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Is outbound going to die?
- trumpisaliberal 1y ago[dead]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cpncrunch 1y agoWhether it's crafted by AI or not, outbound is spam, and only scammy companies use it these days.
- havefunbesafe 1y agoEvery enterprise SaaS company with a sales team uses outbound.
- amanaplanacanal 1y agoSo you agree then?
- xmodem 1y agoDoesn't make it any less spammy/scammy
- kjs3 1y agoQuod erat demonstrandum?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- jasonthorsness 1y agoSomehow my personal phone number leaked into some database, and I get multiple SaaS calls per day. I welcome the day when it's all AI because I hate to be rude to real people but these sorts of calls almost force it.
- ryandrake 1y agoI'm less hesitant to be rude to telemarketers anymore. Yes, they have a shitty job, yes, it's not their fault that your number is on their list. But it's a job they are choosing to do, knowing they are an integral part of the problem. Kind of like the "Contractors on the death star" ethical example. If someone was paid to kick my puppy, I'm not going to just be OK with it because, "hey it's their job, and we're all struggling."
- criddell 1y agoBeing rude might be justifiable, but it still doesn't feel good.
- tehjoker 1y ago> But it's a job they are choosing to do Yes, low wage workers have so many wonderful opportunities to not get evicted or starve. Don't confuse middle-class and wealthy workers with poorer ones.
- Gigachad 1y agoAs soon as I notice they are reading from the script and aren’t the delivery person waiting with my package I just hang up immediately. No comment, I don’t even give them a chance to try to keep me on the line.
- Suppafly 1y ago>I hate to be rude to real people Just reminded yourself that they've chosen to remove themselves from the pool of 'real people' by participating scammy activities. They're the ones that have broken the social contract and treating them with respect just lets them continue to believe they aren't doing anything wrong.
- adriand 1y agoSame thing happened to me. I probably get ten calls per day. I just don’t answer the phone any more unless I recognize the number. It’s very annoying. If I accidentally answer a spam call, most of the time I’ll just hang up. But I’m also very annoyed with telephone companies. Why isn’t there a “report spam” button for phone calls?
- paulcole 1y agoHow do you define "spam"?
- gibibit 1y agoTo me, spam is unsolicited email or phone calls. People or organizations contacting me when I haven't requested they do so.
- paulcole 1y agoOK, was just curious. I only think of it as unsolicited mass email. If something's tailored to me or a call, I just think of it as part of doing business.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dredmorbius 1y agoSpam is any communication the recipient doesn't want. The definition is by the recipient, not the initiator. The term has moved to other forms of mass unsolicited advertising. The first spams weren't email but Usenet (notably Cantor and Siegel's "Green Card" spam, which I remember, though that wasn't the first[1]). We've now got email spam, Web spam, forum spam, SMS spam, phone spam, etc., etc., etc. The only requirements are that it be mass (some define that as > 1 target) and unsolicited. Keep in mind that robocallers (which may have an automated or human at the other end) are dialing billions of numbers in the US per month[2]. Amongst other considerations: spammed networks die as those who find them intolerable defect from them. Phones (and Usenet, and email) were once exclusive, and hence, where intelligent and desired communications were to be found. As costs of utilisation and access fell, that is no longer the case. An instance of the Jevons Paradox as well as Gresham's Law: falling costs leads to increased use, falling barriers to participation makes bad usage drive out good. Direct-dial, universal-access telephony is teetering on the edge of death. ________________________________ Notes: 1. Brad Templeton has a history and etymology dating to at least 2001, which makes clear that the term arises from any unspecified "net abuse", with his first instance being in 1978. The phone system is itself a network. "Origin of the term "spam" to mean net abuse" <https://web.archive.org/web/20120716231643/http://www.templetons.com/brad/spamterm.html https://web.archive.org/web/20120716231643/http://www.temple...>. 2. See: "Phone Call Spam Statistics (2017 – 2024)" <https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/phone-spam-statistics/ https://www.comparitech.com/blog/information-security/phone-...>, "How many spam phone calls do Americans receive?" <https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-spam-phone-calls-do-americans-receive/ https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-spam-phone-calls-do-a...> (reported calls only), "Truecaller U.S. Spam Scorecard" <https://www.truecaller.com/us-spam-stats https://www.truecaller.com/us-spam-stats>. Two of the three report 3 billion+ spam calls per month. There are about 331 million mobile phone subscribers in the US (virtually one per person), which would mean over 100 spam calls per month. Some would suspect this is a severe underestimation.
- AlwaysRock 1y agoWild take. Almost every single company of a certain size does outbound. Just like how almost every company sends endless marketing emails. Yeah its spammy. But it also converts some small percentage of users so they will continue to do it. It's spammy. It isnt scammy.
- rorylaitila 1y agoI'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 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.
- skeeter2020 1y agoThis resonates with me; I hope you're ahead of the curve and we see a time when there's a non-AI valuation multiplier for products & companies.
