting software sales reps

5:53 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Jeetu Mahtani · Sep 27, 2024

BDRs and SDRs are not dead; pure cold calling is inefficient, but an 'allbound' motion combining inbound and targeted outbound using first- and third-party buyer signals still works

With target lists and research signals you knock on the right doors and know the prospect already has a pain, which changes the conversation

Scope: only partly agrees that outbound is dead; requires sophisticated targeting and enablement

30:26 20Sales: Scaling Hubspot from $3M to $1BN in ARR | How to Hire and Ramp Sales Teams | How to Scale Customer Success Successfully | How and When to Go International and Crush It with Jeetu Mahtani

Carlos Delatorre · Jan 24, 2025

Proper PG prep means building hypotheses about what the account cares about plus ~25 named contacts per account with email, LinkedIn and mobile, and personalized conversation starters for the top 10 people

Researching execs' social posts, 10Ks, job postings and employee gripes lets you form a hypothesis about something they care about that you can impact

Scope: AI can now make much of this research better

25:27 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness

Harry Stebbings · Aug 15, 2025

Outbound and cold emailing is done badly, when deep research tools now make it easy to find genuinely personal details that earn a reply

A short, personal note referencing something specific like a shared interest would get a response from almost anyone, including him

44:07 20VC: 15 Term Sheets in 7 Days and Choosing Benchmark | Harvey vs Legora: Who Wins Legal and How to Play When You Have $600M Less Funding | Are AI Models Plateauing Today | Building a 9-9-6 Culture From Stockholm with Max Junestrand

Jeanne DeWitt Grosser · Mar 9, 2022

The brute-force model of hiring a thousand reps and handing them the yellow pages has died, replaced by digitally oriented, tool-supported and much more data-driven sales processes

33:50 20 Sales: The Stripe Sales Playbook; Who Should Create It, When Should it Be Done, Where Do Many Go Wrong | How To Identify 10x Sales Hires and How To Structure the Hiring Process in Sales with Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Head of Americas Revenue & Growth @ St

Stevie Case · Jan 25, 2023

High-volume cold outbound at scale is dead; outbound now has to be personalized and give the prospect something meaningful

People are constantly hit from every angle, so unpersonalized volume no longer lands

42:54 20Sales: Why You Should Not Do PLG and Enterprise Sales at the Same Time | How To Move Into Enterprise Sales Gradually | How To Make a Comp Plan For Sales Teams | Why Discounting is Good and Can Be Used with Stevie Case, CRO @ Vanta

Brendon Cassidy · Mar 8, 2024

Outbound has broken because SaaS verticals are glutted — a thousand companies now compete for one buyer's attention where there used to be five or ten — making mass-produced quasi-personalized outbound unable to engage anyone

Buyers are being approached the exact same way by a thousand other companies

8:12 20Sales: Outbound Sales is Dead Today, Why Demand Generation Will Move Back Under Marketing, "Wisdom" that Everyone Needs to Unlearn About Sales & Why You Should Never Hire Someone You Do Not Know in Your First Five Hires with Brendon Cassidy

Brendon Cassidy · Mar 8, 2024

The traditional startup go-to-market model of mass outbound — cranking out 100,000 emails and a thousand calls — does not scale and never did

There is too much noise to compete against; he never believed in it, people just went along with it, and it has not scaled

Scope: particularly for startups

36:49 20Sales: Outbound Sales is Dead Today, Why Demand Generation Will Move Back Under Marketing, "Wisdom" that Everyone Needs to Unlearn About Sales & Why You Should Never Hire Someone You Do Not Know in Your First Five Hires with Brendon Cassidy

Ishan Mukherjee · Apr 4, 2025

Outbound does become less effective as supply of AI-generated emails becomes infinite; only authentic, in-voice, human-reviewed communication from your own email rises above the noise floor

The noise floor is increasing exponentially, so anything generic simply won't work

33:57 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Guillaume Cabane · Nov 29, 2023

Cold calling was dead from roughly 2012 to 2022 but is back big time thanks to LLMs and tools like Orum

58:40 20Growth: The Golden Rule to $100M in ARR, Why CAC to LTV is BS Early On, Why Your First Growth Hire Should Be a Former Founder & How Ramp Does 200 Growth Experiments Per Quarter with Guillaume Cabane

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

Cold calling is the most underrated outbound channel right now

She sees it working and almost nobody does it because rejection by phone hurts more than by email, so calling — even just leaving a voice message — makes you top of mind with the people you want to reach

Scope: much of the value comes from voicemails, since most people don't answer

45:31 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Carles Reina · Feb 14, 2026

Cold email is the outdated sales channel, not cold calling — reply rates have collapsed to near zero

The volume of AI-generated outbound emails means nobody replies anymore; conversion has dropped to a fraction of a percent

68:58 20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina

Chris Degnan · May 23, 2026

AI-generated prospecting has not replaced the phone; persistent human outreach (calls, voicemails, texts) is what still cuts through

He personally gets three embarrassing AI-generated recruiting emails a day, and CIOs are inundated with AI prospecting, so the channel is saturated

Scope: pairs cold calling with field marketing and events

60:38 20Sales: The $100M CRO Bubble: Why Anthropic Are Causing a Comp Crisis | Why You Should Never Hire From Salesforce or Service Now | How to Hire, Train and Forecase in a World of AI with Chad Peets and Chris Degnan

Carlos Delatorre · Jan 24, 2025

The most effective pipeline generation channel remains human voice cold calling, with email and social serving to soften the field and build familiarity; roughly two thirds of meetings are set on a cold call

Prospects respond to a familiar name built up by prior touches — the David Boyle / Dun & Bradstreet meeting looked like a single call but rested on 11 emails, eight calls and a post-it from the exec admin

22:07 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness

Harry Stebbings · Jan 24, 2025

People underestimate how much repeated name exposure builds familiarity that later converts

Seeing someone post ten times a month on LinkedIn makes the name ring a bell even when you can't recall who they are — he sees the same effect with show listeners

24:26 20Sales: Why Every Sales Rep Should Do Pipeline Generation & How to Teach Them | Verticalised Sales Playbooks: When and How | How the Best Sales Reps and Leaders Structure Their Time with Carlos Delatorre, CRO @ Harness

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

Outbound should be diversified across channels — email, cold calling, LinkedIn, warm connections via Sales Navigator — with the AE acting as quarterback deciding who to reach and how to divide work with a BDR

Reaching the right stakeholders requires strategy across channels, and only the AE has the account context to direct it

35:07 20Sales: How to Layer Enterprise Sales on PLG | How to Sell AI Tools To Enterprises That Are Scared | Should Reps Own Their Own Pipeline | Mistakes All Founders Make When Moving From Founder-Led to Rep-Led Sales with Kim Graves

Harry Stebbings · Jun 7, 2024

SDRs should start podcasts interviewing the biggest buyers in their ICP as a lead generation funnel

It gives you a legitimate reason to meet top target-persona executives twice a week

40:52 20Sales: How Rippling Built Their Sales Machine: How to Hire, Train and Manage the Best SDRs, What is the Right Comp Package for Sales Teams & The Playbook to Start and Scale Your SDR Team

Harry Stebbings · Aug 23, 2024

Content is the most important element of the sales process today

If a prospect already knows and values your content, the cold outreach converts into a warm, easier conversation

46:50 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Chad Peets · Aug 23, 2024

The content-led sales hook works far better for known brands than for unknown startups, though it can still work for startups

Harry's example only lands because everyone has heard of Snowflake; a company nobody has heard of has no such hook

Scope: not claiming content doesn't work for startups

47:04 20Sales: How Snowflake Built a Sales Machine | Why You Have to Hire a CRO Pre-Product | Why Most Sales Reps Do Not Perform | Why Hiring Panels are BS in Interviews | Why Remote Sales Reps Do Not Care About Their Development with Chad Peets

Harry Stebbings · Feb 14, 2026

Having a large media brand makes you the best BDR in the world because people will always respond to you

A big brand guarantees responses to cold outreach

32:38 20Sales: Inside ElevenLabs $330M ARR Sales Machine | The 20x Sales Comp Plan Reps Must Hit | How to Land and Expand in a World of AI | Why Product-Market-Fit is BS, Reps Should Not Be in the Office and Outbound is King with Carles Reina

Harry Stebbings · Apr 19, 2023

Salespeople avoid outbound because it is painful — continuous punches in the face — and inbound is comparatively warm and cozy.

People run away from things that are painful.

37:16 20Sales: Why You Should Never Hire a VP Sales First, How To Create Urgency in a Sales Process, How to Do Traditional Outbound 10x Better, Why Revenue Doesn't Matter with Your First Customers | Mark Goldberger, Head of Enterprise Sales @ Ramp

Larry Shurtz · May 10, 2024

The claim that selling is impossible today because budgets centralized and people aren't spending is largely a mindset problem, not a market reality

Winning companies have TAM data and propensity-to-buy data as table stakes — reps are handed their territory and the opportunity inside it — so absent force majeure there is no excuse for not selling

Scope: genuine exceptions for macroeconomic shocks, pandemics or financial crises (e.g. travel and transportation during COVID); leaders should show humility and empathy where a rep inherited upset customers

44:22 20Sales: How to Build Vertical Sales Teams, Why No Customer Success is BS and Everyone Needs it, How to Hire, Train and Retain the First Reps and Lessons Scaling to $2.1BN Revenue and 1,300 People with Larry Schurtz, CRO @ Genesys

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024

Outbound worked better four years ago than it does today and will keep getting harder

It's an arms race — everyone has the same tooling and the same perfect email, so buyers are numb, flooded with email, and not answering their phones

Scope: mentions possible new spam rules but is unsure whether they'll take effect

47:16 20VC: The Metrics That Matter in SaaS Today; Why CaC Payback is Flawed & CAC Ratio is Better, Why You Need to Hire Three Sales Reps at a Time, How to Forecast in 2024 & Biggest Mistakes Made Forecasting & How to Make Customer Success Sell More with Dave K

Harry Stebbings · May 31, 2024 · speculative

Outbound may decay and die completely as a channel because AI creates infinite supply and total saturation, forcing companies to find new channels like WhatsApp or text

Infinite supply of outbound saturates the channel

Scope: framed as his worry rather than a prediction

48:52 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024 · hedged

AI-powered outbound is a transient advantage that will saturate as everyone gets the tools, so founders should use it but not build their strategy on it — inbound is the durable answer

Once he's receiving 50 ultra-personalized emails a day he'll ignore them all, and within a year all competitors will have the same tools

Scope: acknowledges he can be too quick on these calls; transient advantage is still worth exploiting now

64:03 20VC: The Metrics That Matter in SaaS Today; Why CaC Payback is Flawed & CAC Ratio is Better, Why You Need to Hire Three Sales Reps at a Time, How to Forecast in 2024 & Biggest Mistakes Made Forecasting & How to Make Customer Success Sell More with Dave K

Matt Lerner · May 31, 2024 · hedged

AI-enabled cold outreach is currently on the ascending part of the curve — lots of people are getting good results they couldn't before — but recipients will become inured to it within about a year, so the window is still open now

Suddenly lots of people are getting good cold outreach in a way they didn't before, but saturation follows

Scope: window estimated at roughly a year

48:40 20Growth: The Six Channels Startups Need to Dominate to Grow, Why the Best Growth Talent Never Comes from Marketing or Product, Who and How to Hire Growth Leaders and Teams and Why in a World of AI, Growth is More Science than Art with Matt Lerner

Brendon Cassidy · Mar 8, 2024

No great VP of Sales will take a job at a company dependent on an outbound go-to-market model

0:00 20Sales: Outbound Sales is Dead Today, Why Demand Generation Will Move Back Under Marketing, "Wisdom" that Everyone Needs to Unlearn About Sales & Why You Should Never Hire Someone You Do Not Know in Your First Five Hires with Brendon Cassidy

Brendon Cassidy · Mar 8, 2024

Great sales leaders privately treat an outbound-dependent company as a fait accompli that probably won't make it, even if they are circumspect with the founder about why they declined

They know an outbound-dependent growth model is doomed

8:59 20Sales: Outbound Sales is Dead Today, Why Demand Generation Will Move Back Under Marketing, "Wisdom" that Everyone Needs to Unlearn About Sales & Why You Should Never Hire Someone You Do Not Know in Your First Five Hires with Brendon Cassidy

Brendon Cassidy · Mar 8, 2024

The path forward is leveraging relationships and influence with people close to your customer — referrals, nudges, introductions — to accelerate in market

Scope: what he is personally working on

7:44 20Sales: Outbound Sales is Dead Today, Why Demand Generation Will Move Back Under Marketing, "Wisdom" that Everyone Needs to Unlearn About Sales & Why You Should Never Hire Someone You Do Not Know in Your First Five Hires with Brendon Cassidy

Raaz Herzberg · Dec 12, 2025 · hedged

Spending heavily on marketing and marketing channels is the wrong way to break into Fortune 500 accounts

Enterprise buying is a finite list of accounts and a small, tight-knit group of CIOs, CTOs and CISOs who all know each other and rotate between companies, so warm introductions and referrals dominate

Scope: about breaking into Fortune 500 / large enterprise accounts

37:30 20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Maggie Hott · Dec 14, 2022

The primary objective of cold outbound is brand and market awareness plus buyer education, not closing a deal in the moment

You are very unlikely to reach a prospect at exactly the right buying moment, but months later when the pain surfaces they remember the rep who reached out; she herself excluded a PLG tool vendor from an evaluation purely because she didn't know they existed

21:27 Outbound purpose is brand awareness and buyer education not immediate conversion

Lauren Schwartz · Oct 19, 2022

Outbound has an undeserved bad reputation, and the best form of it is co-selling with partner sales teams in your ecosystem — a channel sales people badly overlook.

