3 reasons outbound will never be the same

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share 3 reasons why outbound prospecting will never be the same, and what you can do about it. If you can accept these changes, forget scale, and focus on starting quality conversations, then you’ll book more meetings, and create more opportunities as a result.

Let’s dive in:

Reason #1: Email Service Providers are cracking down on mass emails

If you opened LinkedIn in the last few days, you may have seen an email sent from Outreach to their customers. In short, it shared new limitations from Outreach to protect the deliverability of emails, imposed by restrictions from Google and Yahoo.

These new limitations mean that if more than 0.3% of your emails are marked as spam, then all emails sent from your domain will be blocked by Google and Yahoo.

This is excellent news. It will translate into less spam for prospects, and leave more space to good emails from salespeople who take the time to do their research, and focus on starting conversations.

What you can do about it:

• Rebuild your Outreach System with a focus on getting replies
• Focus on prospects’ problems and use them in your messages
• Double down on LinkedIn prospecting and cold calling (but stay focused on quality)

You can use my New Outreach System to do all that. It’s 50% off for Black Friday with code “B9YK8H7”.

Reason #2: AI is making salespeople exponentially efficient

AI (and specifically ChatGPT) have brought massive changes to the world of sales. Instead of replacing salespeople, AI allows them to become more efficient. For example, you can use AI to:

• Search for a specific trigger in a 10-K report
• Find personalization elements in a LinkedIn profile
• Build cold outreach messages from top-performing templates

These tasks are common for salespeople, and they often take hours to perform. With AI, salespeople are able to do this in a few minutes, so they can focus on tasks that require them to be creative, or interact with customers.

What you can do about it:

• Get familiar with common AI use-cases for prospecting
• Work AI into your daily prospecting system
• Find out what not to do with AI

You can use my AI Outreach System to do all that. It’s 50% off for Black Friday with code “B9YK8H7”.

Reason #3: Data is (almost always) freely available

This last point is the main reason outbound prospecting has changed forever. In the past, salespeople didn’t have access to much information about their prospects. They typically knew about their names, phones numbers, and emails.

Nowadays, you can find a ton of “digital footprint” online. You can go on LinkedIn, see what posts prospects reacted to, gather data on their companies, find out their company headcount, and countless other data points. You can then use this data as a triggers in your cold outreach.

Yet, most salespeople ignore these triggers and put prospects into cookie-cutter sequences. And this brought us to the situation we are in right now; prospects don’t reply anymore, and SDRs are being laid-off in droves.

What you can do about it:

• Get familiar with triggers you should use in your outreach
• Stop sending automated sequences
• Focus on starting conversations

I’m currently working on a course to help you book more meetings, and create opportunities from outbound in 2024. Join the waitlist if you want to learn more about it.

These are 3 reasons why outbound prospecting will never be the same. You can choose to ignore this and keep using the same old playbook, or you can adapt to the seismic shift we’re going through.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut