Cold outbound is brutal right now. Not only is it difficult to launch cold outbound campaigns, but you're also seeing poor or no responses. It's as competitive and difficult as ever to find new customers.
Despite these terrible numbers, cold outbound remains the go-to strategy for building a repeatable b2b sales pipeline. The main obstacle: generating quality meetings with your ICP.
Now experts are telling you that AI-powered personalization will cut through the noise and generate leads. You see this everywhere in your inbox now. Unnatural mentions of your first name, your company, your school in throughout cold messages.
AI-powered personalization has become the hot trend. It's an attempt to generate leads with promising new technology. The excitement among businesses to use AI for outbound is real:
Traditional outbound agencies can charge $3,000 - $10,000+ per month (see how much outbound costs), and they're usually pitching AI-powered personalization. AI-powered SDR tools market themselves as cheaper alternatives to apply AI-powered personalization to your outbound motion. Venture capital is flooding the space:
Combined, these three platforms alone have raised over $163 million. This demonstrates massive investor belief that AI-powered personalization will transform outbound sales.
But consumers are catching on fast. According to Bynder:
Companies are bleeding money on failed outbound investments. The root cause? The misconception that personalization will increase reply rates.
Here's what actually matters: An effective cold outbound campaign doesn't generate positive replies due to personalization. It generates replies due to relevance.
Think about the average worker at a business. They're occupied with their own problems. What gets them to respond to a stranger in their inbox? A message relevant to their problem.
Personalization may or may not be involved in this relevance.
When you layer first names or "Saw your post about X" onto weak premises, you create personalized irrelevance. Now you're wasting everyone's time, including your own.
You probably ignored and deleted cold emails that said your first name in the subject line within the last business day.
Successful campaigns identify specific, compelling answers to "Why are you reaching out to us?" and "Why right now?" Here are examples from real campaigns:
This campaign targeted property managers during peak season with a simple ask: "Do you need work on your gutters?"
Why it worked: Highly seasonal need + correct audience = no heavy personalization required. The targeting captured prospects at the exact moment they needed the service.
The offering: An esports league looking to partner with schools
Targeting strategy:
Why it worked:
The key insight: When you've done the research to identify the exact right audience (schools with esports teams), the message becomes simple and direct. No elaborate personalization needed. The relevance comes from knowing they're the perfect fit.
The offering: A PE firm looking to acquire businesses for their roll-up strategy
Targeting strategy:
Why it worked:
The key insight: When your targeting criteria are this specific and verifiable, the prospect can see exactly why they're receiving the message. The personalization comes from the precision of the list, not from clever copywriting tricks.
In each case, the formula for reply-generating relevance made recipients understand (1) why you're reaching out to them specifically and (2) why now.
Here's the uncomfortable reality: personalization never worked for any kind of lead generation, whether inbound or outbound, consumer or B2B. What generates leads is relevance, not personalization.
Personalization itself is neither good nor bad outside the context of relevance. It's a tool that may or may not play a role in creating relevance, a means to relevance as the end. When you obsess over {first_name} tokens and LinkedIn mentions, you're optimizing the wrong variable. The real work is understanding who needs what you offer and why they need it now.
This is why the top-performing campaigns often have minimal "personalization" in the traditional sense. They don't need it. When you've identified someone experiencing a specific, acute problem that you can solve, the message becomes inherently personal by virtue of the situation you're describing.
There's a popular misconception that outbound lead generation is being disrupted by AI due to AI-powered personalization at scale. While yes, AI reduces the cost and increases the quality of personalization, that's not the real value of personalization.
The actual role that AI and personalization at scale bring to an effective outbound motion is in:
Relevance just means better message-market fit. So effective personalization using AI helps you deliver your message to each lead in their own context. Ineffective personalization is just expensive outbound that wastes your time instead of generating pipeline.
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