Customers buy data movement only alongside a destination and sources — you'd never buy plumbing alone — so going to market with ecosystem partners meets customers where they are; sellers dismiss partnerships as lunch-and-learns, but done well it's the most effective motion.

7:43 Co selling with ecosystem partners is the best overlooked form of outbound

Harry Stebbings · Feb 14, 2024

Tools like HeyGen and Synthesia have lowered the technical knowledge needed for deepfakes and AI-automated outbound to the point that it is available to everyone

These capabilities have been commercialized and democratized into off-the-shelf products

63:52 Ai deepfake and automation tools have been commoditized and democratized

Martin Gontovnikas · Feb 14, 2024 · hedged

As AI marketing tactics become easily accessible, they work less well every month, so companies still need engineering and ops to build custom approaches that differentiate them

If you do the same thing as everybody else, nobody buys from you — like SEO content, the more unique it is the better it works

64:13 Commoditized ai tactics erode fast requiring custom engineering to differentiate

Sam Blond · Apr 12, 2024

Startups should target outbound in concentric circles of closeness to the business — founder network, investor networks, employee networks, customer referrals — and only expand outward as brand builds

Cold emailing strangers only works once you have a brand they recognize; you can't get there on day one, it's a process

45:43 Concentric network circles before cold outreach

Max Junestrand · Aug 15, 2025

Offering to pay professionals their hourly rate for a lunch is a highly effective way to learn an industry, because the respect it signals plus visible enthusiasm makes them say yes

Nobody in legal tech had met someone as enthusiastic about it, and offering to pay for their time showed he respected it; most refused the money and paid for lunch themselves

42:45 Offering to pay experts hourly rate signals respect and earns access

Max Junestrand · Aug 15, 2025

A personal text to an attorney framing your work as a 'project' rather than a company, referencing shared universities and their specific expertise, and offering to pay their hourly rate, gets roughly a 90% response rate

Attorneys publish their phone numbers, a project sounds more interesting than a company, and lawyers like a nice lunch

44:41 Personal project framing with shared affiliation and payment offer drives high response

Dave Kellogg · Jan 31, 2024 · hedged

Companies turned to outbound as a savior because they believed their inbound low-hanging fruit was picked and outbound gave them a sense of control and something for reps to do

Leaders wouldn't question their people's claim that the market was tapped, so outbound was the only remaining lever and it quieted salespeople complaining about lead flow

45:52 Companies adopt outbound as a savior because they believe inbound is tapped

Harry Stebbings · Jan 31, 2024 · hedged

The purchase of increasingly sophisticated outbound tooling likely drove the proliferation of outbound activity

Teams bought outbound tools that craft the perfect email and then had them pushed onto sales teams

46:53 Outbound tool purchases drove tactic proliferation and saturation

Harry Stebbings · Jun 27, 2025

Consistent, repeated public engagement (e.g. commenting on someone's LinkedIn posts over time) markedly increases the chance they respond to your outreach

People recognize continuity of commenting and start to feel they know you, so a later message gets answered

34:45 Sustained public engagement builds familiarity before outreach

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

The core trick of outbound pipeline generation is persistence — you have to keep going after the first, third, and seventh non-response

Harry landed Marc Benioff on his show on the fifty-third email

35:43 Persistence through repeated non response drives outbound success

Kim Graves · Jun 27, 2025

Cold calling programs need a celebratory, in-person, collaborative environment to get off the ground

Nobody wakes up wanting to cold call and it's harder alone at home; in the office rejection is consoled and wins are celebrated, and reps can hear what actually books meetings

46:41 Cold calling programs need a celebratory in person environment to get off the ground

Julian Teixeira · Mar 7, 2025

Outbound deals close at half the rate of inbound but for twice the value, because the buyer has no preconceived notion and you define the requirement from the start

The person you reach out to hasn't decided what they want to buy, so you shape the deal from the get-go

29:32 Outbound converts lower but lands larger deals

Becca Lindquist · May 2, 2026

Outbound and SDR teams are not dead.

Marketing can't reach every company and buyer, or does so less efficiently at scale; when you need to build a quarter billion dollars of pipeline it's more efficient to put hungry scrappy 24-year-olds on accounts.

50:50 Sdr outbound is the efficient path at large pipeline scale

Harry Stebbings · Nov 10, 2023

The more powerful and senior you become, the more effective outbound prospecting is and the more of it you should do.

34:57 Seniority increases outbound effectiveness

Ashley Kelly · Jun 7, 2024

The SDR role is not dead; declarations that it is ignore that every market and industry is different

Markets and industries vary so much that blanket 'X is dead' pronouncements don't hold

47:56 Viability varies by market and industry