Automated Sales Outreach Tools are Bad

They’re bad. Don’t use them. If you have a list of 50 companies you’d like to have in your pipeline, you are being incredibly lazy not finding a way to reach out to each of them with a:

1. Warm intro: Your LinkedIn, your investors’ LinkedIn, all your advisors’ LinkedIn, you gotta know somebody who knows somebody.

2. Quickly-researched pitch: Now that you know how you’re connected to this person, you can at least take a guess as to why they should care about your company. You don’t need to spend hours on this. But something. Do they post on LinkedIn? Was there something they said that you can reference that’s not just “I read your piece on [topic] and couldn’t agree more!” (which I get in my inbox a lot and I’m certain is just AI).

3. Head-fake: Sometimes a pitch isn’t the right thing. Is there an event you’re going to that they’re likely to be at too? Are you hosting a podcast they’d be a good guest for? Is there something personal they posted about that you relate to specifically? People tend to buy stuff from people they like. You can sell them after they like you.

Now, AI may wind up enabling each of these! I think that's the thing we're getting wrong about AI: too many of us are trying to outsource the entire thing to AI when what they're actually good at is facilitating research that you can use to do your outreach. Enterprise marketing is not a numbers game. You can get a 100% response rate if you do this right. Optimization doesn't mean "have the computer optimize" when you can optimize way, way better.