- rorylaitila 1y agoThanks, I hope so too! I think by the end of the year sales AI disillusionment will really start set in and I'll have polished HumanCRM enough by then. All of the existing CRM players are going heavy into automation so this might stand out.
- codazoda 1y agoI’ve been looking for something to get better at my personal contacts. I’m not really on LinkedIn. Maybe I’ll get on just to try this, but reach out if I could try it some other way.
- rorylaitila 1y agoThanks! I sent an invite to the email on your profile.
- emmanueloga_ 1y agoLooks great, is it comparable to Monica [1] or is it more business oriented? -- 1: https://github.com/monicahq/monica https://github.com/monicahq/monica
- neom 1y agoI'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!
- neogodless 1y agoFor the outsiders here (like me) GTM = Go-To-Market https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/trends/go-to-market-strategy-framework https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/trends/go-to-market-strateg...
- esperent 1y agoThanks, I looked it up and all the results were for Google Tag Manager. That's just close enough to make me shrug and accept it but also be very confused.
- LaundroMat 1y agoSpoken like a real Theodore Levitt-fan! I've been reading up on 70s and 80s technology firm histories (including game consoles) and it strikes me that marketing back then was much more strategic, much more about understanding the market, the value customers seek and how to deliver it. Marketing today feels like a grift.
- huhkerrf 1y agoI'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.
- kjs3 1y agoAmen. Extra special are the ones that when you complain about outbound, you get "well how else are we supposed to sell things!". As though "smiling and dialing" or carpet bomb spamming are the only possible ways. Appropriating other peoples time isn't enough; if we don't like being subjected to the entitlement, we're supposed to figure out how to do their job for them.
- Suppafly 1y ago>Amen. Extra special are the ones that when you complain about outbound, you get "well how else are we supposed to sell things!". These people live in a different reality than the rest of us, one they've likely taken steps to convince themselves is true so they don't have to feel bad about their actions. I met someone years ago that was basically a professional email spammer that described his job as marketing and sending newsletters and was convinced that people were OK receiving spam and that he was providing a service by spamming garbage to people who didn't sign up for it.
- chickenzzzzu 1y agoSounds like roughly the same process defense industry professionals take to rationalize their "career" ^.^
- carlosjobim 1y agoEvery human on earth, except for literal saints.
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- joenot443 1y agoSometimes 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.
- prescriptivist 1y agoI was listening to a podcast the other day and one of the commercials I think was from Facebook (IIRC, it could have been Google...). It was directed toward students, so I'm pretty sure it was an organic ad, but there were several aspects to it that felt fairly personalized to me (bicycling and outdoor related) that I actually wondered if it was generated on the fly using an LLM. FB knows me and what I like and they have enough of data on my searches that they could customize a pretty relevant audio ad that, now with LLMs, can feel really relevant and natural, especially with audio gen being so good. My point though is I wasn't sure if it was LLM generated or not and that's stuck with me. Random ChatGPT copy-pasta is easy for me to pick out – most people do not write that well. But a sophisticated application of this tech probably approaches the it-could-go-either-way territory.
- ToucanLoucan 1y agoI genuinely loathe the over-familiar vibe you get from targeted ads in such a way where no matter how relevant to me the given product is, if you advertise it like that, I'm immediately suspicious of your intentions. If I'm talking about longboards a lot around my house and get ads for longboards, I would go so far as to say I would go out of my way to not buy any of the brands shown to me. I think this is an underrated metric in terms of how advertisers are organizing their spend; the creep factor. If your first impression with a potential customer is creeping them out, how are the odds of them giving you a sale? Just my 0.02.
- dccoolgai 1y agoI would put a finer/pithier point on it: The "attention economy" is out, the "trust economy" is in.
- tonyedgecombe 1y agoThere is a job waiting for you at McKinsey.
- rglullis 1y ago> 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.
- lurk2 1y agoI think that most marketers are aware that controlling your own mailing list is important; this is why so many of them post on every platform, have podcasts, and try to get you to sign up for their newsletter. The issue with federated projects is that they lack the content to attract users and they lack the users to generate content.
- rglullis 1y ago> The issue with federated projects is that they lack the content to attract users and they lack the users to generate content. This is why I wrote "it depends on companies and marketers realizing that they need to be proactive about it". It costs next to nothing to set up a server and configure a bot that mirrors your twitter posts to the Fediverse. If they done just that, they'd be solving their end of the chicken-and-egg problem, and all they would need then is some patience and treat it as a Pascal Wager, where every round of "Here's something stupid that Musk did today" would be a change for them to convert the users to their preferred network, or to just maintain the status quo.
- lurk2 1y agoI think you’re overestimating how many of these promoters could figure out how to set up a server by themselves. Most of the ones who can will just stick with the proven technology (email). I want the technology to work out, I just don’t see it happening anytime soon. Think of Linux and Firefox; both have been best in category products for years, but neither one has an appreciable market share.
- Animats 1y agoDoesn't everybody on here have filters good enough to route all "outbound" to spam?
- danielodievich 1y agoBy 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.
- kjs3 1y agoThat's like the "is that your pitch?" scene from Boiler Room.
- deadbabe 1y agoThis 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.
- goatherders 1y ago100% wrong.
- deadbabe 1y agowhy
- carefulfungi 1y agoAI 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.
- tehjoker 1y agoI think for that to happen, you'd have to let a sophisticated AI read your emails, which maybe possible with the right home setup, but otherwise you're sending them to be read by a large corporation's.
- alister 1y agoIn 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.
- fmajid 1y agoIt's already happening in HR and recruiting, but people still trust their network more. Their real network, not salespeople who sent a LinkedIn invite.
- tiffanyh 1y agoWhile 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.
- neom 1y agoYou always make great points. For my comments, I was mainly thinking of the <$50k range where I've worked most. I did do a b2g startup that failed in part because the motions are fucking nuts jfc. So to your point: sales motions should differ dramatically based on price point. For enterprise deals ($500k+), strategic outbound still makes perfect sense, tho I'd argue you should prime the market first with a brand awareness campaign.
- Denzel 1y agoThank you for narrowing your claims, you might want to update your post at the top of the thread to call out your ADV/ACV assumption. I appreciate all the experience and advice you’re offering on this thread! Take my feedback as a nitpick: as I was reading through your top post, my initial thought was “this isn’t true all the time” because I spent 6 years in 2 separate startups with significant and successful outbound sales where our ADV > $100k. One company stayed private and profitable while driving revenue north of $80M/yr; and the other company sold enough long-term enterprise contracts to be acquired by a bigger $B company. Context is king.
- garrickvanburen 1y agoradically different? I mean, aside from being comfortable with longer sales cycles and taking the time to build more advocates on the enterprise side, I haven't seen a substantial difference across this spectrum (<1K is very different). All are best when the relationship-building is first and foremost.
- mathgeek 1y ago> 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?
- SpicyLemonZest 1y agoMost people do that except in the rare instance where they find a product that really satisfies their needs. But farming those rare instances is precisely the goal of outbound marketing. You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets, and sitting in your inbox there's an email from someone who says they can start foobaring your widgets next week. The same email went out to a bunch of people who already have a team or don't run widgets, but neither you nor the salesperson cares about them.
- masfuerte 1y ago> You had a meeting just yesterday about how it'll take 9 months to staff up a team that can foobar your widgets Who leaves that meeting and starts searching for a solution in their spam email?
- alabastervlog 1y agoPeople click ads in Google search results all the time.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Gigachad 1y agoThe ads are kind of sneaky these days. It’ll be in the form of astroturfing, paying influencers to shill stuff, using bots to downvote negative reviews, etc.
- snowwrestler 1y ago> 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.
- dismalpedigree 1y agoCan we skip to the part where unsolicited emails, calls, and texts go away? This sounds amazing.
- zcmack 1y agoEventually, humans are going to get used to the constant spam and start mentally tuning out these hyper personalized initiatives. haven't we already been doing this since email templating was a thing?
- SoftTalker 1y agoI have. Spam email is obvious from the subject line and the sender. Those messages get deleted unread. I very rarely am tricked into opening one.
- p0w3n3d 1y agoFun fact: in my language (Polish) those AI generated voices are unbearable. I understand that this can improve making them indistinguishable from real person, but so far it all sounds to us like a fake person from temu.
- jongjong 1y agoFrom my perspective, as someone who is not good at marketing and sales, this is going to be positive because the playing field will have to focus more on product. Currently, I'm being out-competed by people who can sell well. A landing page with nothing behind it is out-competing my fully working product. If outbound sales becomes ineffective, people will have more opportunities and time to think about their inherent needs, as opposed to being funneled into all their decisions by a salesperson. It's frightening how much stuff people are buying that they don't need. While there exist stuff which they need that they don't know exists.
- libertine 1y agoI don't think messaging has improved - maybe on avg. but it's still clearly AI-generated. The number of companies that "Elevate" services/quality/experiences... It's getting so sloppy. But a lot of these points are recurring ones over the years, it's just like a rubber band that stretches. At some point, CEOs will go on LinkedIn ... "We loved the AI boom and it helped us improve a lot of our processes! But we need human connection, and that's irreplaceable - but now our differentiator is that we have humans reaching out to humans. AI will still be here as a sidekick."
- cogitovirus 1y agoeveryone blasting ai-generated posts, bots, and videos is slowly making real people invisible.
- MobiusHorizons 1y agoNice article, I hope we see the volume of spam and marketing reduce overall, but I wouldn’t bet on it even if it does become ineffective. Just fyi, there are a few typos I noticed: > where the accuracy and quality of the has improved tremendously at scale. Missing a word. Maybe “content “? > this is also going to cause a certain about of fatigue for the users and customers. about -> amount
- irq-1 1y ago> With LLMs, the messages and content have gotten to a point where the accuracy and quality of the __?????__ has improved tremendously at scale.